Category Archives: Science

“I was appalled by the number of people affected by lead contamination in water.”

NPR the two-way: Troubled By Flint Water Crisis, 11-Year-Old Girl Invents Lead-Detecting Device.

“Gitanjali Rao, 11, says she was appalled by the drinking water crisis in Flint, Mich. — so she designed a device to test for lead faster. She was named “America’s Top Young Scientist” on Tuesday at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minn.”

“Some 130 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed Earth, two dead stars in a far-away galaxy collided violently…”

NRP Science: A New Era For Astronomy Has Begun.

“Astronomy will never be the same again. We will be able to watch extremely violent processes on the fly, and watch them in many different ways, as they run their course. […] That so many astronomers could each catch a piece of the story and then work together to patch it together is a magnificent achievement.

Everytime a new tool or technique made its way into astronomy, amazing new discoveries followed. We are now watching the skies with unprecedented precision and breadth, combining all wavelengths of light with gravitational waves.

If history is a guide, we can expect untold surprises as we dramatically amplify our grasp on physical reality. Stay tuned and enjoy the show.”

When adding a third filter lets through MORE light

3Blue1Brown with minutephysics: Some light quantum mechanics. “This is a simple primer for how the math of quantum mechanics, specifically in the context of polarized light, relates to the math of classical waves, specifically classical electromagnetic waves.”

minutephysics with 3Blue1Brown: Bell’s Theorem: The Quantum Venn Diagram Paradox. “This video is about Bell’s Theorem, one of the most fascinating results in 20th century physics. Even though Albert Einstein (together with collaborators in the EPR Paradox paper) wanted to show that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because it was nonlocal (he didn’t like “spooky action at a distance”), John Bell managed to prove that any local real hidden variable theory would have to satisfy certain simple statistical properties that quantum mechanical experiments (and the theory that describes them) violate. Since then, GHZ and others have managed to extend the theoretical work, and Alain Aspect performed the first Bell test experiment in the late 1980s.”