Copasetic Flow

Maintaining the theme of suited up scientists, here's another dapper 1960's scientist presenting on two of my favorite subject areas, special relativity and particle accelerators. Dr. William Bertozzi presents a series of experiments that show that electrons gain relativistic mass as they approach the speed of light.  This was an educational film sponsored by the NSF.  The explanations are fairly simple and concise.  The coolest part of all though is that Dr. Bertozzi opens and modifies the accelerator between runs on film!  You don't see that at today's giant accelerators. For whatever reason Jefferson Laboratory, the maintainers of the film haven't seen fit to put the film on youtube yet.  You can access the whole film via their website though at http://education.jlab.org/scienceseries/ultimate_speed.html The youtube video below is just the first few minutes so you can get a flavor.

This one of the more interesting magnet levitating over a superconductor pictures I've seen in a while.  The sequence shows a magnet on the end of a non-ferromagnetic chain being lowered into a superconducting dish.  The chain becomes a graphically impressive part of the demo in the last frame.  You might have heard that magnets won't levitate stably over a flat type I superconductor, and the won't.  The sides of the dish are adding lateral repulsive forces that keep the magnet in place! The picture is from "Cryophysics" by K. Mendelssohn.  It's volume 7 of the excellent and completely out of print "Interscience Tracts on Physics and Astronomy"

Still trying to ease back into writing as I've been swamped with well... writing, and physics, and learning all about intermediate state superconductors. But, more about all that later. Last night I made a batch of beer bread before going to work. Apparently it came out OK!  Here's the recipe.   Beer Bread recipe:  3 cups Self Rising Flour, (the stuff in the red Gold Medal bag) 3 tablespoons Sugar 1 warm beer Mix it all up, put it in a greased loaf pan and bake for one hour at 350. This is one of the first things I learned to cook as a kid. It's easy and difficult to mess up. In my experience, the cheaper the beer the better, but you should experiment.