A random walk through atomic physics and quantum stuff.
There's a text file on my computer in which I’ve written down some questions, the answers to which will firmly demarcate the line between science and engineering. Here are some of the questions I’ve set myself: Is there such a thing as 'rocket science'? If a carrion crow retrieves food using a stick, is that engineering? Can a serendipitous discovery be scientific? Was the phase-contrast…
For my birthday this year, my other half got me a riso printing workshop. Riso is like industrialized screen printing, but in this case (contradictorily?) on a small scale. The purpose of the workshop was to produce zine: a small booklet on a topic of your choosing, which, for me, was the nitrogen-vacancy center: one of the hottest quantum systems in town. Here's an adventure in outreach using…
While out on a lark a few months ago, we bumped into a vestige of the colonial history of The Netherlands. Triggered by some structurally curious elements, a grand tour through history, engineering, and the history of engineering ensued. Enter: compressed catenaries, colonial fanclubs, stiff slabs, and Pope Benedict XIV.
Most physicists don’t enjoy writing, and don’t want to spend a lot of time wordsmithing away at sentences until they sound just right. On its own, this is not a problem; you can be a great storyteller while not caring much for written text. Should scientists get the chatbot to do the writing for them, though? I don't think so. Telling a story about whatever it is you do ultimately leaves you with…
In a contribution to the American Journal of Physics, one of David Griffiths’ former students recalled a remark that Griffiths once made during a lecture, in which he supposedly claimed that physics is but a recipe for calculating numbers that describe reality. David Griffiths, asked by the journal whether he indeed felt that way, responded: Whoever this David Griffiths may be, I disagree with…
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the real Planck constant $h$ or $\hbar$? Sometimes it is said that good science raises more questions than it answers. Well, if that is so, today is a day for good science.
— Lyra, there's elections coming up. Do you know who you'll vote for? — No Pan, I think I'll just look at my alethiometer the day of. — Are you sure? I think some dust got in and it only has one functioning needle left. — Huh, what's that? — Dust, Lyra! Dust! And off they went, to remap the political territory on $\mathbb{R}^2$, using some Big Data Tools.
'You look bored,' his physics teacher once told a young Richard Feynman: 'Let me tell you something interesting.' He continued to divulge the secret of the principle of least action to him. Coincidentally, we use this principle here to look at something interesting as well — something no one tells you about in undergrad! — namely: anharmonicity in the vibration of (piano) strings.
Much has been made of people coughing during concerts. An economist has observed that the rate at which people cough during a concert is roughly twice that of the baseline, and has hypothesized that, among other reasons, they do so in order to express their disapproval with the performance. Here, we explore alternative explanations, and take a Bayesian turn.
YouTube and podcast apps appear to be able to change the playback speed of an audio signal without (dramatically) changing the pitch. How does this work? And could it be useful for musicians looking to change the playback speed of a sample during a performance? A look at the phase vocoder.