Latest Posts by theperpetualscholar - Page 4

[BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS]

Shedding light on our understanding of the universe.

Until recently, gravitational fields were only known to be generated near black holes, hundreds of light years away. But researchers at IBM’s Zurich lab successfully recreated one right here on Earth. While still theoretical, their findings have the potential to seriously change how we generate and conserve energy, which makes black holes look a little bit brighter.

See how they did it ->

His story never changes. Ergo, lying

A note on Nuclear Fission

When an atom fissions, it releases a teeny tiny amount of energy ( The decay of one atom of uranium-235 releases about 200MeV or about 3*10-11J.). But atoms are quite small. An atom does not make a big explosion when it splits.

To get a big explosion, you need to split lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them—many, many trillions of them.

Each one releases only a teeny amount of energy, but when you add up the teeny amount of energy from trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms, then you get a big explosion. (The explosion of 1kg of TNT releases 4MJ).

Revising like.

Subjects shown: Advanced dynamics, vibrations and waves, properties of matter, electricity and magnetism. All first year.

Physics is an eternal chaos. You have to adapt to this condition and like it or you become mathematician.

Theoretical Physicist (via scienceprofessorquotes)

Physicist Create a Fluid With Negative Mass

Physicists from Washington State university have created a liquid with negative mass meaning that when you push it, instead of accelerating in that direction, it accelerates backwards.

Matter can have a negative mass much the same way that particles can be negatively charged. Newton’s second law of motion (F=ma) tells us that mass will accelerate in the direction of the force so we can deduce that matter with a negative mass would do the opposite and accelerate against the force.

To create the conditions for negative mass, Peter Engels and his team started by cooling rubidium atoms to a Bose-Einstein condensate meaning they reached very near absolute 0. The researchers used lasers to trap the atoms in an area less than 100 microns across and allow high energy particles to escape cooling them further. Then to create negative mass, the physicists applied a second set of lasers to change the way atoms spin back and forth. They then removed the first set of lasers causing the rubidium to rush out and appear to hit some sort of invisible wall; behaving as if it had a negative mass.

What’s great about this is the control we have over the negative mass without any other complications. This gives us a new tool we can use to engineer experiments in astrophysics looking at neutron stars, black holes, dark energy and a lot more.

Each equation, a line, in a stanza, within a poem that is the universe - (physicists-need-love-too)

The quest to crystallize time

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see ‘How to create a time crystal’). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty’ diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It’s less weird than the first idea, but it’s still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.

Continue Reading.

Don’t let anyone tell you that physics isn’t poetry; the only difference is that for us, the universe is the page on which we spill our souls.

- Physicists-need-love-too, 3.57 am (via physicists-need-love-too)

Hello everyone.

Apologies for the long/unexplained absence. I’ve not been doing very well recently and I haven’t quite had the time to be posting. However, a small update is that I’m struggling very much with my mental health but my studies are going very well. I just wanted to thank you all for your kindness and support and I will try update more regularly from now on!

I hope you are all well and looking after yourself, and I’m sending love, hugs and good study vibes 💗

Now if you were like me, this might come to you as a huge surprise because whenever one thinks about Jupiter one is not used to visualizing it with rings around it, but rather as a huge gas giant.

The rings are not prominent

Unlike Saturn’ rings which are bright, the discovery of Jupiter’s wings had to wait till 1979.

This is so because the rings are faint and are only visible only when viewed behind Jupiter and lit up by the sun.

How are they formed ?

Jupiter’s rings are formed from dust particles hurled up by micro-meteor impacts on Jupiter’s small inner moons and captured into orbit.

If the impacts on the moons were any larger, then the larger dust thrown up would be pulled back down to the moon’s surface by gravity (meaning that the dust would not have enough velocity to escape the surface).

The main and halo rings consist of dust ejected from the moons Metis, Adrastea, and other unobserved parent bodies as the result of high-velocity impacts

The rings must constantly be replenished with new dust from the moons to exist.

Actually, there are quite a bit about these rings that we are still in the dark about. And hopefully these would become clearer in the upcoming years.

Have a great day!

Top 10 Most Uncomfortable Physics Facts

While physics can show us amazing things about our universe, it doesn’t always agree with how we think things should work. Sometimes, physics can be very counter-intuitive, and often unsettling. So, here’s my list of physics facts that can be a bit unnerving.

10: Weight doesn’t matter

If it wasn’t for air resistance, everything would fall at exactly the same speed. If you let go of a hammer and a feather from the same height at the same time on the Moon, they would hit the ground simultaneously. 

9: Gyroscopic precession

It doesn’t matter how much you know about physics; gyroscopes are weird. The way they seem to defy gravity makes you rethink everything you know about physics, despite being fairly simple toys. Still, it’s all just Newton’s laws of motion.

8: Neutrinos and dark matter

We like to think that we can interact with most of the world around us, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Neutrinos and dark matter are passing through your body right now, as if you weren’t even there. The fact that 65 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body every second is weird enough, who knows what we’ll learn about dark matter.

7: Photons are particles

Light travels like a wave, but can only interact like a particle. It can interfere and have a frequency, but it can only take and give energy in discrete quantities. It behaves like nothing else in our macroscopic world, and can be very difficult to imagine.

6: Electrons are waves

We’ve established how photons act like waves and particles, but surely massive particles act normally. Nope! Even electrons have wave-like properties. In fact, everything acts like a wave! Except these waves come in discrete quantities, which we’ll call particles. This won’t get confusing.

5: E=mc^2

Einstein’s most famous contribution to physics states that matter is simply another form of energy, which has very profound consequences. A wound-up Jack-in-a-box would weigh ever so slightly more than a released Jack-in-a-box, due to the potential energy stored within.

4: Time is relative

The core of special relativity states that time passes differently for different observers. If you took a trip to Alpha Centauri at 99% the speed of light, everyone on Earth would see the trip take 4.4 years, while you would only experience 7.5 months. Time travel is real!

3: The (not so empty) vacuum

Something can be created from nothing, as long as it goes right back to being nothing quickly. In seemingly empty space, particles pop in and out of existence all the time as a result of the uncertainty principle. Not to mention, space is inflating at an accelerated rate due to “dark energy”. To the vacuum, the law of conservation of energy is more of a suggestion.

2: c is the fastest speed

Another important point in special relativity is that nothing could ever go faster than light. This doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, but the math doesn’t lie. To even get something with mass to travel at the speed of light would require infinite energy. Even if you somehow get around this, there are just too many mathematical problems with superluminal travel. Like it or not, the universe has a speed limit.

1: The cat is dead and alive

How could it not be this? The nature of quantum mechanics allows for objects to take on two seemingly contradictory states in a ‘superposition’. An electron can be in two places at once, or in a more extreme example, a cat can be both dead and alive. Of course, this weird property goes away once someone makes an observation. It’s as if there are tiny physics trolls messing with nature whenever we’re not looking.

Of course, there’s plenty more unsettling physics facts, like the space-bending nature of general relativity, or the “spooky action at a distance” that is quantum entanglement, but these are my top 10. I’d like to hear any unsettling physics facts you think I’ve missed, though!

So, our physics teacher has the strange idea of motivating his students by letting each of us present a physical phenomenal we find interesting to our classmates in a 5-minutes-presentation. And now I need something that is interesting for everyone - even people that usually don't care for physics -, but has interesting facts for someone who's interested in it, too (preferably with an easy experiment). You don't happen to have any ideas, do you?

First of all, your professor is awesome for taking the time to do this. Of the top of my mind, the best one I have is Chladni figures.

Basically take a flat metal plate, fix it at the center and spray some fine sand particles on it.

Using a violin bow, gently excite any edge of the plate to magically witness these beautiful normal mode patterns ( known as Chladni patterns/figures ) forming on the plate.

Also notice that by pinching the plate at different points, the pattern obtained changes.

There is a whole lot of physics that goes behind such a simple phenomenon and I dare say we understand it completely. There are lots of questions on these figures that we have no answer for!

Hope this helps with your presentation. Have a good one!

Gif source video: Steve Mould

A sand pendulum that creates a beautiful pattern only by its movement.

But  why does the ellipse change shape?

The pattern gets smaller because energy is not conserved (and in fact decreases) in the system. The mass in the pendulum gets smaller and the center of mass lowers as a function of time. Easy as that, an amazing pattern arises through the laws of physics.

Science Fact Friday - Tapetum lucidum!

So why don’t all vertebrates have this adaptation? It’s an advantage to animals that are active in the dark - cats, dogs, owls, raccoons, crocodiles, and so on - but it makes everything slightly blurry. Many daytime vertebrates (including humans and most other primates) do not have one and instead have better day vision.

We’re used to radiation being invisible. With a Geiger counter, it gets turned into audible clicks. What you see above, though, is radiation’s effects made visible in a cloud chamber. In the center hangs a chunk of radioactive uranium, spitting out alpha and beta particles. The chamber also has a reservoir of alcohol and a floor cooled to -40 degrees Celsius. This generates a supersaturated cloud of alcohol vapor. When the uranium spits out a particle, it zips through the vapor, colliding with atoms and ionizing them. Those now-charged ions serve as nuclei for the vapor, which condenses into droplets that reveal the path of the particle. The characteristics of the trails are distinct to the type of decay particle that created them. In fact, both the positron and muon were first discovered in cloud chambers! (Image credit: Cloudylabs, source)

Fibonacci all day, every day [http://bit.ly/2jiUBF6]

Why the strong feels against Watson and crick?

Because of this.

One sentence. Her hard work was STOLEN and they gave her one friggin sentence in the acknowledgement section. Meanwhile they’re riding the cash cow to fame and glory, heralded as these biological geniuses.

It seems like textbooks have become more progressive in the past 5 years or so, but the biology textbook I was issued in high school (published in the early 2000s) dedicated a small, 2-3 sentence paragraph to Rosalind Franklin (which mostly focused on explaining what X-ray crystallography was, not focusing on her contribution or Watson and Crick’s theft of her experimental data), while Watson and Crick received an entire full page spread with their iconic photograph, posing next to a giant DNA model. The most recent version of that textbook now has an entire page dedicated to Rosalind and even includes a picture of her, though!

(Pierce, B. 2012. Genetics: A Conceptual Approach. 4th ed.)

Watson and Crick took credit for Franklin’s work and got away with it because she was a woman. She couldn’t even be awarded the Nobel prize because she died as a result of the radiation from the very X-ray diffraction techniques she used to discover the structure of DNA. Women were not taken seriously in science back then and even still today there is a huge deficit of females in STEM fields.

“Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive, and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not.” -James Watson

This woman played a crucial role in the discovery of the structure of DNA and Watson said himself that her work with X-ray crystallography was key, but he says her name did not deserve to be on the paper. Why you might ask? Probably because she was a women and only ever look down on during her entire career. She brought the world close to arguable the biggest scientific discovery, yet the only thing she was commented on were her looks. 

Today would have marked Rosalind Elsie Franklin’s 97th birthday, so keep her in your heart. Women in science are still not taken as serious as men. So remember her and what she went through. If you are a women in science follow her example of being strong and confident, if not, respect the women around you and take them seriously! 👩‍🔬🔬💕

Art by @peachistudy 

omg thank you so much for putting rosalind franklin in the dna history post!!

And also:

i think it is morecorrect to say that in 1953 Watson and Crick stole Rosalind’s picture to buildtheir model, and when they published it, of course they didn’t gave her anycredit. I think it is important for people to know that Rosalind Franklindiscovered the antiparallel structure of the DNA molecule, but since herstudies and researches were published after Watson and Crick’s, she didn’t getany recognition until many years later. (Sorry for the long message!)

Hello Nonnies!!

We can’t not talk aboutRosalind Franklin. She is an awesome lady that is slowly getting therecognition she deserves in the scientific community.

(We also went to an allgirls catholic highschool with large emphasis on science, and her name alwayscame up in all of the science classes. It’s pretty hard to forget her name now.We are also going to hijack these asks to give a more in-depth biography forRosalind Franklin.)

Franklin was a giftedX-ray crystallographer. She was a research associate at King’s College Londonin 1951, moved to Birkbeck College in 1953. She died at the early age of 37 dueto ovarian cancer. Really she should have gotten the same Nobel Prize thatWatson, Crick, and Wilkins shared in 1962 for the discovery of the DNA doublehelix, but the Nobel Committee are pricks and don’t award prizes posthumously.

Franklin’s the one tofirst contribute the concept of the two forms of DNA; A-DNA (dried, short andfat), and B-DNA (wet, long and thin). Photo 51 (image from Wikipedia) is thex-ray diffraction pattern developed while at King’s College that leads to thediscovery of DNA double helix structure.

There has been some controversies surrounding the nature ofher work being used by Watson and Crick. Allegations where made that Photo 51was shown to Watson by her colleague Wilkins without Franklin’s permission (badscience ethics here) but we are not sure how true that allegation is. Franklindid not gain much recognition for her contribution originally, all that wasmentioned was a footnote acknowledging that it was based on “general knowledge”of Franklin’s unpublished contribution.

Rosalind Franklin is a good example of sexism in science. She’s not gaining a lot of posthumous recognition for her work. I would also like to think that she’s an awesome role model for a lot of girls pursuing science as a field of study.

Women’s History Month – Dr. Rosalind Franklin, Pioneer Molecular Biologist and Uncredited for Discovering Double Helix Structure of DNA

Important Terms

For approaching Religious and Anthropological Studies:

Cultural Relativism:

“The ability to view the beliefs and customs of other peoples within the context of their own cultures rather than one’s own; or, describing another culture from its own point of view without imposing one’s own cultural values.” Look at what people BELIEVE, not whether or not what they believe is “true.”

Ethnocentrism (the opposite of cultural relativism):

“The tendency to judge the customs of other societies by the standards of one’s own; combines the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture with the practice of judging other cultures by the standards and values of one’s own culture.”

Harnessing ethnocentric ideas when approaching religious and cultural studies will hinder one from truly being able to learn and understand other peoples and their cultures. 

So how bad is Guns, germs, and Steel? Is it still worth reading or do people consider it bunk/ too pop history.

It is a garbage book. Diamond tries to answer difficult questions, but in doing so simplifies issues and topics to the point of being wrong. This is compounded by his use of out of date information and poor understanding of topics within anthropology. Fans of his book like to say it is just sour grapes among academics, but his fans are the same sort of people who think colonialism was justified and that we no longer need to do anything for contemporary Native peoples.Instead, I recommend reading 1491 by Charles Mann. He presents a lot of information, much of it very new and groundbreaking at the time of its publication in 2006. It is a favorite among academics to assign to their intro classes because Mann does not try and interpret research to fit a narrative like Diamond does. His sequel, 1493, is equally great with his discussion on the effects of the the Columbian Exchange. My favorite topics are the spread of the potato to Europe, the lack of European use of Native agricultural practices for cultivating the potato, and the resulting potato famines as a result of using New World guano as fertilizer which introduced a fungus that killed the potato. The effects of the famines were compounded by the use of European agricultural practices for the potato which greatly increased the spread of the fungus. If they had used Andean potato cultivation practices the potato famines may not have been so severe. My other favorite topic is how all the silver wealth extracted by Spain fro the New World initially made them rich, but the continued introduction of silver quickly caused a financial crisis with rampant inflation. Spain’s response was to use more silver. All this silver made its way to China which destabilized China’s economy and left it open for later colonization efforts.

Tabulae Osteologicae (1767 / Engraving) - Christoph Jacob Trew [Anatomist], Nicholas Eriderico [Artist] & Georg Lichtensteiger [Engraver]