Physical Science
tfk | March 15, 2011As you presumably know by now, the earthquake in Japan damaged a series of nuclear reactors at the Fukujima Daiichi plant. Due to damage from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, safety systems failed and the reactors could not be shut down the way they were supposed. Hydrogen gas built up and several buildings surrounding the reactor cores have exploded, though the reactor cores themselves seem to be holding up (there is some reporting now that the core of one reactor may have been breached, but it's still unconfirmed whether that's true, or how extensive the breach might be if so). It'…
tfk | October 15, 2010Laughing Squid reports, via John Brockman's twitter feed and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's website, that the father of fractal geometry has moved to a different fractional dimension.
rallain | May 17, 2010Grades are in. So, let me just say a couple of trends that I saw on the physical science final exam.
Gravity on the moon
I asked the question: "why is the gravitational force on an astronaut less on the moon than on Earth?"
The simplest answer is that the gravitational field on the moon is smaller than on Earth (I would accept that answer). Why is this? It is because the moon as a much smaller mass even though it also has a smaller radius (that idea is rather complicated for this class - that gravitational force depends on both mass and radius). I would also take "the mass is smaller" as…
tfk | April 25, 2010Via A Continuous Lean, an HD version of origina 16 mm film from the Apollo 11 launch:
So awesome.
emjohnson | April 9, 2010With yesterday's announcement of the historic nuclear arms treaty signed by Russia and the United States (that would reduce existing stockpiles by as much as 30%) I thought I would repost my piece on Edward Teller's nuclear legacy from September, 2003 that was originally commissioned by The Nation magazine (though ultimately went unpublished). Also see my posts Intimidating the Soviets: A Hiroshima Anniversary Memorial and The Population Bomb, Nuclear Winter and the Role of Science in Public Advocacy. Yesterday's treaty is the first step in dismantling the nuclear policies that this would-…
grrlscientist | March 28, 2010tags: marshmallow peeps, Astropeep, peeponaut, easter, space, humor, funny, silly, video, streaming video
I posted this last year, but I think it is worth repeating .. this streaming video lacks music, but it shows you the adventures of a very special marshmallow peep, an astropeep (or a peeponaut, depending upon which name you prefer) who traveled to the edge of space .. thanks to the Adler Planetarium's "Far Horizons 12" high altitude balloon mission, which rose to nearly to 97,000 feet.
rallain | March 26, 2010I am teaching physical science this semester. It appears that I will be teaching it again this summer. Ideally, I would like to switch to something like Physics and Everyday Thinking for large lecture courses. A course like this is being developed, but it isn't quite finished. Also, the current version includes chemistry and physics. I really need something different (we offer physical science 101 is physics and 102 is chemistry).
The current course is pretty traditional. Your basic physical science stuff. It has the following content.
Forces and Motion
Newton's Laws
Projectile motion…
emjohnson | December 7, 2009The twice monthly premiere science blog carnival has just been posted at Mauka to Makai. Many of your favorite science bloggers have been included (as well as yours truly). Make sure to stop in and prepare to be amazed.
emjohnson | August 4, 2009In 1996 Cornell astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan posed the question, "What are conservatives conserving?" It was not something he asked lightly. The question appeared in his final book following a prolonged battle with bone marrow disease. Faced with his own mortality, he wanted to understand the individuals whose actions, whether consciously or not, threatened the lives of so many others. Sagan was a passionate advocate for science but, first and foremost, he was an advocate for humanity itself.
A kindred spirit, someone representing the same passion for science and…
emjohnson | June 30, 2009On June 30, 1905 Albert Einstein published his paper on Special Relativity with the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" in the journal Annalen der Physik (original German version in pdf here).
This was Einstein's third of what have become known as the Annus Mirabilis papers (Latin for "extraordinary year") and revolutionized the field of physics by reconciling Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics. He was 26 years old. In this paper Einstein also dispelled with the concept of "luminiferous ether" (proposed by Isaac Newton in 1704), a…
grrlscientist | April 11, 2009tags: Astropeep, peeponaut, easter, space, streaming video
I posted this last year, but I think it is worth repeating .. this streaming video lacks music, but it shows you the adventures of a special peep, an astropeep (or a peeponaut, depending upon which name you prefer) who traveled to the edge of space .. thanks to the Adler Planetarium's "Far Horizons 12" high altitude balloon mission, which rose to nearly to 97,000 feet [3:00]
amillikan | November 17, 2008Physical Science
Physical Science channel photo. An image from the Hubble Space Telescope of Fomalhaut b, the first planet outside of the Sun's solar system viewed from Earth. From Flickr, by bobster1985
“Lack of peer review is a unifying feature of pseudosciences. In this regard creationism is indistinguishable from astrology , homeopathy, etc. Effective peer review would cause all these "fields" to quickly disappear.“
Phil on Entropy and evolution