Skip to main content

Daybreak Chapter 4, Wardenclyffe and Real Physicists

Chapter 4 of Daybreak premiered yesterday! It was a little mushy and a little short for my taste, but it had another great physics quote delivered by Charles:
"oceanic overturn followed by a series of mega-tsunamis and hyper-hurricanes"
Oh the alliteration!

There were also some interesting references to Wardenclyffe, Tesla's last laboratory. Which brings up the question, do real physicists hang out around Wardenclyffe?




Although the transmitting tower was torn down and sold for scrap to pay Tesla's hotel bills, the laboratory building behind the tower is still there, and yes, yours truly got to hang out at Wardenclyffe for a day. A group on Long Islan, the Tesla Science Center, is working to restore Tesla's last lab into a working science museum and makers space. In support of the efforts to restore the lab, I worked with Jeff Murray, K1NSS, ham radio cartoonist extraordinaire, Diana Eng, Make magazine contributor, fashion designer, and NYC ham radio aficionado, and Colorado ham radio adventurer Michael Coletta, KG7UFO to activate three historic Tesla locations. Diana and her team of ham radio operators transmitted from atop the New Yorker, Tesla's residence in downtown New York City. Jeff and I were lucky enough to get to setup a station at Wardenclyffe itself. Michael, KG7UFO, transmitted from the site near Colorado Springs where Tesla built the prototype of his Wardenclyffe transmitting tower. A great time was had by all and Wardenclyffe communicated with radio stations all over the world, just as Tesla intended, (see the interactive map below). If you'd like to help with the effort to restore Wardenclyffe, please contact the Tesla Science Center.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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: