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Radioactivity chain reaction
Radioactivity chain reaction
Blowing stuff up in the name of physics
(A stack of matches below hydrogen balloons)
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Quote of the week!
In physics, you don’t have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.
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This weeks brainteaser:
An iceberg is in the form of an upright regular pyrimid, of which 10m shows above the surface. Find the period of the small oscillations of the berg. (density of water 
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Hundreds of new marine species discovered down under!
Dozens of tiny crustaceans, 130 new species of soft corals and 100 small isopods are all new to science
Marine biologists have discovered hundreds of new and rare species while exploring the waters around two remote islands and a reef off the Australian coast.
Scientists conducted in-depth surveys of marine life around the Heron and Lizard islands on the Great Barrier Reef off the country’s northeastern coast, and in the waters around the 170-mile-long Ningaloo reef off the western coast.
Among their findings were an estimated 130 new species of soft corals, several undescribed shrimp-like species - some with claws larger than their bodies - and dozens of tiny crustaceans. They also collected around 100 small organisms called isopods that are believed to be new to science. Some isopods are parasites and burrow into fishes’ mouths and nibble their tongues away.
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This week in Physics History
- Sept. 10, 1892 - American physicist Arthur Compton is born. Compton received the 1927 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in discovering the Compton effect, a form of scattering in which electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light waves) and matter interaction. This was a crucial discovery in the early development of quantum physics.
- Sept. 12, 1897 - French scientist Irene Joliot-Curie is born. She was the daughter of famed scientists Pierre & Marie Curie. Jointly with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, she was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of their work in discovering artificial radioactivity.
- Sept. 14, 1959 - The Soviet probe Luna 2 becomes the first man-made object to reach the moon, as it crashes into the surface of the moon.
- Sept. 10, 1975 - English physicist George Paget Thomson dies. Thomson was the son of J.J. Thomson, the famous physicist & chemist who discovered the electron. George Thomson similarly went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for his own work in discovering electron diffraction, which was a major step toward understanding the nature of wave particle duality.
- Sept. 10, 1983 - Swiss-born physicist Felix Bloch dies. Bloch received the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in discovering the underlying principles of nuclear magnetic resonance which would ultimately lead to the invention of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device.
- Sept. 10, 2008 - The Large Hadron collider is turned on for the first time at the CERN facility in Switzerland.
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Cartoon laws of Physics
Cartoon Laws of Physics - Authorship Unknown
Cartoon Law I
Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.
Cartoon Law II
Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly. Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge’s surcease.
Cartoon Law III
Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter. Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the specialty of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction.