Physics Buzz

I don't know if all you PhysicsBuzz readers at home know this, but today's the 35th anniversary of the first flight of the Concorde. No, not the world famous folk duo from New Zealand ; the fleet of supersonic commercial airplanes that crisscrossed the globe for 27 years. On January 21, 1976, the first paying passengers took a trip on a jet that could travel faster than the speed of sound from London England to Bahrain. These planes were fast, traveling twice the speed of sound . A flight from New York to Paris would only take a Concorde about three and a half hours, a far cry from the typical eight hours it takes most jets. However there was a downside; the sonic booms that come with faster than sound travel. Because of these booms, the Concorde originally had trouble coming to the United States. At first Congress banned them because of worries over sonic booms, and then once the national ban was lifted, individual airports like JFK in New York barred the sleek planes from

Its been 400 years since the birth of the telescope - at least according to some scientists and historians. Nonetheless, the Netherlands is celebrating (aka conferencing) to mark 4 centuries of one of the most influential inventions ever. Based on several sources, it is believed that on October 2 1608, eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey, originally born in Germany, filed a patent application in Netherlands (or in Belgium, no one is certain) for a device he called a "kijiker" or looker. The story isn't without polemic. Some claim that Lipphershey's neighbor and fellow eyeglass maker Zacharias Janssen invented an instrument capable of viewing far-off objects up close. Despite the open questions, all of the potential inventors resided in the Netherlands so this year the Dutch are taking credit for the telescope. In 1609, Galileo Galilei set about improving the telescope and was eventually able to gaze at the stars and moons. His observations offered proof that the Sun a