By Alan Reifman, Non-Physicist
Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 2 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 3 years.
The Pope of Physics is a 2016 biography of Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), written by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin. Segre's uncle Emilio was a student of Fermi's in Rome, whereas Hoerlin's father knew Fermi from Los Alamos, New Mexico in the post-World War II years. I began reading the book earlier this year, before I knew that the movie Oppenheimer was coming out. Both The Pope of Physics and…
Vox provides a very clear explanation of Henrietta Leavitt's 1908 discovery that allows us to estimate the distance to stars and galaxies. The book Einstein's Greatest Mistake (which I previously reviewed here ) also discusses Leavitt's contributions (pages 137-142). This section of the book explains why stars differ in their degree of pulsation: "We're used to our sun shining pretty evenly, at…
The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three researchers for their work in quantum entanglement and its applications. This posting from Daily Kos features a compilation of links, explanations, video tutorials, and other material pertaining to the prize-winning research. I wrote a watered-down introduction to quantum entanglement back in 2005, which is available here .
My friend Alan Nathan, a retired professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and one of the leading experts on the physics of baseball, appeared on the Society for American Baseball Research's SABRcast several weeks ago. The archived audio is available here (you have to scroll down a bit when the new page comes up). Professor Nathan discusses both historical and current…
David Bodanis begins his 2016 book Einstein's Greatest Mistake with a depiction of a once-great scientist who had become a forlorn figure in his later years. He was usually alone when he walked home after a day at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, isolated intellectually and socially from other scientists, many of whom "no longer took his ideas seriously" (p. xii). How…
Vox explains "Why ski jumpers hold their skis in a V," as opposed to the older style of keeping their skis parallel ( link ).
Vox explains the climate-change modeling -- "account[ing] for the roiling randomness present in everything from materials to the motion of the atmosphere, and still mak[ing] useful predictions" -- that earned three researchers this year's Nobel Prize in physics.
The San Jose Mercury News reports on physicist Samantha Schultz's position as a pitching analyst with the Oakland A's Major League Baseball team ( link ). The following paragraphs from the article describe the kinds of things she does with A's pitchers: “One of my biggest strengths is to take this complicated stuff and put it into baseball language,” Schultz said. “It’s not like I’m on the mound…
For fans of American football, the New York Times has an article ( link ) on three physicists' explanation of why the axis of a spiral forward pass changes -- from nose pointing up at release to nose pointing down as the receiver catches the ball -- even though the laws of physics say the axis should remain the same.
The 7-10 split is when the only pins standing after a bowler's first shot of a frame are the leftmost and rightmost pins in the back row. It's obviously extremely difficult to knock out both pins on one's second shot, but until I saw this video from Wired , I didn't know how difficult. Professional bowlers, in fact, topple both pins for a spare less than 1 percent of the time! And the only reason…