My friend told me today about a researcher in her department who is publishing an article on the physics of frisbees. A frisbee works because of the difference in air velocities below and above the frisbee, similar to an airplane wing. Give it forward and angular momentum and it can rise into the air. That’s at least the basic idea. But apparently there are things we don’t quite understand, such as the influence the rim has and so on.
This reminded me of something that Feynman wrote in one of his books about his life (Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?)
At some point he was apparently stuck in one of the problems he was solving (something to do with QED) and he got fascinated by the shape the flow of water out of a tap. He spent some time working the physics of this and a small part of that gave him an idea for his research, which he went on to win the nobel prize for.
Just goes to show that not only is there physics in the most mundane things (cool physics at that) but there is also a connection between complicated abstract physics and the physics of everyday life.
Archive for July, 2005
I’m sure everyone has heard it before, but this is so cool that I can’t really mention this often enough.
Humans, animals and pretty much our entire planet, hell most of our solar system is made up of stuff that came out of stars which have gone supernova, exploded, kaboom.
When the universe first started, before the first stars collapsed, the only two elements that existed anywhere, were hydrogen and helium (and some traces of lithium, but we’ll just ignore that for now). Anything heavier than that was produced somewhere inside a star and many of the heavier elements (iron and such) were made in supernovae.
Thus we’re all little specks of star.
It doesn’t really get much cooler than that, now does it. Whenever people ask me why we should care about what astronomers do it’s these kinds of things I try to talk about. It is this kind of knowledge and understanding of the universe, which places our lives into a greater context I think. (Of course the physics we learn is pretty cool too :-)).
