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#physicist

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Happy birthday to #physicist Harriet Brooks (1876 - 1933) who discovered atomic recoil, Radon & recognized radioactive elements could undergo chains of transmutations into a series of new elements. #nuclear #physics

She was Rutherford’s 1st grad student at McGill. After publishing her results in 1899 she completed her MSc in 1901 on “Damping of Electrical Oscillations,” before embarking on #radioactivity research.⁠ 🧵
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #histsci

Happy birthday to German-American theoretical #physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972), the 2nd woman to win the Nobel Prize for #physics. As the series of increasingly large atomic nuclei grows with additional nucleons (protons p & neutrons n) from hydrogen to transuranic elements, there are points where the binding energy of the next nucleon is a lot lower than the last. So there are a series of quantum “magic numbers” (a term coined by Wigner):🧵

👒🔍📐 Here comes Nicols Hatcher, the self-proclaimed "physicist by soul," to dazzle us with a mind-numbingly riveting tale of shapes and #algorithms. Get ready to be blown away by the exhilarating world of #monotiles and SAT solvers—because that's exactly what your weekend was missing! 💤🎉
nhatcher.com/post/on-hats-and- #physicist #SATsolvers #weekendreads #HackerNews #ngated

I'm Nicolás Hatcher · The Hat, the Spectre and SAT solversIntroduction In this blog post you are going to read about two things:

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was born #OTD, 13 June. As a physicist, he ranks alongside Newton & Einstein (“He achieved greatness unequalled”—Max Planck; “I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell”—Albert Einstein).

Maxwell also wrote poetry: “Rigid Body Sings” is based on “Comin’ Through the Rye” by Robert Burns

poetryfoundation.org/poems/457

Happy birthday to #physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)! He dreamt up his demon to deal with the very odd 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which is not a law like others, and can not be derived from first priciples). It states that two bodies of different temperature brought together in a closed system will reach thermal equilibrium; or, you cannot use a cold thing to heat a hot thing; 🧵

#sciart #linocut #printmaker #MaxwellsDemon #ImaginaryFriends #thermodynamics #mastoArt

Happy birthday #physicist Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), who came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror)! In my print on the left I show Wu in her lab & a schematic diagram of her experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, & the mirror reflection of the experimental set-up & the shocking result, 🧵1/n

Debate erupts around #Microsoft’s #quantumcomputing claims
#Physicists cast doubt on #Majorana1 chip
Henry Legg, #physicist at Univ of St. Andrews who had two preprints challenging the work, attacked. “It doesn’t look like Majoranas, at least to me,” Legg said. “Any company claiming to have a topological qubit in 2025 is essentially selling a fairy tale [that] undermines the field of #quantum computation … and public confidence in science.”
science.org/content/article/de
archive.ph/PD8mx

This bugs the physicist in me each time I see this... WTF is "low side current monitoring"? I remember vaguely understanding it once but I forgot...

adafruit.com/product/5832

C'est comme les amplis différentiels qui ne sont pas vraiment différentiels (ils ne mesurent pas la différence de potentiel entre leurs entrées V+ et V-), pour ça, il faut un "instrumentation amplifier" 🤦‍♂️ <sigh> ah les ingénieurs...

www.adafruit.comAdafruit INA228 - I2C 85V, 20-bit High or Low Side Power MonitorThe INA228 is an amazing power monitoring chip, with best-of-everything support: up to 85VDC common-mode, high or low side measurements, 20-bit (!) ADC for precision measurements from ...

Happy birthday to British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook).⁠

Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd of 8 children 🧵

Born on this day: #physicist J. R. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). While best remembered for his role in the Manhattan Project, he was a giant of 20th century theoretical physics, nominated for a Nobel 3 times. ⁠

In 1927 he & Max Born greatly simplified how we predict electrons behaviour within atoms. The Born-Oppenheimer or adiabatic approximation is based on the observation that electrons are 1000s times lighter than nuclei, 🧵1/n
#sciart #linocut #printmaking #histsci

Contrary to popular belief, #mathematician s and theoretical #physicist s don't just discuss their theories on blackboards all day, but much of the research in practice involves #software and coding. Recently, I started using #PariGP , which is an #opensource algebra system that has existed since the 1980s but is still being actively developed today. It has amazing abilities in the realm of number theory, all sorts of modulus and p-adic computations, etc. I use it because it is very fast in handling power series and polynomials. Of course, it can deal with big rational numbers and arbitrary precision float.
I recommend reading the "GP tutorial" pdf. It is one of the most entertaining tutorials I have done in a long time, written in a subtle funny way 😄. pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/doc.ht

pari.math.u-bordeaux.frPARI/GP Development Headquarters

Happy birthday to French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Marie-Sophie Germain (1776 – 1831), known as Sophie. She taught herself mathematics using books in her father’s library and by corresponding with leading mathematicians of her day, including Lagrange, Legendre and Gauss, initially using the pseudonym Monsieur LeBlanc. 🧵1/n

#linocut #printmaking #sciart #mathart #SophieGermain #ChladniFigures #mathematician #Fermat #womenInSTEM #physicist