Antigravity and the history of Relativsitic Astrophysics

If you can sneak away this afternoon and you want to see a fascinating history of physics video, this is the one! This is a recording of the history roundtable at last December's 50th anniversary meeting of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. The speaker include in no particular order:
Roger Penrose
Wolfgang Rindler
Charles Misner
Louis Witten
Cecile DeWitt-Morette
Joshua Goldberg
Ezra Ted Newman
and Roy Kerr,
and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

The agreed upon format was that each speaker had two or three minutes to introduce themselves and then the moderator would ask questions. Fortunately, the format was completely abandoned! What followed was over two hours of each speaker recounting their favorite stories about the history of relativistic astrophysics. The whole video is worth watching. Here's a link to the video on youtube queued to the beginning of Louis Witten's talk. He worked for RIAS in the 1950's and 60's and was tasked with finding anti-gravity. Of course, that didn't work out, but the stories are funny and the work he actually did while there is fascinating. As an aside, he's also the father of Edward Witten, string thoerist par excelance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten. The talk here and a few other sources have been the inspiration for my recent history of physics research into RIAS resulting in posts like http://chipdesignmag.com/carter/2014/07/30/satellite-crowdfunding-then-and-now/

Comments

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog