This is how physicists make lunch.

To make coffee, use the YAG laser beam.

Only Neanderthals use flames to cook, and microwave is so 20th century; let’s use high powered laser beams to make coffee. YAG laser, 300W 2.5kW would work fine for now.

To make hot dogs, let’s use the Tesla coil:

OK, a 10 foot tall baby coils by Nevada Lighting Lab would be just fine.

Almost at the end of the movie, you will see several sparks running down the pole - those are the hot dogs.

Here is a clearer picture of Tesla coil cooking hot dogs.

Some jobs have better perks then others!

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The Euler’s one of the most fascination equation ever and I am not surprised that people chose it to have it tattooed.

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Since Pi is not in color, I presume Pi tattoo came earlier and then it was surrounded by the ornate orchids.

Not sure if I have seen an ornate pi tattoo like this before.

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Tattooee’s note:

I spent four years studying electrical engineering, and I didn’t drop out to some easier subject like some other students. I graduated with a BSEE… not that you can call me a doctor, but it’s still a small accomplishment. Because of this small accomplishment, I got my tattoo. To me, the transistor revolutionized the world due to faster and smaller computers and anything else that can benefit from them. It also has to do with the fact that transistors are in just about everything.

The design is from the IEEE schematic symbol for a transistor. My feelings for the tattoo vary, but for the most part, I don’t regret it. It has had no negative impact on my professional life and can be covered by my watch when I need it to be.

Looks like we got a package from the island of nuclear stability!

I am surprised by this claim of finding super-duper-heavy element with Z=122 or Z=124. The last I heard was that the element Z=118 didn’t exist in nature, but was manufactured, and it had a very short life. The new element with Z=122 or Z=124 is apparently stable and is found in nature!

It’s like you go past the island of stability and find a mountain of solidity.

It sort of makes intuitive sense. When there are so many nuclei, and then when you have neutron deficit on top of it, it is likely that the nucleus would not be a sphere but of some other deformed shape; which in turn would make the shell take on a deformed shape. So, itt may be a highly deformed, long lived isometric state of Z=122, because the ground state of an element with Z=122 is expected to decay within microseconds.

The temporary name of the element will presumably be Unbibbium (Ubb) or Unbiquadium (Ubq).

Evidence for a long-lived superheavy nucleus with atomic mass number A=292 and atomic number Z=~122 in natural Th
Authors: A. Marinov, I. Rodushkin, D. Kolb, A. Pape, Y. Kashiv, R. Brandt, R.V. Gentry, H.W. Miller

Evidence of superheavy element -

Here are a few of my favorite ones:

highly symmetric spiral galaxy seen nearly face-on and partially backlit by a background galaxy. The foreground spiral galaxy has a number of dust lanes between its arms.

This Hubble image displays a beautiful pair of interacting spiral galaxies with swirling arms. The smaller of the two, dubbed LEDA 62867 and positioned to the left of the frame, seems to be safe for now, but will probably be swallowed by the larger spiral galaxy, NGC 6786 (to the right) eventually. There is already some disturbance visible in both components.

This is a remarkable collision between two spiral galaxies, NGC 6050 and IC 1179, and is part of the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. The two spiral galaxies are linked by their swirling arms.

Arp 256 is a stunning system of two spiral galaxies in an early stage of merging. The Hubble image displays two galaxies with strongly disrupted shapes and an astonishing number of blue knots of star formation that look like exploding fireworks.

The galaxy to the left has two extended ribbon-like tails of gas, dust and stars. The system is a luminous infrared system radiating more than a hundred billion times the luminosity of our Sun.

Two clear signatures of the gravitational tug of war between the galaxies are the bridge of material that connects them and the disruption of their main bodies. The galaxy on the right has a long, bluish arm while its companion has a shorter, redder arm.

This interacting pair is in the constellation of Indus, the Indian, some 550 million light-years away from Earth. The dust lanes between the two galaxy centers show the extent of the distortion to the originally flat disks that have been pulled into three-dimensional shapes.

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Is this for real or is this photoshop?

There is a detailed explanation of the tattoo, which describes the physics behind the Fourier Transforms rather well.

Anyway, the tattoo shows the Fourier transform, one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in mathematics. It is due to Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, 1768-1830. I won’t put his picture here because he’s butt ugly. Anyway JB realized that in a way, a different universe lives beside us. We are accustomed to x, y, z and t. x is horizontal, y is vertical, z is near-far, and t is time. Everything we can feel and intuit is expressed in these terms. But entangled in this Cartesian universe is another one, a jiggly world of images and sounds and signals and waves.

Anyway, sound is a frequency-domain phenomenon. You can’t understand it in the space-time domain. Some things are strictly space-time, and other things can be seen either way. You might be amazed at how useful it is to look at the visual world in the frequency domain. In fact, that’s how our brain does it. Everything passes through a kind of Fourier transform before the higher visual processing centers do anything with it. Visual computation, for the most part, follows frequency analysis. You have to admit–The Foomeister was definitely the man.

Source David Bradley’s blog  (seems to be down for now)

There is a joke floating around that you know you are a real physicist, when you go to the beach and see the waves, and the first thing that comes to your mind is the Fourier Transforms!

It’s the latest internet craze - spoof scientific charts and diagrams based on the titles of pop songs and the artists who performed them.

Survey of Girls’ Wants
(Percentage of respondents)
- Food 0%
- Clothing 0%
- Oxygen 0%
- Fun 100%

Answers in the comment section.

Meet new Mazda model Pi - replaces the Mazda model e (2.71)

Video produced by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness.

The video demonstrates the transformations in two dimensions but then backs away and adds a third-placing a sphere above the plane and shining light through it. As the sphere moves and rotates above the plane, suddenly all the transformations become linked, in a way that conveys visually in minutes what would otherwise take “pages of algebraic manipulations.

This video has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, so it is not new, but every time I see it, I am fascinated. Going to higher dimensions and visualizing moebius transformation is just a bonus.

Download the full high resolution wide screen narrated video in QuickTime format (130mb), if you have a fast connection.

Nice combination of pi, infinity and a mobius strip

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I expected to run out of physics or math tattoos a long time ago, but there seems to be an endless supply.

This is really nice one; and I love the way it is proudly displayed.

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There is so much beautiful physics in this falling drop of water!

It is especially fascinating because the red color of the water drop helps you visualize the intricate hydrodynamics of the falling drop with the water surface.

You see the real struggle the red drop is going through to stay away from the water. I see three bounces here, each creating its daughter droplet, which in turn bounces back.

So what happens? When a drop encounters a solid surface, its initial spherical shape is forced into a pancake-like form that stretches out over the surface. The kinetic energy of the drop forces it to conform to the planar geometry of the solid surface.

If the liquid in the drop is attracted to the surface, it will continue to spread and eventually adhere to the so-called hydrophilic material. The extent of the spreading is determined by the molecular interactions between the drop and the liquid.

When the molecular interactions between the water drop and the surface are repulsive, water droplets landing on these surfaces try to minimize their contact with the surface.

Thus, after being forced into a pancake shape, the drops retract as they try to re-establish a spherical form to minimize their exposure to the surface. Indeed, for certain cases the retraction can be sufficiently violent that the drop actually rebounds or bounces off the surface after impact

Here you see several attempts by the drop to return to its spherical shape.

More at Physicsworld

EnglishRussia brings us some ghostly pictures of an abandoned lab designed to hunt the ghostly neutrinos.

Deep inside this mound there is an ex-to-be-very-secret Russian neutrino lab. It belongs to the Russian Nuclear Research Center and was build to explore the neutrino particle properties.
It is a multi stored underground lab which is on 1000 ft (330 meters) deep mark inside this hill. It is also 11,000 ft (3600 meters) long and contains hundreds of rooms with the equipment, mainly the neutrino detection radars.
This radars are big metal tanks filled with white-spirit that has a light emission detectors and multipliers. They register neutrino mini-blasts in this white spirit environment and sent the real time reports to the main computer you would see its terminal below.
These tanks with radars occupy many many rooms on different floors so that none of the neutrino folk could pass unnoticed here.

By neutrino detection radar, they probably mean the neutrino detectors. Not sure what White-spirit did they used. And there is a mention of a neutrino mini blast - presumably using the technique of smashing protons into a fixed target, producing charged pions or kaons and focusing the particles in a long tunnel where they decal while in flight.

The tunnel:

The detectors:

floors and floors of detectors everywhere:

More detectors:

The control system:

Long live neutrinos!

Neutrinos never dies, they just oscillate.

My favorite space dog Laika now has a statue in Moscow!

The monument was unveiled on the eve of Cosmonauts’ Day, marking Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin’s April 12, 1961 space flight.

At one time a stray wandering the streets of Moscow, she was selected from an animal shelter. Originally named Kudryavka (literally: “Little Curly-Haired One”), she was renamed Laika.

After undergoing training with two other dogs, she was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 and was launched into space on November 3, 1957.

Laika wasn’t the first animal sent in to space (fruit flies were the first), but she was the most recognizable one.

Russian authorities had previously circulated reports that Laika survived in orbit for four days and then died when the cabin overheated due to a battery malfunction.

In reality, medical sensors recorded that immediately after the launch, as her capsule reached speeds of nearly 18,000 miles per hour (28,800km/h), her pulse rate increased to three times its normal level, presumably due to overheating, fear and stress. Five to seven hours into the flight, no further life signs were received from Laika.

Between 1957 and 1966, a total of 13 dogs were used in Soviet space flights, many of whom were recovered unharmed. Laika was the only one Russian scientists knowingly sent into space to die

I have some sentimental attachment to Laika; my wife had a dog named Laika when she was growing up and I have seen pictures of her frolicking around.

What they say is true - dog is man’s best friend.

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Why are icicle long and thin?

Here is a great image of three icicles.

As water drips onto an icicle and freezes, it releases heat. The warm air rises up the sides of the icicle. That warm air layer acts like a blanket that’s an insulator, and so the blanket is very thin near the tip and thick at the top. That allows the top to grow very slowly and the tip to grow rapidly — creating a long, thin icicle.

The height of an icicle is proportional to the radius to the four third!

The apex angle is about 15 degrees

How the ripples form on the icicle issue has not been fully resolved yet. I am not even sure if the problem of optimal distance between the icicles has been resolved either!