Author Archives: John F. Lindner

About John F. Lindner

John F. Lindner was born in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and educated at the University of Vermont and Caltech. He is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at The College of Wooster and a visiting professor at North Carolina State University. He has enjoyed multiple yearlong sabbaticals at Georgia Tech, University of Portland, University of Hawai'i, and NCSU. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics, celestial mechanics, and neural networks.

All Engine(s) Running

I asked Siri to wake me at 7:15 AM this morning so I could watch SpaceX’s second Integrated Flight Test of Super Heavy Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Unfortunately, my house suffered a rare power outage … Continu… Continue reading

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Diversity Improves Machine Learning

For the last two years, the Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab and I have labored to incorporate diversity in machine learning. Diversity conveys advantages in nature, yet homogeneous neurons typically comprise the layers of artificial neural networ… Continue reading

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Neural network does quantum mechanics

A particle confined to an impassable box is a paradigmatic and exactly solvable one-dimensional quantum system modeled by an infinite square well potential. NC State’s Elliott Holliday and Bill Ditto and I recently explored some of its infinitely… Continue reading

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The Ringed Planets

When I was a kid, Saturn was the ringed planet. But today, we know that all of the outer planets have rings. The James Webb Space Telescope has now imaged each of them in infrared revealing their distinctive structures, including … Continue readi… Continue reading

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Simplest Chaos

The motion of one of the simplest dynamical systems, a torqued, damped, nonlinear pendulum, can be infinitely complicated. Consider a simple pendulum of length [latex]l[/latex] and mass [latex]m[/latex] rigidly connected to an axle of radius [latex]r[/… Continue reading

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Vampire Ein Stein

Just a couple of months after announcing the remarkable discovery of a single shape that forces a non periodic tiling of the plane, Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss have announced an improved aperiodic monotile or ein stein. (Ein stein is &#82… Continue reading

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The Temperature of the Vacuum

Quantum field theory predicts that the temperature of empty space should depend on the observer’s motion, increasing proportionally with acceleration. Here I attempt an accessible introduction to this striking effect, related to Hawking radiation… Continue reading

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A Century of Compton Scattering

One hundred years ago today, the Physical Review published Wooster graduate Arthur Compton‘s famous article on the scattering of light and electrons, which earned him a Physics Nobel Prize four years later. By relativistically conserving spacetim… Continue reading

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We Are Going

After half a century confined to low-Earth orbit, humans once again intend to leave Earth and voyage to Moon, currently planned for late next year. The reality of this exciting adventure crystallized earlier this month when NASA announced the diverse &… Continue reading

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Behold, an ein Stein!

This academic year has been thrilling: first nuclear fusion breakeven, now an ein Stein! Last week, a preprint at arxiv.org by David Smith et al. announced an “ein Stein”, or one stone, a shape that forces a non periodic tiling … Cont… Continue reading

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