EXCLUSIVE: The Day Einstein Died - Photo Gallery - LIFE "Albert Einstein, the genius physicist whose theories changed our ideas of how the universe works, died 55 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine's Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch -- to open doors and loosen tongues -- Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon's passing. But aside from one now-famous image (above), the pictures…

Some bonus cute for your weekend: Here's SteelyKid apparently deciding to be a wizard. She can wave a stick and babble in what might as well be fake Latin with the best of them-- don't try to tell her she can't.

Via Kate, a call for love songs. I like most of the songs on Kate's list, but as I tried to think of songs to add, I realized a couple of things: 1) I own more really good kiss-off songs than I do traditional love songs, and 2) even the songs that I like about loving relationships tend to be a little... odd. Make of this what you will. Anyway, as a complement to Kate's list of relatively conventional love songs, here's a list of some odder tracks, mostly by less well-known artists. They're all songs about love or people in love, but not quite the sort of thing you should expect to hear as the…

The Secret of L.A.'s 10-Year-Old Fake Freeway Sign - Traffic - Jalopnik "An artist named Richard Ankrom had the same experience, and so he did what any fed-up Los Angeles driver would do: He created a simple directional tool to help drivers prepare for the 5's poorly marked hairpin exit. He designed and sewed a Caltrans uniform, cut the shield-like "5" shape as well as a "NORTH" from sheet metal, and affixed reflectors to match the existing system. He even gave the signage a nice dusting of L.A. smog sheen so it wouldn't look glaringly new. On August 5, 2001, in broad daylight, he hoisted a…

What's the application? Holograms are images of objects that appear three-dimensional-- if you move your head as you look at a hologram, you will see the usual parallax effects, unlike a normal photograph, which is fixed. So, if your hologram includes one object that is partly behind another object, you can see around the obstruction by moving a bit to the side, just as you would if the original objects were in front of you. What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How can we jazz up flat images and make them look more lifelike?" 2) "How can we make credit cards harder to copy?" How does it…

Around 470 people voted in yesterday's optics quiz. I continue to be amazed at the power of radio button polls to bring people into the blog. As of early Friday morning, the correct answer is solidly in he lead-- 63% of respondants have correctly replied that the image remains intact, but is half as bright. You can see this fairly easily by looking at a traditional ray diagram of the image-forming process (re-drawn slightly from yesterday's picture, to get the arrows right): The arrows in this picture show the paths followed by three different rays of light that all leave from the tip of the…

YouTube - Real Word Problems From My Physics Book - PH17 Amazingly, this isn't the silliest problem I've seen in an intro physics book... (tags: education physics science silly video youtube) Twitter / @busynessgirl/Calcwars Newton, Leibniz, meet Twitter. Twitter, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. (tags: silly math science history internet) Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 153202 (2010): Scattering in Mixed Dimensions with Ultracold Gases "We experimentally investigate the mix-dimensional scattering occurring when the collisional partners live in different dimensions. We employ a binary mixture…

The arrival of good weather has led to a good deal of yard work here at Chateau Steelypips. SteelyKid, being a sturdy and active toddler, is quite insistent that she can help with the raking: Or, possibly, fight off demon armies with her ninja skills. It's a little hard to say. Swinging the rake around does make her happy, though, so Appa and I just try to stay out of her way.

The pace has slowed, but there are still occasional sightings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in my Google vanity searches: It turns up on library blogs with some regularity. This particular one, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is nice because it's not just a rewrite of the publicity copy I was really excited to see Daily Kos show up as one of the sites found by the blog search, because they have bazillions of readers. It was only a plug in a comment, but still... The strangest-- in a good way-- mention recently was this passing reference in a newspaper column from Michigan,…

I was starting to type up the next Laser Smackdown entry, when it occurred to me that this was a good point to talk about a neat little thing from optics. It further occurred to me that this would be a good poll/quiz topic, to see what people think before I give you the real answer. So, here's the scenario: You have a brightly illuminated object, the canonical example being a vertical arrow (it could also be a shadow cast in a beam of light). You take a lens, and put it in front of the arrow, projecting an image of the arrow on a screen, like so: As you can see from the picture, the image…

A neighbor pointed out to me yesterday that there's a big hole in our clapboard siding that was made by some sort of bird. This morning, I got a picture of the culprit: I'm not quite certain why the animal kingdom has decided to trash my stuff this year-- insane jealousy of Emmy?-- but I would like it to stop. I will call the contractor who did our garage conversion to replace the siding, but it would be very helpful if somebody with actual knowledge of birds could tell me what these little guys are, and whether this hole-digging is a fluke behavior (which would be just my luck), or…

The Virtuosi: Would a laser gun recoil? "Let's motivate our question a little bit. I've wondered about this question since I saw star wars. Though I'm no firearms expert, the recoil in guns must come from conservation of momentum principles. Momentum is conserved in a system. The gun starts with zero momentum. We fire, give the bullet momentum, and so to keep the system at zero momentum, the gun must gain equal and opposite momentum. That is, the gun will move backwards. All of that was for conventional guns. Light carries momentum, so if we fire a pulse of light, we expect our laser gun…

What's the application? Telecommunications, namely, the sending of messages over very long distances by encoding them in light pulses which are sent over optical fibers. What problem(s) is it the solution to? "How can we send large numbers of messages from one place to another more efficiently than with electrical pulses sent down copper wires?" How does it work? The concept is dead simple: You take a signal and encode it in light-- this could be analog, like the SpectraSound demo LaserFest is selling, with higher intensity meaning higher signal, or it could be digital, with a bright pulse…

I won't attempt to explain the chain of reasoning that led to this topic this morning. The poll itself doesn't need much explanation, though: As any geek knows, the tv show(s) CSI: Descriptive Subtitle rely heavily on fake technologies. which of these would you most like to be real? Which imaginary technology from CSI would you rather have?online surveys Yes, I have read the relevant xkcd comic. Personally, I lean toward the image enhancement, because if we had their image processing capability attached to the Hubble, we'd be mapping continents on Earth-like planets in the Andromeda Galaxy…

slacktivist: L'affaire Waltke "This is a story about control. It is about, in the unintentionally candid terms of one of the main actors, "absolute authority" and the desire to wield that authority over a text so that the text, in turn, may be used to wield absolute authority over others. It is a story, in other words, about mortals who covet the authority of God and the lies they tell themselves and others when trying to usurp that authority. Our story takes place at an institution calling itself "Reformed Theological Seminary."" (tags: slacktivist religion politics science evolution…

I am currently on a committee looking to set some standards for technical writing in the introductory engineering sequence (which means the first two terms of physics, as they constitute 50-67% of the classes common to all first-year engineers). One of our jobs is to come up with a list of skills that we want to particularly emphasize in student writing in the first year. I've already sent this query to my colleagues, who are the votes that really matter, but this seems like a worthy subject for a blog poll. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see if my wise and worldly readers prefer…

I'm teaching a junior/senior level elective this term on quantum mechanics. We're using Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, which starts with spin-1/2 and develops the whole theory in terms of state vectors and matrices. This is kind of an uneasy fit for me, as I'm very much a swashbuckling experimentalist, and not as comfortable with formal mathematics. This occasionally leads to good things, though, such as Monday's class, on photon polarizations. the book uses some vector arithmetic to show that circularly polarized photons have spin angular momentum of one unit of h-bar.…

Michelson and the President (1869) « Skulls in the Stars "I'm currently working my way through the book The Master of Light: a Biography of Albert A. Michelson (1973), written by one of his daughters, Dorothy Michelson Livingston. I typically find the beginnings of biographies to be rather slow-moving, with some sort of statement like, "There was little to indicate in his/her childhood what a great scientist he/she would become," but this is definitely not the case for Michelson -- his life story is interesting starting pretty much at birth! I thought I'd share another anecdote from the…

What's the application? LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Graviitational Wave Observatory, because (astro)physicists feel free to drop inconvenient words when making up cute acronyms. This is an experiment to look for disturbances in space-time caused by massive objects, which would manifest as a slight stretching and compression of space itself. What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we directly observe the gravitational waves that are predicted by the equations of General Relativity?" 2) "Can we detect things like colliding black holes, because that would be awesome!" How does it…

Several weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. Personal issues interrupted this, but I want to finish it out in honor of LaserFest Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up: Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show Laser cooling/ BEC Lunar laser ranging Optical tweezers Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) LIGO Telecommunications Holography Laser ignited fusion Laser eye surgery Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics I'll be writing up LIGO shortly, and will try to finish the whole thing as soon…