A song involving special relativity. In the words of the composer, Brian May,
“It’s a science fiction story. It’s the story about someone who goes away and leaves his family and… because of the time dilation effect, when you go away, the people on Earth have aged a lot more than he has when he comes home. He’s aged a year and they’ve aged 100 years. So, instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter and he can see his wife in his daughter…”
Snuggle-worthy science
Buck the summertime tropical/nautical pillow trend and indulge your inner science dork by opting for Gus*Modern’s new organic cotton graphic pillow line featuring Venn diagrams, molecules and magnets.
Artwork inspired by quantum mechanics by Julian Voss-Andreae. The description of Night Path:
Night Path was inspired by Richard Feynman’s path integral approach to quantum mechanics. Feynman calculated quantum mechanical probabilities by adding up all the possible paths between two points. He did this by ‘slicing up’ time and filling each slice with a continuum of paths. The path in a quantum mechanical sense only exists if it is not observable; it is really a tendency and not an actual path. When modeling Feynman’s approach on the computer only a small sampling of random paths in the vicinity of the classical trajectory are calculated. For this piece, I started with a parabola, the classical trajectory of a thrown object, and generated random paths around it. In this piece, I am interested in connecting the idea of the quantum mechanical path to the image of a meteor, a rock falling through the dark of the night, often believed to be connected to a meaningful event.
Click here to see more artwork and read the descriptions of the above artwork.
Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa
Trial and error.
What artist has not at some point resorted to “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better.“?
You might say that, in light of Darwin’s model of natural selection, nature itself does the same: make a genetic mutation or two, or a billion, and see what works.
Swedish programmer Roger Alsing has created a playful experiment in “genetic programming” applied to image making, in which he wrote a small program for rendering 50 translucent polygons into an image area….
genetic algorithms are BAMF
theoretically, given enough precision and accuracy and computational time, could you reverse-engineer the conditions of the big bang/early universe such that the end of the simulation is representative of today’s universe?
Good question. I would think not, given quantum fluctuations. This is similar to the question: given a monkey with a typewriter and infinite time, will they produce the complete works of Shakespeare? There are programs to simulate this (though obviously not infinite), and here’s what they’ve managed to produce so far:
One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on August 4, 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the “monkeys” typed, “VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t” The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”. Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from “Timon of Athens”, 17 from “Troilus and Cressida”, and 16 from “Richard II”.
A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took “2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years” to reach 24 matching characters:
- RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r”5j5&?OWTY Z0d…
Because the universe is guided by randomness at the quantum level, and because we don’t have infinite time or infinite computing power, it would be virtually impossible to recreate the universe today from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. My guess is that a few slightly different quantum fluctuations at the beginning of the universe would drastically change the future.
Beautiful snowflake photography by Kenneth G. Libbrecht at snowcrystals.com. Check out the website to see more photos, learn about the physics of snowflakes and buy snowflake books.
My twin is ancient
Tricked into staying at home
While I toured the stars
A quantum kitty
By any other measure
Would purr as strangely.
Creationist rant:
“My ancestors were not apes!”
Rave on, monkey-boy.
A stone falls to earth
Matter warps space around it
Albert described it
Droning on and on
Talking about the atom
What an awful Bohr.
Want to submit your own science haiku? Click here.
C60 islands.
molecules do not like salt;
strange shapes resulting.
-“Buckminsterfullerene on KBr studied by High Resolution NC-AFM: Molecular nucleation and growth on an insulator”
Peaks in the spectrum!
Is that spin transfer I see?
No! Blasted cellphone!
-Paper, in preparation, on GHz noise in TMR junctions
Supernovae Flame
Miles-per-second fire
Slows down when bended
-“The Response of Model and Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flames to Curvature and Stretch”
Waves crashing, cold spray,
Churning the hot rain inwards,
On ember of star.
-“On Heavy Element Enrichment in Classical Novae”
Chlorite, iodide.
What makes such oscillations?
Perturb, gauge response.
-“Experiments and theory toward the determination of bifurcation features and the deduction of the mechanism of the oscillatory chlorite-iodide reaction”
Epsilon-Delta
the limit as x nears y
Joys of basic math!
-“On basic (higher-level) math”
