Velociraptor42

For what it's worth, you have my full and total agreement.

I heard something about 200 people signing up for a trip to the moon with no return...?

Source For those of you not constantly checking up on astrophysics and stuff like that (not a common habit of most people), the cosmic web is a construct that binds together the majority of the universe that has been long theorized, but never imaged. Until now, that is. The cosmic web is made up of around 84% dark matter, which is why it is so difficult to find and photograph. As you could imagine, dark matter is invisible to us and any instruments we have except for its interactions via gravity. So the fact that this nearby quasar lights up the gas enough to show this filament is completely unheard of and incredible. The two images to the right are simulations including both gas and dark matter, and as you can see the recorded image to the left very closely matches the zoomed in image on the lower right. Which means that the researchers and scientists that theorized this were EXTREMELY accurate. Kudos to them.

First, as usual, watch this video: (easter egg: look for the Doctor Who reference at 5:30) Yes, that is the entire history and future of everything in seven minutes. Yes, that is kind of scary. But the inevitable heat death of the universe is, well, exactly that. Inevitable. Luckily, we will all be loooooooong dead before then, if that makes you feel any better. Actually I think I just made that worse. Oops. Anyways, this brings up the interesting nature of time, and our lack of ability to travel through it. Well, we can time travel, at a rate of exactly one second per second. Pretty lame, and slightly asinine of me to bring up, but it proves the point that for us, time moves only in one direction and at a set speed. I know I've talked about the nature of time multiple times (ha. haha. punny.) but it's just very intriguing. We seem to think we're so important, dividing up our time into smaller time units and carefully planning all of it out, when compared to all of time it's a speck. Yet, our measuring of time as relatively constant (not getting into special relativity of course) is what makes everything measurable in physics. Well, time for me to end this post. Cricket's begging to sit on the laptop, and I need to stop making horrific puns.

Yes, this is totally a physics post, and not just an excuse to post this gif This is Waffles the cat. And his job is to remind us all about winter driving. As any of us who have been behind the wheel on a snowy day know, the coefficient of friction between regular tires and the snowy road is veeeery low. Dangerously so. Just around .15, compared to around .7 on a dry road. Even with snow tires, it can still be hard to stop due to low coefficients of both rolling and sliding friction. Moral of the story: low coefficients of friction mean that frictional force will be lower, meaning that it will take longer to break. I also wanted an excuse to post a video of a cat failing in slow motion, I'll be honest.

Yup, that's a pretty terrifying title. And yes, that's exactly what this is. Tell me that I could name this anything different. Biomedical Engineering at it's most amusingly accessible right here! So, what's physics-y about this? Apart from, you know, everything in existence being physics. First of all: magnets. These things are "remote controlled" by magnets and magnetic fields. You know, those things that you can't see but you have to contort your hands to figure out which direction they go and all that. I swear if any of you ask "magnets, how do they work?" you'll be deported off my blog Also, since physics is all about movement, I should point out that the method of propulsion of this spermbot (yess I get to use that in real speech/typing!) is ingenious. Rather than use something that would have trouble maneuvering within the human body or which would create waste products, they used human cells that can easily propel themselves throughout viscous fluids (gross yes but needed) and that would have no trouble with the immune system. Altogether, another useful product of BME

Not quite a physics post, but something really cool that came out recently Now you know what it's like to see through the eyes of five different animals! I'm still waiting to see a mantis shrimp though... 8 color receptors compared to our three? How does that even work? Where do they fit in the electromagnetic spectrum? Extra colors that is. Maybe within our lifetimes we'll be able to find out.

I think that the way this was originally sent to me conveys the meaning better than any rewording I could do: Equation of orbit of a small mass around a much greater mass Equation of human awe of earth orbit So now that you've watched it, you should have a greater appreciation of gravitational forces and centripetal ones, the whole Fc=mv2/r and Fg=GM1M2/r2 and such. Or maybe you just affirmed that space is really freaking awesome, and a lot prettier than anyone gives it credit for. I'll take that too. Earth looks pretty cool from up there.

Hooray for a cool many physics applications! Alright, so if you can't quite tell, these crazy NASA engineers built a complex rig in order to record cool things at 7,200 FPS for the hell of it. Though we're not doing optics this year, they had to do a lot of considering with that, buying special mirrors that lose less light with each reflection than your standard hardware store mirror. Sure, warping occurred, and the lens they used made the objects look farther away, but just look at how awesome it is. Although you should have already done that by this point. Apart from the camera rig itself, the shots themselves are (like everything else in the world) filled with physics. Watch the inertia of the water as it falls straight down despite the balloon around it being dragged sideways. See the conservation of momentum in action. And most importantly, watch two cool guys shoot things with slingshots and have the video go in a circle. Because science is cool. Source

Dear Mr. Fullerton: I am not crazy for laughing so hard during class about this. It's real. Sincerely, velociraptor Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3186#comic

If you guys happen to look at nearly anything nerdy, you have likely seen the original video for this or a reaction to it. In essence, a came out trying to prove to the general public how 1+2+3+4+... all the way to infinity equals -1/12. You know the drill. Go on, watch it. I'll still be here when you get back. Or at least my post will "So what?" you're probably asking. Or maybe you do know the so what, who am I to judge? Anyway. If you don't believe the video and think it's all stupid, ponder this. Euler, great mathematician, proved it for all real numbers. Reimann did it again for complex numbers. A third mathematician did it again completely separately. The incredible part happens when the physics comes into play. Whether you believe it or not, this sum is essential to Quantum Electrodynamics. And when something is used in the most correct theory in history (not the best wording, but best proven, etc), you can assume that it itself is pretty damn accurate. It only seems fair that a confusing equation that makes no sense yet perfect sense is used in proving a theory that makes even less sense yet describes the world perfectly. Psst. If you're interested in further proof, read this blog post from physicsbuzz

I remember creating a huge argument for funding of NASA last year in... some class or other... and astounding everyone with lists of what NASA has created. Though I think those of us perusing a physics site already appreciate what it's done

Despite my last entry clearly dictating that I have no idea what's going on when it comes to fluid dynamics, here I go again. This time, it's droplets of water and propylene glycol and how they interact when on a glass surface. First, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Wx2PHIYGI. Now. Okay, watched it? No? Then the rest of this won't make much sense and will be pretty boring. I promise it's cool, and the music's pretty sweet too. Now that you've all either watched it or closed out of this post due to my incessant nagging, let's try to explain what's going on. The different types of droplets create a film on the glass that attracts other droplets due to surface tension differences. Once they actually meet, things happen and one droplet ends up "chasing" another. Add hydrophobic markers to the mix and a few curious scientists with a cool camera and a lot of awesome effects can be achieved. Read a much better explanation of what's going on (not including the one in the video itself) by people who actually understand it here.

We all know the standard shape of a mushroom cloud It looks something like this: The question is why do they look like this? Well, as can be seen in this post, the less in-depth answer is a simple difference in density between the rapidly expanding gases and the rest of the air. However, this is a physics blog after all, and so I'm going to get into the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. In the most understandable terms (though to be quite honest after reading up on it I still don't really understand it), one fluid accelerates into another of a different density and convection magic and PHYSICS happen and things like supernovae and mushroom clouds happen. I don't really get fluids. Gizmodo explains it better than me. But it's pretty cool. Woo.

Fun fact: anything is a boomerang if you throw it straight up

Recently I've come across a physics paper describing a certain way of time travel using the awesome theme of Doctor Who (as well as a Portal reference) to explain things. Explaining the name is something I'd rather leave to the creators of this theory though, so here's that: The name refers to a bubble (a Domain) which moves through the spacetime at speeds greater than the speed of light (it is Achronal); it moves backwards in time (Retrograde to the arrow of time outside the bubble); and finally, it can transport massive objects (it is Traversable) So, what exactly is this TARDIS? Glad you asked. And if you didn't, well, too bad. You're going to hear about it anyway. Or just leave this post. Either way. TARDIS. So. Basically. A light cone is a boundary that shows you what and where can be traveled. If a point source of light were turned on and you watched its 2D passage through time, it would create a cone. this probably explains it a bit better than I can Anything outside of the light cone would therefore have to move faster than light. Past the event horizon of a black hold, light cones all point inward and so no matter can escape without going faster than light and therefore backwards in time. Well, what if you could bend the direction these cones, and time itself? By creating a circular path (which would require faster than light particles - whoops), you could go back in time, then accelerate forward, even going sideways in time, as long as you ended in the same place you started. Kind of like a loop. However, the fun parts happen when you splice these achronal loops. You could end up in a point in time just prior to when you first started traveling, or if you cut a "donut" (that's what they seem like to me) in half, you could stay moving backwards in time, essentially becoming antimatter (note: look up single electron universe theory if this seems interesting) As always, the source explains it much better than I, along with diagrams and other cool stuff and even fandoms.

Everyone loves Ted Ed. And everyone loves time travel. So what happens when you put them together? Now, aside from the wonderful wonderful fact that the TARDIS makes a few appearances (making a certain Whovian very happy) as well as the DeLorean, what's actually going on? How does it relate to "time travel"? Well, the velociraptor is here to explain this to you. The only constant in the entire universe that is consistently constant (yes that's a sentence) is the speed of light in a vacuum (about 3e8 m/s). Therefore, if someone is moving whilst holding a flashlight, the velocities don't add up or subtract like they usually would. Instead, it is time that is warped. The greater the velocity of the mass, the more time is dilated for it. Essentially, if it was possible to have enough energy to accelerate an object to close to the speed of light (let's say 99.99%), relative to the inertial frame of say, the earth, the object could pass what was 10 years to itself and travel thousands of years into the future of the earth. Einstein explains this better than me. But there's some Theory of Special Relativity for ya

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music." —Betrand Russell Physics is, in essence, applied mathematics. It's how math applies to life, and the results thereof. And math is... beauty? That's not how one would usually think. However, there is a certain beauty to math and how everything resolves itself when it is applied. The way tree growth and snowflakes resemble fractals, light waves follow the simplicity of a sine curve, a top wobbles back and forth, light bends around a magnifying glass - heck, we learned some of these last year in physics B. But while analyzing the theory behind it, how many of us stepped back to think of the beauty? However I explain it, watching it makes it better.

Optical illusions are awesome. That cannot be debated. Ever. Some of them are used to be thought provoking, street art that looks one way from one viewpoint and completely different if you move. Some are just to screw with your brain, like many of Escher's famous pieces. This one is used to make you want to buy Ray Bans. No, seriously. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhuUhaNIWLQ. So why do these things look 3D to us? Courtesy of our lovely brains, which like to detect patterns where there aren't any. Some awesome drawings with shading intact, stretching the perspective so that it would match the camera angles, and boom, things look like they pop off the table. Eyes may not be that easy to trick, but the brain interpreting the images is. After all, if we're used to things sitting on tables, why wouldn't the baseball be just another object on a table? Advertising tells us sunglasses are the only thing that is real. Get ready for the paper apocalypse, everyone.

I'm likin' the mustache ones

With the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics for 2013 being given to those who worked on the discovery of the Higgs Boson, it only follows that the physics blog should have something on that. This slideshow does a wonderful wonderful job of making the Higgs field relatable for the layman and explaining why it took so long to say why there is a "possible" discovery. Namely, it's impossible to find a Higgs boson straight out, but rather they have to search for its predicted decay pattern among billions of collisions. As for the nickname "God Particle", that was a joke among physicists because it was so important to the standard model yet so elusive and near impossible to find. Basically, as much as I could go on explaining the history of the search and exactly what the Higgs Field does, the slideshow does a much better job with pretty animations too. So look at it. The velociraptor says so.

The center of a black hole is called a singularity and theoretically have infinite mass in an infinitely small. The laws of physics also break down at that point so physicists can't quite explain what happens... One of my favorite parts about black holes are that the term for what happens when you pass the event horizon and the closest part stretches an incredible amount more than the further parts is spaghettification. That's the actual physics term.

They use tachyons as the explanation for 'impossible' things in Star Trek and I think that's where the name came from. Also I read a book called Physics of the Impossible (by Michio Kaku) and it proposed a theory that tachyons were actually present during inflation and caused the rapid, well, inflation before dissipating into another universe. Food for thought I suppose.

Just like pretty much everything I find interesting

This isn't going to be a full out physics post, but this is just astounding. Look at this. This used to be a living bird. It accidentally flew into this mirror-like lake with a pH of 9.5-10 and a high soda and salt content that caused it to calcify. Just look. Nature is scary, guys. Image credit goes to Nick Brandt, article here