An interesting read from The Atlantic for anyone else tired of hearing about the State of the Union, Sen. Marco Rubio, or Christopher Jordan Dorner on what has turned out to be a rather slow news day.
Physics Nobel goes to Serge Haroche, David Wineland
BBC: This year’s Nobel prize in physics has been given to Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the US for their work with light and matter at the most fundamental level.
Haroche says he had been told he had won just 20 minutes before telling reporters, ‘I was lucky - I was in the street and passing near a bench, so I was able to sit down immediately.’
Photo: Serge Haroche (left) is based at the College de France and David Wineland is based at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology. (AFP/NIST)
Last weekend, 21 people received second and third-degree burns (we covered the biology of burns last week) at a motivational event put on by Tony Robbins. No, Mr. Robbins did not blow-torch their feet for daring to make eye contact. They took part in a “mind over matter” firewalking demonstration.
Now, burning your feet while walking over glowing hot coals sounds to me like “exactly what you would expect to happen.” Or, as my niece puts it: “That’s a bad decision, not an accident.” But there are some interesting physics behind successful firewalking.
Jennifer Ouellette has a fantastically detailed post all about it at SciAm:
“… when one walks on fire is that on each step the foot absorbs relatively little heat from the embers that are cooled, because they are poor conductors, that do not have much internal energy to transmit as heat, and further that the layer of cooled charcoal between the foot and the rest of the hot embers insulates them from the coals.”
Check out her post for more interesting research done into firewalking, and for goodness sake, don’t try this at home. But if you do, videotape it.
We’ll throw it up on YouTube tonight, Joe, scars and all.
The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real. … They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they’ve done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements.CERN spokesperson James Gillies • Talking about an oddball subatomic particle they’ve discovered that reportedly moves faster than the speed of light — which would break Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (you know, E=MC²). Excuse us while we forget everything we knew about physics (which was probably limited to that equation).
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