Interest of the day

Comet Lovejoy passed within 0.1 AU of the Sun without breaking up. The tail of the comet wiggled due the magnetic field produces by the Sun's corona. Researchers were able to model the Sun's magnetic field produced by the corona and then model the comet and predict the effects of the field on the ionized gases in the tail.

Fran Scott shows how to make your own Van De Graaff generator in this short video using a empty soda bottle, pencils, teflon tape, tape, scissors, a pot, and a spoon. It's actual kind of works.

G'Day Math provides online maths courses that are short and to the point. Sections include:

• Quadratics 1: Getting Started – Playing with Numbers
• Quadratics 2: The Algebra of Quadratics
• Quadratics 3: (OPTIONAL) The General Quadratic Formula; Imaginary Solutions; Cubics?
• Quadratics 5: Fitting Quadratics to Data
• Quadratics 7: Things Missing from the Course that might Surprise Educators

The first two lectures were quite good. I was always interested in a methodical approach to finding the next number in sequence. Professor James Tanton does a good job at exampling the concepts.

Two researched at the University of Winnipeg have reproduced Einstein's mass equivalence derivation from a photo of the chalkboard he used during a lecture he gave in Pittsburgh in 1934. Strangely, E=MC² was not capture in the photo. For more details the paper Einstein’s 1934 two-blackboard derivation of energy-mass equivalence is available.

A new paper looks at the origins of the Schrodinger's equation and describes how Schrödinger derived it. The classical solution is a nonlinear wave equation but the quantum mechanic solution is linear wave equation. In quantum mechanics, the amplitude and phase depend on each other making the Schrödinger equation linear. This linearity allows for the superposition of states. The full paper by Wolfgang P. Schleich, et al. titled Schrödinger equation revisited sounds fascinating. I wish I had access to it.

Don Lincoln describes how an atom smasher/accelerator works in this short TEDed video.

AgustaWestland showed an advanced demonstrator aircraft based on an all-electric tilt-rotor built into a flying wing known as project zero. The aircraft can take of vertically and hover like a helicopter, and then fly like an airplane by tilting the rotors forward. No performance specs were released.

University of Oxford has posted an open source course in Quantum Mechanics that is taught be Professor James Binney. There are 33 lectures with the last 5 covering nanotechnology. Check out the video tab and look at the bottom of the list for the nanotechnology lectures give by Simon C. Benjamin.

Columbia University has posted The History of the World from prehistoric times to 1500 CE. The course was taught in 2010 by Professor Richard Bulliet. The twenty-five lecture course can be found on YouTube.

The Quantum Exchange website contains reference and other materials to support teaching quantum mechanics. Subject areas include:

• Approximation Techniques
• Bound State Systems
• Entanglement and Quantum Information
• Foundations and Measurement Theory
• General
• Multi-particle Systems
• Probability, Waves, and Interference
• Scattering and Continuum State Systems
• Spin and Finite Dimensional Systems

Materials include, pdfs, illustrations, animations, and mathematical models in Mathematica, MATLAB, and MathCAD which all look very interesting and useful.