The Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations and Snow Removal Team is seen, in this video, preparing a classic mousetrap-as-analog demonstration of how nuclear fission proceeds. Their written explanation includes these comments: We’ve got the set-up time down to 15 minutes, and like all nuclear devices, you only get one shot at this one. The mouse trap […]
Tag: Physics
Demonstration of the physics of sheep through a bottleneck
A physics experiment of sheep passing through a bottleneck, which we featured some months ago, has now been formally published, and the researchers have released a video of the experiment. The study is: “Flow and clogging of a sheep herd passing through a bottleneck,” A. Garcimartín, J. M. Pastor, L. M. Ferrer, J. J. Ramos, C. […]
Cosmologists and their metaphors: Follicly-Challenged Stars
People who theorize about the physics of the cosmos looooove, some of them, to come up with metaphors that extend the metaphors that other cosmologists came up with. This new paper shows how that’s done: “Relating Follicly-Challenged Compact Stars to Bald Black Holes,” Kent Yagi and Nicolas Yunes, arXiv:1502.04131, February 13, 2015. (Thanks to Simon Morris […]
Cup-of-coffee micro-droplets surface physics, poetically
Investigator Mason Porter sent us this note, about a study he noticed: The thing that strikes me about this paper is the first sentences of the abstract — just about the most poetic initial sentence that I have ever seen in an abstract of a scientific paper. So one thing that could be interesting (to me, […]