electrons
esiegel | August 14, 2012"The colors of a rainbow so pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces of people going by." -Louis Armstrong
It's no secret that white light is the light that we see when all the colors shine together and are seen at once. This has been known for over 400 years, when Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light could be broken up into all the known colors by dispersing it through a prism.
Image credit: Adam Hart-Davis.
All that we're doing is breaking white light -- in this case, sunlight -- up into all of its component colors. This can be done artificially (such as by configuring a prism) or…
ksnyder | October 14, 2010The steel framework that will house Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) is almost a complete, nearly half-mile ring after the last piece of structural steel was ceremonially signed yesterday afternoon.
Construction workers, Brookhaven employees, and elected officials signed the last remaining piece of structural steel for the NSLS-II ring. This milestone is known as "topping out" in the construction industry.
Just how big is this scientific circle? Big enough to fit the playing field of Yankee Stadium inside -- with so much extra room that you might never see a home…
drorzel | April 9, 2010The National Science Board made a deeply regrettable decision to omit questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2010. As you might expect, this has stirred up some controversy.
I wasn't surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the omission a couple of months ago, when I updated the slides for my talk on public communication of science-- the figure showing survey data in the current talk doesn't include those questions, while the original version has them in there. I noticed it, and thought it was a little odd, but it had no effect…