For a little lagniappe to the regular daily post, here’s a few things things I thought were really cool.
The world’s largest air vortex cannon. How far away can you blow out a candle? Unless you have a jet engine handy, probably not this far.
Hrm. Carl over at Mass is working on some heuristic modeling of fundamental particles. It’s a little out of by depth, but reading stuff like this makes my depth a little greater.
Via Dr. Pion, the science(?) of Donald Trump’s hair. Come on, Mr. Trump. Don’t you know that thanks to those enterprising biologists there’s an actual full-blown cure for baldness that’s already in Phase II trials? Surely your millions can get it now if you want.
Firefox 3 is out of beta and available for download.
Anyway, never let it be said you don’t get variety at this site!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Carl Brannen // Jun 19, 2008 at 12:07 am
Thanks for the link to my latest post on the mesons. It would be best to treat stuff I write as science fiction or entertainment, at least if you want to get your degree, LOL. The usual way of modeling the mesons requires a great deal of curve fitting, though it isn’t called by that name. You should judge for yourself, the particle data group has a wonderful review of meson theory which I’m linking here because I searched for some time before finding it (though it was in the obvious place), and thought it would be apprciated.
Right now the various Koide formulas I’ve found are spread all over the internet, they would be more impressive listed together but it’s a lot of work. I’ll collate them together in one place before the summer is out and send a sheet to each of the people who are interested in that sort of thing (physicists are so specialized these days no one else cares).
One of the cool things about grad school is talking with other physics grad students, mostly about physics. And the best thing are physics koans:
Suppose we have a wave function for two identical fermions psi(u,v) where u and v are the positions for the two fermions. Because of the Pauli principle, psi(v,u) = -psi(u,v), and wherever u=v, psi(u,v) = 0.
Define an ordering on u and v, so we can always say which is smaller of two different positions. For example, in 1-dimension, define “u”<”v” if the real number u is less than the real number v. For more than 1-dimension it is not so easy. You can compare x-coordinates and rely on the difference if any. If x-coordinates are the same, compare y-coordinates, and then z-coordinates.
Now define phi(u,v) = psi(u,v) if uv. Then phi is symmetric, and therefore could be the wave function for two bosons. And yet, |phi|^2 = |psi|^2; the two wave functions are identical in position information, and are identical also for momentum, except on a set of measure zero.
Therefore a fermion wave function can be lifted to be a boson wave function with the same position and momentum characteristics, (but not generally vice-versa).
2 Uncle Al // Jun 19, 2008 at 10:58 am
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/hair2.htm
“Somatic Fur Queen”
Discover 16(5) 16 (1995)
For biology, the price of progress is mostly the cost of leasing a small piece of government regulation.
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