pwn physics 365: physics history, vocabulary, and resources every day of the year

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On this day in physics: 30 January 1982 A white dwarf companion to Sirius is discovered by Alvan Graham Clark using an 18.5-inch telescope.  Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. It is now known as Sirius A, because of this discovery, which saw that a second White Dwarf star, Sirius B, existed and orbits Sirius A. 

Word of the Day: White Dwarf- a type of star-leftover which is considered to be the final stage of stars which are not massive enough to become Neutron Stars. These dwarfs were once small to medium mass stars, then entered the red giant phase, which have very large radiuses with relatively low temperature (5000 K or less). Red giants are essentially giant fusion reactors, which fuse helium into carbon, releasing massive amounts of energy. When they run out of energy, what you're left with is a white dwarf. It's the core of the reactor which doesn't have enough energy to react anymore. Imagine the nuclear waste in a nuclear reactor once it's been used up. They are extremely dense, imagine something the size of the sun compressed down to the size of the Earth.

White dwarfs, in this stage, radiate out tons of energy, in the form of white light, and as they have no source of energy, they simply lose energy, dim and fade away. The white will get slightly redder as it ages. They should reach a point of cooling where they will no longer radiate light, and will become the theorized "black dwarf". There are no known black dwarfs to exist. The amount of time that it takes a white dwarf to cool to the black dwarf stage is longer than the current age of the universe. We may see some in the future, but the coolest and oldest White Dwarfs known to exist are still a few thousand Kelvins. 

Killer Resource: Drums and Cymbals in Slow Motion. World Record holding drummer, and current Dream Theater drummer Mike Mangini was filmed with high speed cameras to see how drums behave in slow motion.

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On this day in physics: 30 January 1991, we said Goodbye to John Bardeen, an American Physicist and Electrical Engineer. John so far is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize TWICE! The first time he won in 1956 with two others for the invention of the transistor. As if once wasn't enough, the next time he won again with colleagues in 1972 for the development BCS theory, which is a theory which describes superconductivity and breaks it down into a property which exists at the microscopic scale. PWN Physics 365 salutes you!

Word of the Day: Momentum- It would be hard to do a word of the day about mass and inertia and not follow it up with momentum. As if mass and inertia weren't hard enough to describe, I think momentum is even harder. This is what momentum is. It is the product of the velocity and the mass of an object. If you are stationary your momentum is zero. The faster you're going, the more momentum you gain. There is also something called conservation of momentum, which means that the total momentum of a system must be conserved. This is very important for collisions! If two bodies collide, the total momentum of the system will be conserved, which means that one body could leave the collision with a much higher velocity than it entered! This is especially the case when a small object moving slowly collides with a massive object moving quickly!

Killer Resource: Conservation of Momentum- Newton's Cradle Explained.

Dig Deeper at pwnphyiscs.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 29 January 1926, we say Happy Birthday to Abdus Salem, one of three physicists to share the Nobel Prize in 1979 for unifying the electromagnetic and weak force to the electroweak force.Word of the Day: Mass- First, let's take a look at a couple of definitions. From wikipedia: "It is generally the amount of matter of an object. It is determined by the strength of its mutual gravitational attraction to other bodies, its resistance to being accelerated by a force, and in the theory of relativity gives the mass–energy content of a system. The SI unit of mass is the kilogram (kg)." From Hyperphysics: "The mass of an object is a fundamental property of the object; a numerical measure of its inertia; a fundamental measure of the amount of matter in the object. Definitions of mass often seem circular because it is such a fundamental quantity that it is hard to define in terms of something else." Isn't that the truth. Unofficially, Mass is "how much stuff there is". It can be quantified in a couple of ways. First, as mentioned in both of the definitions, it is a way to quantify inertia. If you have two objects of the same volume, but one is more massive, it will be harder to move, a lot harder to slow down, do more damage if it collides (i.e. more momentum), etc. Next, it is a cause for gravitational attraction. Mass attracts more mass. Next, we have Newton's Second Law: F = ma. If you have an object, which will have constant mass, the more force you give, the more acceleration you will get. So mass defines how much force you need to generate acceleration. Lastly, mass is a quantifiable measure of energy, think about Einstein's E = mc^2. c^2 is the speed of light squared it will always be the same, so mass, by this equation is the same as energy, or energy waiting to be released. One thing that most people confuse is that mass is the same thing as weight. This makes sense since we're on earth, and the earth is a monster constant mass next to us, so gravity is constant. So, the more massive something is, the more weight it has on Earth. However, the same mass on the moon will have 1/6 of the weight. Weight is equal to mass times gravity, so on Earth, they are totally linearly related. However, mass and weight are separate quantities, so be careful, you cannot use those words interchangably!Killer Resource: The way that various atoms are created: This periodic table is color coded to show how different elements are created, either via the Big Bang, Supernova, Man-Made, Large Star, Small Star, and/or Cosmic Rays.

Dig Deeper at pwnphysics.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 28 January 1613, the planet of Neptune may have been discovered, unbeknownst to its observer, Galileo Galilei. According to his observation records of that night, he noticed what he believed to be a star, very close to the planet Jupiter. This star does not match any current records. For three nights it was observed, and then had moved to an unobservable part of the sky. Neptune remained under the radar for another 233 years, until it was formally discovered as a planet by Urban Le Vernier, who predicted its existence using only mathematics, and by Johann Galle, an observational astronomer who actually first found it in 1846. Neptune's year is 164.8 earth years long, meaning that since we've first discovered it has only gone around the sun once (2011!) plus a very little bit.  Word of the Day: Inertia can be embodied by the following phrase: "A body at rests remains at rest." Inertia is an objects opposition to motion, or its desire to remain inert. It is also responsible for "A body in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force" (courtesy Isaac Newton). So, if we have an object "at rest" or not moving, we will not see this object move unless something happens to it which would induce motion, such as a wind, push, or other action. And, if this motion were to occur in a deep space vacuum (we're going to ignore air resistance here), it would continue to move along with a constant velocity, until something were to stop it. These properties are referred to as inertia. When you get in your car, and finally turn on the highway, getting on the on ramp, starting at a presumable 0 mph, your car's engine must burn a considerable amount of gas to get us up to the 65mph speed limit, and what the engine is doing is overcoming the inertia of the car, or its desire to remain at its 0mph velocity. Once on the highway, we still need to have our foot on the gas, but we're burning considerably less gas. In a frictionless and air resistance less world, we wouldn't need to have our foot on the gas at all, we'd just cruise along forever, although braking would be something of an issue. On the highway, the only energy expenditure of gas is to overcome the resistive friction of your tires on the road, because once in motion, the car's inertia wants to keep it going at whatever speed you've set. Killer Resource: What if the moon was replaced by various planets visualized.

Dig Deeper at pwnphysics.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 27 January 1936, Happy Birthday to Samuel C. C. Ting, a Nobel Prize winning physicist for discovering the J/ψ (J/Psi) meson or psion. He turns 80 today. Happy Birthday! He is currently the lead researcher on the 1.5 billion dollar alpha magnetic spectrometer research experiment aboard the ISS (Word of the day!) It is working to detect specific cosmic rays in search of Dark Matter [Source].Word of the Day: Meson- a particle composed of one quark and one antiquark. These can be comprised of their own "species", i.e. a Charm and Anticharm, aka "Charmonium", or different "species" such as in a Pion, which consists of an up and anti-down quark. Mesons which consist of the same type of quark and antiquark, such as Charmonium, are referred to as Quarkonium. Now, one thing that I thought about when I was researching about this, most particle/antiparticle pairs annihilate, releasing energy. How is it that these particles exist? Well, the short answer is that the lifetimes of something even like a pion, which is made of an up/antidown pair, lives for something on the order of 1e-8 seconds, or 10 nanoseconds. Protons and Neutrons are not mesons, since they are not made of 2 quarks, but rather 3 quarks, none of which are quark/antiquark pairs. Killer Resource: Jupiter is sometimes referred to as a failed star.

Dig Deeper at pwnphysics.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 26 January 1911 Happy Birthday to Polykarp Kusch, Nobel Prize winning physicist who shared the prize in 1955 with Willis Lamb. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1955 was divided equally between Willis Eugene Lamb "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum" and Polykarp Kusch "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron"[Source].Word of the Day: Magnetic Moment is related to the amount of torque generated by an object in the presence of a magnetic field. If you're a totally electrically neutral object, you're moment is 0. Neutrons, for example, will travel through a magnetic field as if it wasn't there. Now, if you're something like an electron, or a planet, or a charged atom, or a current carrying wire, the situation is slightly different. It can be thought of as a vector, or an arrow of a specified length and direction, for any given item that you are considering. For the extremely small, like electrons studied by our birthday boy Polykarp, the magnetic moment is dependent on the particle's spin and some constants, notably planck's constant, and the Bohr Magneton (maybe future words of the day? tweets please). For something like a current carrying wire, it's related to the diameter of the wire, as well as the current travelling through the wire. This magnetic moment is important because the overall magnetic properties of a material are highly dependant on the magnetic moments of their component atoms. Anything that you see in everyday life that deals with magnets, i.e. the ones that stick to your fridge, the ones in your speakers, etc. are behaving this way because of the component magnetic moments of the atoms which make up the materials (mostly ferromagnetism.) Killer Resource: Motion of a Charged Particle in a Magnetic Field.

Dig Deeper at pwnphysics.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 25 January 1839, Michael Faraday announces the first photographs have been taken during his Friday Night Discourse meeting. They were referred to as "Photogenic Drawings" and a paper revealing more about this process was published in the following weeks. Word of the day- A Wave Function is a quantum mechanical property of everything that exists. A wave function of an object is the probability finding that object at any particular place at any particular time. If you calculate the wave function over all of space, the value will be 1, since there is a 100% chance of finding everything that exits somewhere in space at any given time. The wave function is critical in Schrodinger's Equation, which are most student's first introduction to the concept of a wave function. It is most usually described with the Greek letter phi. Let's go back to the word of the day a few days ago: electron. An electron which is in an atom's orbit has its wave function distributed around the atom, known as the electron shell. However, an electron's wave function is stretched across all space, and there is a very small chance of finding it somewhere else for a brief moment. Electrons "take advantage" of this wave function in a phenomenon known as tunneling. Consider it in this way. There is an electron on one side of a wall. There is a very small part of the electron's wave function on the other side of the wall, meaning there is a small small small chance that the electron's position will be on the other side of this wall. If the electron is to crash into the wall over and over, billions, and billions of times, sooner or later this probability becomes more of a certainty, and the electron is able to "tunnel" to the other side of the wall.  Killer Resource: Astronomy Picture Of The Day App.

On this day in physics: 24 January 1947, Happy Birthday to Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical and popular physicist. I first heard of Michio reading his book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension. Michio has been making his way into more into the media spotlight, currently making him maybe the most popular scientists outside of Stephen Hawking and Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Word of the day- ISS is an acronym (Like FBI, KFC, NATO, or VIP) for the International Space Station. Its first component was placed in orbit in 1998 and is referred to as a "habitable artificial satellite". It is the largest artificial body in orbit and can be often seen with the naked eye from the surface of the planet (more on this in a minute). It has been continuously inhabited since November 2000. It provides a place for long term experiments to take place, which can be monitored by human researchers. Crew stay on board the space station for continues 6 month increments, and then rotate out with other researchers from U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe. The gravity in th ISS is actually not much less than that of earth, but because it is orbiting, and in a perpetual state of freewill, there is a perceived weightlessness. It stays somewhere between 205 and 270 miles above the earth and maintains this height with something known as "reboot maneuvers", or else it would eventually come crashing back to Earth. It makes roughly 15 orbits a day.

Killer Resource: ISS Finder App- Find every single change to see the ISS across your view of the sky.

Dig deeper at pwnphysics.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 23 January 1907, Happy Birthday to Hideki Yukawa, 1949's Nobel Prize winner who predicted the existence of the pion. He won the nobel prize for "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces". [Source.] [Source.]Word of the day- Wave-Particle Duality is an embedded property of everything that exists. Every atom, quark, photon, car, person, planet, galaxy, can partially be described as a particle, and partially described as a wave. Louis de Broglie was able to describe the wave-like property of matter as follows: lambda = h/p, where lambda is the wavelength, h is Planck's Constant (6.626 × 10−34 J seconds), and p is the particle's momentum. So how come if everything has a wave-like part, we're not oscillating all over the place? The answer lies with this de Broglie wavelength. When you consider something as large as a fly, or even as large as a person, the wave-like part is so small it is simply unnoticeable. However, when you're considering something the size of an electron, this becomes much more noticeable. The wavelength of a 0.511 MeV electron is roughly 1.23 nm. Still very small, but these wavelengths are now on the same scale as the particle to which it is associated. By comparison, "A 50-kg (~110-lb) person walking at a speed of about 2 m/s would have a deBroglie wavelength of 6.63x10-36 m." [Source].Killer Resource: An article where the particle and wave properties of light are imaged for the first time. (WIRED MAGAZINE)

Dig Deeper at pwnphysics.blogspot.comOn this day in physics: 22 January 1997, Lottie Williams becomes the first person to cross paths with a piece of falling space-vehicle debris. On a walk at 3 a.m. in Tulsa, OK (What??) she sees overhead what she believes to be a meteor, a bright glowing object in the sky. Some time later she gets struck in the shoulder by a six-inch piece of metal. It is believed to be the debris of a Delta II rocket which had burned up in Earth's atmosphere earlier that night. [Source.]Word of the day- Electron- A fundamental particle, meaning that it does not break down into any other particles. It is one of three types of particles which makes up all atoms of matter: Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. As stated before, whereas protons and neutrons are made up of up and down quarks, electrons do not break down. They can be modeled as "orbiting" the protons and neutrons, which make up the nucleus of the atom. The "distance" of the electron's orbit can be thought of as follows: If an electron was to "orbit" circularly around the very highest seats of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a quarter on the 50 yard line. We know very well in 2016 that electron's don't actually orbit the nucleus of an atom, the way the earth orbits the sun. Instead, electrons don't really have a definite position of any sort. Rather, they have "probability densities", places where they are most likely to be, were you to measure their position. Hydrogen has a single electron orbiting a single proton. This makes the overall charge of the atom neutral, because the electron's charge exactly opposes the charge of a proton. As we look at atoms with more and more protons, generally we find atoms with more and more electrons. These electrons all orbit the nucleus, but the shape of the probability densities changes based on how many electrons there are. They actually group together in clusters with different "radiuses" and shapes of their probability densities. These are called shells. Killer Resource: Hydrogen Atom Orbitals. Very excellent poster of the the different electron orbitals, or "shells".