All posts tagged physics.

This is one of the best cyanide and happiness I’ve ever seen. But mainly because I’m a physics nerd.

This doesn’t make any sense. An ohm is a unit not a quantity. Something cannot be related to ohm. It should be resistance is futile: (if < 1 ohm).

I wouldn’t mind this distinction except that the person who wrote this knew enough about what happens when resistivity is less than one ohm but didn’t get the unit distinction.

(via un:klaatu)

M.C. Hawking - Entropy

A detailed explanation of entropy by a man rapping using a synthesized voice. It’s off an album with one of the best titles ever: A Brief History of Rhyme.

(via pilnick)

pilnick:

The LHC’s Secret Weapon - The Grid

It’s a solution to one of the LHC’s most important problems: the 15 Petabytes of data it will spit out annually, none of which can just be stored on site at the CERN in Switzerland. Rather, the data needs to be globally parceled out to the 7,000 physicists involved in the project.

The history of the Internet is dotted with sporadic jumps in speed and efficiency, but this tops them all: the Grid is 10,000 times faster than the fastest existing broadband. It’s huge.

Gotta love physicists frugality. A cluster of hundreds of shitty ass computers are just as good as spending tons of money on some hardcore hardware.

The Large Hadron Collider Drinking Game

The rules are simple. Take a drink of your favorite beverage whenever one of the following occurs:

• A proton crosses the border between Switzerland and France.
• A magnet quench in a superconducting magnet causes all the liquid helium to boil away.
• A Higgs boson is detected (2 drinks).
• Scientists learn the secrets of the universe and go insane (2 drinks).
• A miniature black hole forms (2 drinks if it absorbs Switzerland).
• Strange matter is created (weird, unusual or eccentric matter doesn’t count).
• A petabyte of data is generated.
• Someone sings the chorus of the LHC Rap.
• The Super Proton Synchrotron reaches 300 gigavolts (2 drinks if it hits 400 GeV).
• The Compact Muon Solenoid finds something that completely alters our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe.
• Flight 19 suddenly appears over Geneva.
• Particle superpartners are found to have natural supersymmetry.
• An intern confuses muons with gluons.
• The experiment goes awry and someone ends up with superpowers.
• Aliens show up and make us turn off the LHC before we implode reality.
• Scientists go back in time (2 drinks if they create a paradox).
• Someone says “Big Bang.”
• Particles crash into each other (2 drinks if there are Batman-tyle visual sound effects, like “Pow!” and “Zap!” when it happens; feel free to construct your own).
• Someone says, “What’s a hadron?”
• Scientists access another dimension (2 drinks if that dimension is occupied entirely by Donna Summer impersonators; 3 drinks if denizens of said dimension eat the scientists; note that these two conditions are not mutually exclusive).
• Someone on TV questions the amount of money spent to build the LHC.
• Someone on TV worries that the LHC will destroy the world.
• The world ends (drink whatever you have left).
• Scientists prove string theory (3 drinks because we’ll all pretty much have to take their word for it).
• Someone uses the term “beam pipe” in a pickup line.

(via io9: The Large Hadron Collider Drinking Game & travors)

langer:

1927 Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons.  Photo includes Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Born, Curie, Planck, Lorentz, Schrödinger, Dirac, de Broglie, and others.

Truly the greatest time for physics to date.

Large Hadron Rap This isn’t that bad for explaining some of the physics envolved. (via ardenashley)

Reminds me of MC Hawking