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Werner Heisenberg nearly failed his 1923 PhD oral because he could not explain the resolving power of a microscope—or even how a storage battery worked. Experimental physicist Wilhelm Wien wanted to fail him, but his mentor Arnold Sommerfeld defended his brilliance as a theorist, securing a mediocre cum laude—four years before Heisenberg used a microscope thought experiment to explain the uncertainty principle.
1+ week, 14+ hour ago (921+ words) Heisenberg's near-failed 1923 doctorate exposed his weakness in experimental physics, then the microscope returned in his 1927 explanation of quantum uncertainty....
Order from disorder: do we need a new law of physics?
1+ week, 5+ day ago (473+ words) A radical proposal that evolutionary pressures apply to atoms as much as animals should provoke scientific debate....
A Science Without a Unit of Measurement
2+ week, 3+ day ago (858+ words) How modern spirituality borrowed the language of science while abandoning the standards that make science possible Physics has carried us to the edge of the …...
Art helped this astrophysicist make sense of math
2+ week, 5+ day ago (1427+ words) Theoretical physicist Ronald Gamble uses math to study how black holes warp the shape of spacetime. Sometimes, he pictures himself as Marvel’s Iron Man. “I feel like Tony Stark every other day.” When Ronald Gamble first learned about black holes…...
What exactly is modified about a modified Bessel function?
2+ week, 6+ day ago (509+ words) Special functions often have arcane names that not very helpful without some context. The previous post goes into some reasons for this. This post will expand on a point at the end of the post about “modified” functions. Things are…...
An Oxford Physicist Discovered Particles Doing the Impossible. It Could Finally Solve the Quantum Gravity Mystery.
3+ week, 1+ day ago (147+ words) And lead to an understanding of how gravity and quantum mechanics can play together in the same universe. But is that really what happens? However, Hawking’s logic suggests that as evaporation continues beyond this point, still further entanglement must be…...
Seven writers, four physicists, one room, lots of plushies – Physics World
3+ week, 3+ day ago (1318+ words) Robert P Crease attends an unusual workshop that sought to moderate the sometimes infuriating discord between physicists and journalists How many times have you wanted to throttle a journalist? Do you ever get incensed about articles, podcasts or videos that…...
Roman to Integer — The Simple Trick Behind Roman Numerals
3+ week, 5+ day ago (164+ words) Roman numerals may look complicated at first, but there is actually a beautiful pattern hiding behind them. Once you understand one simple …...
Proportion of 1s in a Hadamard matrix
3+ week, 6+ day ago (181+ words) The first post in the recent series of posts on Hadamard matrices describes a way of constructing new Hadamard matrices from two other Hadamard matrices by taking their Kronecker product. Starting with a Hadamard matrix H0 and a Hadamard matrix G,…...
The Side Project That Won a Nobel Prize 58 Years Later
3+ week, 6+ day ago (32+ words) A CERN physicist’s personal hobby turned a philosophical argument nobody thought could ever be settled into a number you could actually …...