Wonderful and extraordinary creations by physicist/artist Theo Jansen.
Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter
When we were discussing plans for a new project last week, Physicist John Tisch introduced me to the very nice work of Markus Kayser.....
Larkin: on nature
First Sight
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Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
Tops
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Tops heel and yaw,
Sent newly spinning:
Squirm round the floor
At the beginning,
Then draw up
Like candle flames, till
They are soundless, asleep,
Moving, yet still.
So they run on,
Until, with a falter,
A flicker - soon gone -
Their pace starts to alter:
Heeling again
As if hopelessly tired
They wobble, and then
The poise we admired
Reels, clatters and sprawls,
Pathetically over.
- And what most appals
Is that tiny first shiver,
That stumble, whereby
We know beyond doubt
They have almost run out
And are starting to die.
Molecule Cooling - Optics Table
This beautiful optics table took two years to build. It exists in the physics department basement. Quite a few different colours (or energies) of laser light are required to cool a molecule due to the more complex energy level structures (compared with an atom) - resulting in this lovely spectacle. The molecules are cooled to temperatures colder than outer space of less than a mK by hitting them with carefully tuned photons of light that exactly match the quantum energy levels of the molecule taking into account the doppler effect.
Emmy Noether - Einstein's appreciation
Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician. She created one of the most beautiful and profound theories showing how our most fundamental conservation laws of energy, angular momentum, linear momentum and charge can be derived from corresponding symmetries. Here is Einstein's memorable and thought provoking tribute, published in the New York Times.
Emmy Noether
Professor Einstein Writes in Appreciation of a Fellow-Mathematician.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
The efforts of most human-beings are consumed in the struggle for their daily bread, but most of those who are, either through fortune or some special gift, relieved of this struggle are largely absorbed in further improving their worldly lot. Beneath the effort directed toward the accumulation of worldly goods lies all too frequently the illusion that this is the most substantial and desirable end to be achieved; but there is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling, thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors.
Within the past few days a distinguished mathematician, Professor Emmy Noether, formerly connected with the University of Göttingen and for the past two years at Bryn Mawr College, died in her fifty-third year. In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians. Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.
Born in a Jewish family distinguished for the love of learning, Emmy Noether, who, in spite of the efforts of the great Göttingen mathematician, Hilbert, never reached the academic standing due her in her own country, none the less surrounded herself with a group of students and investigators at Göttingen, who have already become distinguished as teachers and investigators. Her unselfish, significant work over a period of many years was rewarded by the new rulers of Germany with a dismissal, which cost her the means of maintaining her simple life and the opportunity to carry on her mathematical studies. Farsighted friends of science in this country were fortunately able to make such arrangements at Bryn Mawr College and at Princeton that she found in America up to the day of her death not only colleagues who esteemed her friendship but grateful pupils whose enthusiasm made her last years the happiest and perhaps the most fruitful of her entire career.
ALBERT EINSTEIN.
Princeton University, May 1, 1935.
[New York Times May 5, 1935]
The New York Times printed a recent article reminding us of this forgotten mathematician. Click on the image to read (and press <skip ad>).
Seeing into the atom
Visiting the London Science festival at UCL in early October, I met Gleb Lukicov who had created this beautiful experience for visitors - using a cheap hand held spectrascope they could see the spectral lines emitted by different gases. Each lamp contains a different element (cadmium, mercury, sodium.....) which produces its own unique spectral lines, like a fingerprint. The lines tell us about the atomic structure. Gleb is a young physicist and passionate science communicator.
