Physics Buzz

Every year, over 3 million visitors pass through the doors of the United States Capitol building. For many, a highlight of this historic building is the Rotunda, the enormous chamber underneath the building's iconic dome. The floor of the Rotunda is filled with statues of American notables and paintings depicting pivotal scenes in United States history—not to mention gawking tourists and their guides, along with the occasional Congressperson.

On a cold day in Holland last week, 12 of the top street artists in Europe took their places in front of a chain link fence. Each artist faced a 2x2-meter canvas, and the possibility of being the first street artist to experience zero gravity. Not actually in space, but the first to experience weightlessness on one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) parabolic flights—and to create art in that environment.

In the southwest corner of Washington DC, just across the river from the Pentagon, you'll find the unassuming entrance to one of the city's most fascinating places: ARTECHOUSE. Descend the seemingly endless staircase inside, and you'll emerge into a cavernous underground space where light and sound are twisted into dazzling, dynamic displays. This is Naked Eyes .

Imagine walking into a dark, abandoned, stone church, the air a little damp and the floor echoing as you walk into the chapel, towards a glowing orb sitting on the floor. In response to your approach, to your movement and to the heat you radiate, hundreds of individual metallic petals bend forward letting light and soft sound stream out. Lotus Dome is the newest installment of the Lotus series by Dutch architect and tech artist Daan Roosegaard. As the principal behind Studio Roosegaard , a collaborative lab of engineers, artists, and designers, Roosegaard blends nature and technology to make architecture dynamic. His work spans interactive fields of light, sustainable dance floors and energy-generating highways . LOTUS DOME hundreds of high-tech flowers by Studio Roosegaarde from Daan Roosegaarde on Vimeo .

Hanukkah ends this Friday, which means you have to come up with (counting tonight) four more nights' worth of terrific presents to bestow upon your favorite nerd. In case you're running out of ideas in a hurry, here are a few on my geeky wish list. Nerdy Shirts from Threadless.com Threadless is my all-time favorite source for t-shirts. (Besides the local Goodwill, that is.) Artists (many of them amateurs) submit designs, then potential buyers vote on the ones they'd like to see made into T-shirts. Threadless prints a limited amount of each design, safeguarding your independent style from cramping. Combining the geek uniform with social networking, Threadless is the ultimate venue for nerdy shirts. For the cable-wielding, wire-soldering AV nerd, or the person whose back, you suspect, looks like this anyways: Audio-Visual Nerd shirt from Threadless.com For the person who asks you to fix their blender because you're majoring in physics: Dear Scientists: This was

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluefootedbooby/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 This news story from the BBC website almost sounds like a faux-academic fantasy written by Jose Luis Borges: physicists at Umea University in Sweden, using statistical analysis on the works of three classic authors, conclude that every author has a unique linguistic fingerprint. The BBC writes: The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue. This happens to be the same team whose insights into traffic jams we highlighted on the blog earlier this year. The team seems fond of using methods from physics to make observations on systems you wouldn't normally think of being in a physicists' realm, including fads and internet dating. This time they took the complete opuses of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and D.H. Laurence to statistical task. The paper is free to view here. The BBC writes that the graph of the number of u

If you want to learn about science, you can pick from a wide variety of media. If you're a student, you read a textbook; if you're a scientist trying to keep up with the latest research, you read journal articles and attend conferences. If you're an interested layman, you pick up popular science books and magazines, browse the Web, and watch NOVA. And if none of that does it for you, well, there's always interpretive dance. The above video is the work of Theatre Adhoc , a Dutch performance art group. Although it's hard to tell (especially if you don't speak Dutch), the movements portray the work of 17th century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, who discovered the phases and changes in the shape of the rings of Saturn, patented the first pendulum clock, and developed an early wave theory of light. The performance was in honor of the new Huygens building at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Here's another interpretive dance project tha

Fans of opera and science rejoice: celebrated modern composer Phillip Glass has written an opera on Johannes Kepler, the 17th century German astronomer who made a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. New Scientist points out the good timing of this premiere: this year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of Astronomia Nova , in which Kepler revealed his first two laws of planetary motion : that planets move in an ellipse, with the sun at one focus, and that a planet always sweeps out the same amount of area of the ellipse in a given time, no matter where it is on its elliptical path. These laws appear in the libretto, which was largely culled from Kepler's writings, although a critic at the New York Times complains that this makes for some dry moments: When, for example, Kepler asks, "Is it cold that gives snow its starry shape?" and then ponders the question from several angles, or when he explains the scientific method ("First,

The words Philosophical Transactions , which happen to form the title of the journal published by the Royal Society , may not ring a bell for the modern science enthusiast, but the hoary pages of this prestigious journal witnessed the birth of physics as we know it. When Newton discovered that white light was actually a combination of different wavelengths, he wrote a letter to the Royal Society vividly describing his experience: "...In the beginning of the year 1666...I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme, to try therewith the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the Suns light, I placed my Prisme at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertisement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby." The account was published in 1672, twelve years after the Royal Society

James Kakalios knows that he will be forever linked to the physics of Spiderman. When he started teaching a freshman seminar class in 2001 based on the physics of superheroes, he had little inkling that it would soon lead to a whole series of popular lectures, a popular book , and even a gig consulting on a major Hollywood motion picture. He jokes frequently that even if he were to win three Nobel Prizes, the photo of him surrounded by action figures would be his legacy. There is of course more to Kakalios than caped crusaders and comic books. In addition to teaching and directing undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota, he is also a condensed matter experimentalist. His work in disordered systems extends from the properties of amorphous semiconductors to neurological systems and the avalanche dynamics of sand. Kakalios’s book The Physics of Superheroes originated from an impulse and momentum problem he included on exams nearly fifteen years ago. He asked his students t

What started out as just another YouTube video may be competing with the bird-baguette-LHC urban legend for being the best way to get physics some attention from the public. In "A Glorious Dawn," composer John Boswell remixed clips from the vintage pop-science show Cosmos into a pretty darn catchy song. "A still more glorious dawn awaits—not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise, a morning with 400 billion suns, the rising of the Milky way." Thanks to AutoTune , the software that gave Cher's voice that robotic sound in "Believe" and helped Saturday Night Live comedians record their rap hit "I'm on a Boat," Carl Sagan sings his words of physical/philosophical wisdom. It turned out the video isn't just for the geeks—NPR gave it a nod on their music blog, Monitor Mix , and on November 9, the Telegraph reported that White Stripes frontman Jack White is releasing "A Glorious Dawn" on his label, Third Man Records . Great timing—Carl S

Nobu Toge's lens peers through the final magnets of the test accelerator. (Nobu Toge/KEK) For physicist Nobu Toge, a typical day of work at the Japanese high-energy physics lab KEK might involve attending a few meetings, calibrating a just-installed piece of equipment, or writing a report on the research's progress. But in the midst of it all, Toge might also pull out his always-ready camera and snap a photo of a gleaming piece of machinery, or a pair of technicians in bunny suits readying a component for testing. At the end of the day, reports and spreadsheets laid to rest, Toge will add the photos to the thousands he's taken on the job over the last seven or eight years. A high-energy physics laboratory might seem an unlikely muse for a photographer. But just a glance at a few of Toge's photos might convince you otherwise. His images of scientific equipment are explorations of shape, form, and color. When you peer through his lens, you might find yourself awed by

TONY CENICOLA/NEW YORK TIMES Three of Tom Stoppard's plays reveal a deep fascination with physics. When it comes to writing about science, playwright Tom Stoppard is in a genre all his own. Stoppard, whom you might know as the screenwriter for the movies Shakespeare in Love and Brazil , wrote three plays he called his "physics plays": Arcadia (1993), in which a group of modern academics try to piece together the life of a young girl in the early 19th century; Hapgood (1988), about the fictional head of a top British intelligence agency during the Cold War; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), in which Stoppard reimagines Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of its two least important characters. But the plays aren't science fiction or physics edutainment, nor do they portray events from the history of science or depend on science to drive the plot. Instead, Stoppard masterfully uses concepts from physics to ask deep existential questions

"Think Pods" at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyjd/ / CC BY-ND 2.0 The new Scottish parliament building was unveiled in 2004, some Scots were far from pleased. Some felt that the building's unusual design wasn't so much playful, creative, or forward-looking as embarrassing. "It looks like a baboon cage designed by a demented five-year-old," one told me. Some felt the complex's whimsical design insulted to the Scots' newly-minted representational government, which they'd lacked since 1707. Others, with typical Scottish levity, joked that the building's looks suited its inhabitants and purpose. It's understandable that Edinburgh natives, used to either Georgian pomp or medieval heft, found the Spanish-designed clash of stone, grass, cement, and wood somewhat out of place amid the ancient buildings of Edinburgh's Old Town. Angular slabs of cement echo the nearby crags of Arthur's Seat, Edi

If you're in New York City or within driving distance, you're in for a rare treat this week. Thursday is the opening night of the Imagine Science Film Festival , a two-week-long series of film screenings that celebrate science's artistic side. This is only the film festival's second year, but it's already attracted the attention of major sponsors. Last year the journal Nature co-sponsored the festival, and this year the American Association for the Advancement of Science , publisher of rival journal Science , has taken the helm. Maybe it's because of the festival's unique approach to the genre of science film. Unlike what you can expect to see on PBS NOVA or the Discovery Channel, these films aren't out to teach a science lesson. ISFF's founder, Alexis Gambis, says that it's the only science film festival that doesn't take the traditional approach. "There are a few other science film festivals around the world, but the films the

Nanoscientist Rich Robinson on The Secret Life of Scientists A child-prodigy medical researcher who loves to run. An engineer who practices back-flips in his spare time. A nanoscientist who takes soul-searching photographs. These are a few of the scientists profiled so far on the new NOVA Web series, "The Secret Life of Scientists." NOVA explores the different facets of each scientist's life, including their passions, their research, their experiences, and their opinions. The videos are short and minimalistic, and there are no hosts or voice-overs, keeping the viewer's attention on what the individual has to say. Every two weeks, the Secret Life team puts a new scientist under the microscope. When a scientist is profiled, viewers have a chance to submit questions and, after a couple of weeks, get some honest answers. The team's just getting started, but they already have a couple of great videos in the can. The idea behind it reminds me vaguely of a cer