NNNNIIIIIIIICE THREAD

yup.. don't zig when you should zag, ok?

here's a sweet simple fizzix-ish vid.



per Huygen's principle of pendulums.

yesyes base.

the net effect of small changes. in the case of the foot bridge, i think it was lateral momentum. a transfer of kinetic energy happened.

i read about a traffic bridge in the USA that went down when the wind started it swaying, and i know that stadiums are at risk for that kind of synchronization.

i bet our architect friends know this one well.

Lenz' Law.

supercooling + magnet = levitation


the YouTube vid was copied from the Superconducting Lab at the University of Oslo

holy cow

the motor bridge Tacoma Narrows.. awesome that it stayed together for so long, i think. just.. wow.


the lateral movement of the millenium bridge doesn't look as scarey, but i'd have been off that thing as fast as my little feet could carry me.

whooo.. easy to see why people "found" the periodicity of the sway and used it to stay upright. eek

i looked at the math. within tolerance? perhaps on paper.

the calculations for the diff forces is pretty cool to look at... on paper. heh

maybe it wouldn't have fallen down. i'm very interested in the phenomenon of a structure's movement forcing people to "walk this way". people seem to automatically find that moment of inertia.

the Tacoma Narrows bridge video is amazing.

and Mick - the levitating magnet is awesome.


fisix is the one thing i'm not good at understanding. all the same, I love the vids, keep em coming.

Mankind is a bunch of pussies. "Oh no, people might DIE going into space" No shit, sherlock!

Fuck you, the lot of you. Yeah, of COURSE people die in the course of space exploration. I bet more people died within 150 miles of you from traffic yesterday, than died in any single space accident.

Mankind on a solitary rock, orbiting a non-remarkable yellow star out here in a distant arm of the milky way can be wiped the fuck out by any solitary event. Gamma ray burst, wandering black hole, Big Fucking Rock (TM and C BiffCo, incidentally, and pronounced like you're a big movie trailer announcement guy), Idiocy of our earthbound neighbors.

Not spending the money to figure out Space is a really bad idea.

mick, i can't get to your Chandra paper, i get an 'We're sorry' dot Mac page

I'll check it out when finish this job

Hey Mick !

I watched a fascinating documentary last night about the race to zero kelvin.

Its amazing what has happened since I studied physics, I wasn't aware of the Bose Einstein condensate until I watched this. Amazing !

physics is fun !

phsyics is oarsome, yesyes!

and fun, to boot.

the Bose-Einstein condensate work is fucking amazing, squapz. it's woowoo spin-my-brain fodder.

superatoms, groups of atoms behaving as one. slowing of light speed. frictionless flow. the ability to measure more accurately than ever before (mighty useful in planning space flight, imo). cutting edge, to be sure.

20 years ago, people were admiring the work with lasers, while saying "what real use is it?" same thing with the BEC. the possiblities are exciting.

the math ... think about multiple pages of nothing but complexly interrelated constants. i'm distantly aquainted with Gil Summy, a physicist who is working on (as he puts it) "measuring how we might measure what we want to measure". i just nod. heh

a cool story is that when they were first trying to cool atoms down far enough, they'd get to a certain point and the small amounts of heat generated when an atom flips its polarity (a usual event) was enough to prevent further cooling. that's when they started adding magnets.

yes, this was all covered.

Using rubidium atoms, they managed to get within a couple of billionths of 0 kelvin and they highlighted the point that just 1 atom could corrupt the whole process by simply moving ! Scary.

I saw the slowing of light experiment as well, I cant remember which element they used but they made a cigar like condensate and fired light through it and it slowed it by about a billion times ! The point was raised "why not just fire it at a brick wall and it will stop?" but then there is no information leaving the mass to record the data, simple as that ! So why not just create a bose einstien condensate instead !! I'd love to be a physicist.

that game rocks biff!

yeah.. i've sent that to several people of all ages.

i'm going to "use" it, too.

it's better than Phun, though less complex. Phun is only a beta, but it's hard to easily understand how to use it.

Biff has good taste in games. who'd a thunk?

the world’s largest ‘tuned mass damper’ and sits near the top of the world’s largest completed skyscraper on earth

it can reduce the building’s movement by up to 40%.

lots more, including a vid, on the taipei 101 in taiwan, courtesy of Deputy Dog.

i want to ride it, me. *nod*

I understand the risk management of the particle colliders don't think there's any chance of creating a black hole ripping apart space and time anymore.

Kind of a drag, if you ask me.

Brilliant Guardian Special on Cern featuring an interview with Higgs...



...and Chris Morris!

i enjoyed those articles, mesk.

i'm really rather excited about the possibility of identifying the Higgs boson. Finding it would confirm that we really do understand the origin of mass, and complete the electro-weak theory, filling in one the few remaining gaps in a "unified field" theory...... there are so many pieces that would fall into place if that was to happen. several years ago, bookies (Ladbroke's) were giving CERN a 6:1 possiblity of finding it. dunno what the oddsmakers are up to now.

This graphic is about the known. it would be very cool if it were out-of-date by next year.








click through for a MUCH bigger poster. i have this on my upstairs landing wall, atm. wall is unpainted "particle board". i felt it was the right spot.

Four poems about string theory (found at the Short Sharp Science Blog).


String Theory, by Dave Morrison

Thousands of lives are being
spent trying to construct an
Explanation of Everything, six

extra dimensions, parallel universes,
the whole overloaded wagon held
together with tiny bits of string.

String?

Why not tiny jacks, or tiny crescent
wrenches or tiny dandelions, or tiny
charm bracelets, or tiny umbrellas, or

tiny teacups, or tiny disco balls, or
tiny rubber bands, paper clips?
Our Universe is as it is because of

tiny hoops of twine? This
is what you get from too much
coffee and a 'what if'-

When my friends and I considered
such possibilities behind the
cafeteria with a nickel bag of

lame weed, it did not occur
to us that we were budding physicists;
we were burnouts
trying to get comfortable with

mystery.

--

String Theory, by Bruce Holland Rogers

1. The Eleventh Dimension

No one had direct experience of the extra dimensions, so learning about them at age six was difficult even for genetically enhanced superchildren. Child-friendly names were devised. This helped. Children learned that the eleven dimensions were Length, Width, Height, Time, Happy, Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, Doc, and???Even with the new names, one dimension was hard to remember. Even for genetically enhanced superchildren, the universe was not without mystery.

2. Recipe for a Theory of Everything

Start with a figurine of turtles stacked one on top of another and an excellent hammer. Smash the turtles. Smash the pieces, and keep smashing. Pound the dust into atoms. Smash the atoms into protons. Keep smashing down to quarks and gluons. You're close to the theory of everything. Pound everything into strings. Keep pounding. After strings, turtles. Pound, pound, pound. Smaller and smaller turtles, all the way down.

3. But Maybe She Just Couldn't Knit

Wanda had been about to defend her superstring dissertation when the universe gave its answer. Broken strings littered the floors of physics departments everywhere. "But they were so pretty!" she cried.

She drank.

Later, she picked herself up. She went to AA meetings. She spun her old strings into yarn, knitted the yarn into a sweater and wore it to a meeting. Everyone who saw it started drinking again.

--

Building Blocks, by Robert Borski

Morons are not elementary particles,
birds do not quark, and half-
dead cats fail to constitute roadkill.

On the other hand
silly string may underpin much
of the universe, and in
the toychest of infinities
both larger and smaller sets can be
found side by side.

God as a boy must have been
a strange child, if not actually gifted.

--

The Large Hadrom Collider Countdown Timer. right now, it's at 7 days, 12 hours, 36 minutes.

*shiver in anticipation* i'm getting excited.

COUNTDOWN:

6 days, 12 hours, 36 minutes




The ALICE Inner Tracking System during its transport in the experimental cavern and its insertion into the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment @ CERN) will study the physics of ultrahigh-energy proton-proton and lead-lead collisions and will explore conditions in the first instants of the universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang.



click the cropped photo for more wonderful pics from The BIg Picture.


good article today in the Economist: Physics | Known and unknown. (lure: it has pictures)