Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings. ~Rumi Although we don’t usually notice them, ultrafast pulsed lasers are all around us. They are keep time in the atomic clocks on GPS satellites. Metrologists and chemists use them to measure the properties of atoms and molecules. Astronomers use them to measure the color of light from distant stars. Particle physicists use them in supercollidors. Materials
April 2014
Physics / Quantum Mechanics / Science And Math
Quantum Field Theory in A Cavity
So I’m still mired in final exams–this time a final project for my quantum field theory course. The downside is that it will be yet another week before my next “real” post. The upside is that I still have a little something for you all this week. The above image shows part of what I’m working on for my project. Imagine that you make a square box of mirrors, and with some magic quantum tweezers, you put exactly fifty-one photons into your box. Light is a special oscillation in an electromagnetic field, which we usually describe classically. But if
Mathematics / Science And Math
Probability: Part 2 (Distributions)
Editors Note: This week, I’m busy with final exams here in Guelph, so my good friend Michael Schmidt has graciously agreed to do a guest post. Thanks, Mike! Hi everyone! Since last time I decided to talk about the basics of probability, I thought this time I would expand on that subject. In part 1, I discussed how to count different possible outcomes of random events and determine the likelihood of particular events. If you have not read that, or it’s been a while, you should read over Part 1. This method is great when where are relatively few possible
Uncategorized
Post Delayed
This week I’m in Savannah Georgia for the April APS meeting. So far, it’s been a blast! I met fellow blogger +Hamilton Carter, who writes at Copasetic Flow. If you’re interested in relativity or the history of physics, you should definitely check it out. He had a very nice talk on the history of special relativity, and he blogged about it here. And next week, I’ll be taking an exam. So for the next two weeks there may be no posts. To tide you over, I’ll put up a guest post by my good friend Michael Schmidt soon.