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.

Apologies for the long hibernation.  I was getting a paper ready to submit and pushed just about everything else off to the side.  Hopefully, I'll get to write here more frequently as time progresses.  Today, if you're looking for a book on special relativity and you'd like to know more about Gudermannians, then Dr. Robinson's book just might be the one for you. If you're a Landau and Lifshitz fan like me, it will take you awhile to get used to the style of this book. However, once I got my head wrapped around Dr. Robinson's metaphorical style, I really enjoyed his explanations of special relativity. There are no universes cluttered with rigid rods and ideal clocks at every coordinate point! In one chapter the author manages to introduce the hyperbolic nature of space time, Lorentz contraction, and Larmor time dilation all using the metaphor of ants living on a rope hung over a heater with laser holographic communication devices. The example comes off amazing...

Just a few brief notes on circular and hyperbolic trigonometry today.  First, if there's anyone who'd like to offer, any clarifications, expansions, or other cool and interesting facts, please, you're more than welcome!  As usual, this is stuff that I learned in high school that didn't become blindingly clear and meaningful until it cropped up in grad school physics.  First, the equations for the circle and the hyperbola (picture 1) Notice that they differ only by a single negative sign.  Now, for their graphs, (picture 2). Each of these figures can also be expressed in parametric form as follows, (this is where the trigonometric and hyperbolic trig functions come in).  (picture 3) Now for the notes and other thoughts. Angular Arc Length and Angular Area Until just a few weeks ago, I had always wondered why the inverse trig functions were called arcsine, and arccosine.  The answer makes perfect sense, it just hadn't occurred to me.  T...

We've been trying to decipher the video upload system for Google+ events over at the  +STEM on Google+ Community  share your story event.  It's messy and doesn't work as you might expect it to on first glance.  The short version of the story is this: 1.  You can upload videos into events, but it seems they have to be encapsulated in albums that already exist. 2.  You won't see the video in your album, but go ahead and add the album to the event anyway. The video will be added. 3.  Each photo in 'Photos from Posts' is its own album.  Consequently, the easiest way to share a single video to an event is to first share it to your stream to get it into the 'Photos from Posts' album and then, add the video to your event from there. Gory Testing Detail Now, here are all the gory testing details so you know what we saw and also so you'll know you're not going crazy when you run across these problems. OK, here's the latest.  I tried to do...

Rindler demonstrates[2] the best way ever to derive the relativistic Lorentz contraction/time dilation factor, gamma, (of twin paradox fame), from four velocity!  I've been working through Rindler's paper on hyperbolic motion as a result of constant acceleration[1] lately. Starting from the constancy of the speed of light, Einstein's theory of special relativity posited, and Minkowski refined the idea that the universe is actually four dimensional with space and time sitting on an equal footing.  Starting from here, we can write an expression for the distance squared along an infinitesimal line element in four dimensions, (think Pythagorean theorem)... Brian Greene popularized the idea of four velocity[3] in one of his books and although it isn't mentioned as much as some of the other aspects of special rel, it's a simple idea.  Everything is moving at the speed of light.  Something might have more of it's velocity pointed into either the space dime...