neutrons
esiegel | November 13, 2013"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley
Nuclear physics is one of the most daunting, emotionally charged phrases in all of science. You can hardly say the words without the image of a mushroom cloud popping into most people's heads, followed by the devastations of radiation sickness and lingering radioactivity.
Image credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888), Charles Levy, of the Nagasaki bomb.
But -- as a physicist -- that's not what I think of at all.
Think…
drorzel | April 21, 2011Several people blogged about a new measurement of gravitational states of neutrons done by physicists using ultracold neutrons from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France. I had to resort to Twitter to get access to the paper (we don't get Nature Physics here, and it's way faster than Inter-Library Loan), but this is a nice topic for a ResearchBlogging post, in the now-standard Q&A form:
OK, why was this worth begging people on Twitter to send you a copy? The paper is a demonstration of a sort of spectroscopy of neutrons bouncing in a gravitational field. They showed they could drive…