Monthly Archives: March 2013

phenomena, Physics and Astronomy at Western Blog

Shower physics

Don’t worry, nothing too personal here; just an interesting phenomenon. We have a soap dispenser in the shower, which usually has white liquid soap in it. For some reason we bought clear liquid soap recently. To refill the dispenser I poured about 500 ml of clear soap on top of about 50 ml of white soap. This was the result, 24 hours or so later:

IMG_1086 IMG_1087 IMG_1089

Looks like the white soap is a little less dense so it’s slowly rising to the top, although I wonder if the action of the pump at the bottom may have also influenced the mixing. (Anyone with less rusty fluid dynamics want to comment?)

Amusingly, as an undergrad I had a co-op job at the Canadian Space Agency, where my project was to design an experiment to look at mixing of different-density fluids in microgravity! And the person I worked for was astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason, who is now at Western. Small world.

I’m off to buy some more opaque soap so I can do some more mixing experiments.

Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

Visit by Sun Kwok, Dean of Science at The University of Hong Kong

Sun Kwok, Dean of Science at The University of Hong KongI feel a little bit of affinity towards Sun Kwok, if only because I was growing up in Hamilton when he did his BSc in astronomy at McMaster University. Much later, at The University of Calgary, he was on physics and astronomy faculty, where a stone’s throw away, I trying to get my MSc degree in electrical engineering. He also writes books about really cool astronomy!

Now, Sun Kwok has paid us a visit as Dean of Science at The University of Hong Kong where he is radically restructuring the teaching programs. While on his visit here, he met with many science faculty members, as well as our Dean of Science, Charmaine Dean. He then gave a talk about the changes that are happening in Science at The University of Hong Kong.

[images from Sun Kwok’s visit to Western]

 

 

Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

ALMA inauguration

OK, our blog posting is a little behind. What can we say; it’s a busy time of year. But there is big news in longer-wavelength astronomy: the ALMA telescope had its official inauguration 10 days ago. It is not quite complete yet: the last 7 of 66 antennas are still being tested. But it is taking data and some science results have even appeared. Hooray!

The European Southern Observatory has a video (which seems to be mercifully free of speeches) if you want to know more.

Physics and Astronomy at Western What's Happening

Planck cosmology results are out

The big astrophysics news of the week is that the cosmology results from ESA’s Planck satellite have been released. According to the official ESA press release, they reveal “An Almost Perfect Universe“. (Clearly Planck can’t see the current state of my lawn, far from perfect). There has been lots of reaction, including in such unlikely places as The Economist, io9, and the Sheboygan Press. As usual, Andy Lawrence has a funny take, funnier if you know some of the people involved. Personally, I am left with 2 questions:

  • was organizing the simultaneous upload of more than 20 papers to arXiv more or less difficult than actually analyzing the data?
  • how many of the 4 “post-Planck data” papers now on arxiv (that’s pretty impressive, folks) will actually get published?