# Magneto and Momentum

There’s this grim and affecting scene in both X-Men and X-Men: First Class – a young Erik Lehnsherr watches his family hauled away by Nazis through the gates of a concentration camp. He’s being dragged away by the Nazi guards, and he uses his magnetic powers for the first time to grab the gates with…

# How Single-Colored Is A Laser?

In most books or articles that talk about lasers, you’ll see a definition of laser light in terms of “coherence”. But coherence is sort of a term of art, and the books will go on to explain coherence in terms of the waves being in sync with each other, or the emitted light being very…

# Some Cute Math

Back before my now-ended blogging hiatus, the server machinery that keeps ScienceBlogs running was not so snazzy as it is now. Now it’s running a WordPress implementation that includes LaTeX support. LaTeX is a free environment for (among other things) typesetting mathematics. Let’s give it a test run: $latex 3 = \sqrt{6+\sqrt{6+\sqrt{6+\cdots}}} &s=2$ I actually…

# Armstrong in Orbit

If you’ve been reading ScienceBlogs for a while, you might remember this little physics blog I used to write. It and I sort of vanished off the internet for a long while. More than a year, I’m sad to say. Long story short, being a grad student takes up a huge amount of time. While…