Veritasium: Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED. “The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.” (YouTube, 33:44min)
Category Archives: Physics
Austenite and Martensite
Have you ever heard of Nitinol? That is what NASA uses to build wheels for other planets.
Veritasium: How NASA reinvented the wheel. (YouTube, 25:33min) “NASA have made a wheel capable of withstanding tough Martian terrain, but just how indestructible is it?”
The material can also be used to make bullet-proof bike tires. No more punctures!
Goggle up – science is about to happen!
Smarter Every Day Episode 285: Prince Rupert’s Drop VS MOLTEN GLASS. Destin Sandlin visits glass artist Cal Breed who snaps a Prince Rupert’s Drop inside molten glass. There also is a playlist of seven videos at Smarter Every Day if you’d like to learn more about Prince Rupert’s Drops.
What does Gauß have to do with the nuclear arms race?
Veritasium: How An Algorithm Could Have Stopped The Nuclear Arms Race. (YouTube, 26:32min)
“The Fast Fourier Transform is used everywhere but it has a fascinating origin story that could have ended the nuclear arms race. […]
Thanks to Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown for his helpful feedback on the script. His great video on the Fourier Transform is here”
3Blue1Brown: But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction. (YouTube, 21min)
It blew my mind that Carl Friedrich Gauß found the discrete Fourier transform – 150 years earlier that Fourier.
Fourth State of Matter: Time Crystals
Physics Girl: BREAKING: New Phase of Matter. (YouTube, 15:34min) “What are time crystals? How do scientists make one on a quantum computer.”
See also these scientific papers:
Stanford News: Stanford physicists help create time crystals with quantum computers. “A team of researchers including ones from Stanford and Google have created and observed a new phase of matter, popularly known as a time crystal.” (Published November 30, 2021)
“In research published Nov. 30 in Nature, a team of scientists from Stanford University, Google Quantum AI, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and Oxford University detail their creation of a time crystal using Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware.
“The big picture is that we are taking the devices that are meant to be the quantum computers of the future and thinking of them as complex quantum systems in their own right,” said Matteo Ippoliti, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-lead author of the work. “Instead of computation, we’re putting the computer to work as a new experimental platform to realize and detect new phases of matter.””
Phys.org, University of Hamburg: Researchers observe continuous time crystal. (Published June 10, 2022)
“Researchers from the Institute of Laser Physics at Universität Hamburg have succeeded for the first time in realizing a time crystal that spontaneously breaks continuous time translation symmetry. They report their observation in a study published online by the journal Science on Thursday, 9 June, 2022.”