Dr. J.B. Tatum Physics Profiles

I came across Dr. Tatum, (shown in the center in the picture to the left), because of the excellent sets of class notes he wrote for his class in electricity and magnetism at the University of Victoria. At the time the picture was taken, he was a professor of astronomy at Radley College. The history of Radley says the following about Dr. Tatum:

'And at this point the most distinguished astronomer ever to teach at Radley took up his post as Head of Physics. This was Jeremy B. Tatum, fresh from a senior post in Astrophysics at Victoria University in Canada.[3]"

Education
Dr. Tatum did his PhD research[9] at the University of London Observatory in 1960. He did his postdoctoral work[10] at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory before moving on to teach at Radley College[11].

Career
In addition to teaching electricity and magnetism, Dr. Tatum worked in astrophysics and was something of an expert on birds! It had never occurred to me that a physicist could work in the field of ornithology, although it makes perfect sense. Dr. Tatum authored articles on bird navigation and the Coriolis force as well as an article on calculating the volume of a bird's egg. His articles and letters appeared in ornithology journals such as "The Auk", "The Condor", and "Bird Banding"[5][6][7]. In his article on the Coriolis force, he thanks Sir Denys Wilkinson for stimulating converstaions[4]. Sir Denys is a knighted nuclear physicist! He's the rather dapper looking physicist shown below the interesting bird journal cover pictures.

Dr. Tatum frequently wrote letters to journals on a variety of topics including bird collecting and grammar[8].

As a final aside, Dr. Tatum also wrote about the acoustics of meteor fireballs and about locating fragments of meteors. He proposed that the shock waves produced by the meteor falling to earth might be detectable by seismograph allowing the track of the meteor to be determined. See the second list of references for several of these articles, (many of which are free from NASA).

Locations

View JB Tatum in a larger map

References:
1. http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~tatum/index.html

2. http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~tatum/elmag/em01.pdf

3. http://100radleyobjects.wordpress.com/transits-of-venus/

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Wilkinson

5. http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=birdband

6. http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=auk

7. http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=condor

8. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1972Obs....92..147T&classic=YES

9. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1961MNRAS.122..311T&defaultprint=YES&page_ind=0&filetype=.pdf

10. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1965PDAO...12..425T&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf

11. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1968MNRAS.141...43T&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf

Other articles by and about Dr. Tatum
Fireballs: Interpretation of Airblast Data
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1999M%26PS...34..571T&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf

A hitherto unrecorded fragment of the Bruderheim meteorite
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1990JRASC..84....1T

Tracking a Fireball from Eyewitness Accounts II
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005JRASC..99..177T

Asteroid named after Dr. Tatum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3748_Tatum

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:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog