Month: March 2009
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Important changes to the Physics arXiv Blog
From Monday 13 March, the Physics arXiv Blog will appear exclusively on technologyreview.com This is an exciting move for the blog because it will allow me to concentrate on reading and filtering the fantastic ideas on the arXiv while leaving the increasingly onerous task of administering a popular website to the talented tech guys at…
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Chops ‘n’ changes
The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week: A Short History of Hindu Astronomy & Ephemeris Time Asymmetries in Extensive air Showers: A Novel Method to Identify UHECR species The Digital Restoration of Da Vinci’s Sketches Physics of the Shannon Limits Astronomy, Topography and Dynastic History in the Age of the Pyramids
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The secret of world class putting
Watch professional golfers putt and you’ll eventually notice three common features about their style, says Robert Grober, an expert on the physics of golf at the Yale University. First, the putter head always moves at a constant speed when it hits the ball. Second, the length of time the putting stroke takes has little impact…
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How to narrow the search for ET
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence needs all the help it can get. Depending on who you listen to, the chances of us spotting an intelligent technological society vary from an almost certainty to practically zero. The trouble is the sheer size of the search. The Milky Way contains around 10^10 sun-like stars, any one of…
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Visible light metamaterials on the cheap
Only a couple of years, more than a few physicists doubted that it would ever be possible to build decent metamaterials with a negative refractive index for visible light. Metamaterials have bulk properties that depend on the structure of their components rather than the bulk properties of the materials from which they are made. The…
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The fundamental patterns of traffic flow
Take up the study of earthquakes, volcanoes or stock markets and the goal, whether voiced or not, is to find a way to predict future “events” in your field. In that sense, these guys have something in common with scientists who study traffic jams. The difference is that traffic experts might one day reach their…
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Sheets ‘n’ pillows
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Alkali-Helium Snowball Complexes Formed on Helium Nanodroplets Holo-Television System with a Single Plane Towards a Quantum Fluid Mechanical Theory of Turbulence Social Networking: An Astronomer’s Field Guide Single-Particle Foucault Oscillator Powered by Laser
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How superconducting sheets could reflect gravitational waves
Gravitational waves are the elusive distortions in spacetime created by the universe’s most violent events–collisions between black holes, stars exploding and even the big bang itself. Nobody has bagged a confirmed sighting of these waves but that may change thanks to an intriguing idea from Raymond Chiao and pals at the University of California, Merced.…
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Centimetre scale models could compute Casimir forces
The Casimir force is notoriously difficult to measure. So tricky is it, that the first accurate measurements weren’t made until 1997 and even today only a handful of labs around the world of capable of taking its measure. Of course there are various ways of modelling what goes on theoretically but even the most powerful…
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Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?
In 1987, Joe Weber, a physicist at the University of Maryland, claimed to have detected gravitational waves at exactly the same moment that other astronomers witnessed the famous supernova of that year, SN1987A. His equipment consisted of several massive aluminium bars that were designed to vibrate in a unique way when a large enough gravitational…