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An exploration of physics and the quest to understand our world.
Matt Springer is a graduate student of physics at Texas A&M university. He is also an occasional writer and tinkerer, and he is probably too curious for his own good.
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May 27, 2010
Before we get to the heart of yesterday's quiz, let me briefly define solid angle for those who may not be familiar with it. Regular angles are measured in degrees or radians, and solid angles are to angles as square...
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:06 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 26, 2010
Pop quiz! The picture below is a solar power facility wherein light from the sun is collected by mirrors and focused onto the top of a collecting tower. Fluid within the tower is heated by this light and the hot...
Posted by Matt Springer at 9:23 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 23, 2010
Category: Sunday Function
Alice, Bob, and the Nazis.
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:17 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2010
I can't let this week go by without mentioning that it is - officially - the 50th birthday of the invention of the laser. Officially, anyway. On the 16th of May 1960, Theodore H. Maiman produced the first working optical...
Posted by Matt Springer at 12:15 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 19, 2010
Space Shuttle mission STS-132 is currently orbiting over our heads. It's scheduled to land a week from now. After that, there's two more launches and that will be that for the program. At that point the US will officially be...
Posted by Matt Springer at 1:50 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 16, 2010
Category: Sunday Function
f(N) = two different things, simultaneously.
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:22 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2010
CNN has a headline up: Fate or Fluke: Air crash sole survivors. ON the homepage itself the banner reads "Fate or Physics?" (CNN) -- Some will see it as divine intervention, others a simple quirk of fate, fortune or physics,...
Posted by Matt Springer at 11:57 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 7, 2010
I recently learned about a great blog by S.C. Kavassalis of the University of Toronto called The Language of Bad Physics. She discusses, among other things, the way language is used in physics. She's got an interesting piece on the...
Posted by Matt Springer at 11:00 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 4, 2010
The classic "which-way" experiment.
Posted by Matt Springer at 12:20 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2010
Category: Sunday Function
It's been a while since we've done a Sunday Function, so let's get back into the swing of things with a weird one. This is Thomae's function, and using Wikipedia's conveniently typeset definition: If you're new to the concept of...
Posted by Matt Springer at 4:24 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
denialism blog 02.14.2012
respectful insolence 02.14.2012
uncertain principles 02.13.2012
confessions of a science librarian 02.13.2012
starts with a bang! 02.13.2012
