Top hat trumps

Ages and ages ago I said that I would make top trump cards for all the physicists that i came across but I only made one for Nikola Tesla and forgot about it all. So today I have added cards for:

1. Harold Edgerton who developed stroboscopic photography which I have already discussed here.
2. Isambard Brunnel who was in my 'reading about science' book as a great engineer who allowed giant steam powered boats to be built. And I mean, just look at that hat!
3. Clerk Maxwell developed colour photography and the electromagnetic spectrum, by linking light with other forms of radiation. I found him in a magazine from a Kings university London magazine here.
4. Dorothy Hodgkin is one of the scientists that I had never heard of before reading this article in the new scientist. I said that I had a lot to learn and now I have learnt. She did a lot of work using Xrays
5. Andrei Sakarov is the other scientist I did not know but now I did. He developed thermonuclear devices and later became a human rights activist

I have added these to my new door!

Completion

The wall is finished!! I can't quite remember why it was ever called the wall since it is clearly just a load of physics pictures etc. on the side of a door?! I did the best I could to take a picture of it, it was kind of awkward because I couldn't get a good angle to take a picture of it in one go... It's a bit of a frankinsteins monster! In the sense that it is all pieced together, it isn't very much like frankinstiens monster in actual fact...

Extra points if you recognise that awful little sketch as a scene from pirates and the Caribbean...

I've got all sorts on there but the Summer science exhibition seems to be the main contributor. I used little pictures from physics sections of old university prospectus's to fill in some of the small gaps but the only problem is that they weren't labelled and therefore I have absolutely no idea what they are! Ah well, I'll know one day and then I'll be able to feel really successful.

That's an actual xray of a toblerone right there!

Plus a picture that I've been sticking physics stickers on and will continue to do so

A random moon I cut out as a last minute addition just because I could!

You really can't see but that is a poster for the uncaged monkeys who I never got to see even though there was no Oxford interveiw!

However now it is done it feels like I should come out of the closet so to speak and continue my work on a more visible area... I guess I'll have to consider it since I just made my resolution to do whatever I think of all of 10 minutes ago...

The End...? ( sherlock movie reference! )

Return of the Higs

Remember when I decided to make a post about the Higs Boson, realised I had no idea what it was really and then posted it anyway? Well I decided to be a little bit less lazy when I read this article and thought I should at least know a tiny bit more than this journalist!

Found this video by sixty symbols plus a lovely article from the institute of physics. I still don't really understand why this particle has to exist. I mean I thought you were allowed to assume that mass was just a property of certain particles. A property of me is that I have brown eyes, although of course that is due to my genes so is the Higs particle like a gene? Anyway, back to what I do know! The Higs particle creates a field and this field is what makes particles experience a mass but the field is even harder to detect so they are looking for the particle instead. But the particle decays super fast and they can't detect it so they are trying to find the things that it decays into such as z bosons and photons of certain frequencies. I'm slightly happier though of course can't be content till I really understand!

Wall News

I hadn't noticed how much my wall had grown until I tried to take a picture of it and had to do it in 2 parts! So there it is (to the left)! I managed to get Nikola in there as a last minute add in because the printing went a bit weird to make the top trumps! I think it was fate...

At the bottom you can just about see a picture of Saturn I got from Imperial. It is actually entitled 'Saturn and our pale blue orb' but me being the idiot I am I only understood what this meant yesterday when they explained it at Queen Mary! This is it closer:

Can you see the small dot in Saturn's rings? That's the earth!!

It was taken by the Cassini space shuttle which actually only has a camera with 1mega pixel! I find it remarkable that our mobile phones have a better camera than a space shuttle! Its because the shuttle was built in the 80's.

My human genome board has taken a few additions too!

There is a penguin magnet I got from the Royal Society Summer Exhibition which is a symbol in particle Physics because a professor lost a bet with some students which meant that he had to fit the word 'penguin' into his next paper! There is also a sign saying 'please stop mutating my DNA' because my genes kept mysteriously rearranging themselves!

Wall of Cool

So, I have started a physics wall! Well, its currently a Physics door because then I can close it away when people come over if I need to.. But I'm hoping to stick at it long enough to expand onto a wall!

And no - before anyone starts trying to be funny - no, it isn't just an excuse to have a poster of Brian!