Author Archives: John F. Lindner

Launched just last month, Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, rocky swarms that orbit about 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit. Hal Levinson, Lucy’s Principal Investigator, has described Lucy… Continue reading →

In four dimensions, you can’t tie your shoelaces, because 4D knots don’t work. Any 1D curve in 4D space can be continuously deformed to the unit circle, which is an unknot. The animation below demonstrates how to undo a trefoil knot …… Continue reading →

She’s not looking up at the sky; she’s looking down at it. I am excitedly following the Inspiration4 spaceflight and its crew of four enthusiastic and diverse private citizens: Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Christopher Sembroski, and Si… Continue reading →

In 1609, Johannes Kepler first described how planets orbit the sun in ellipses. Kepler understood an ellipse as both the locus of points whose distances from two foci sum to a constant and as the intersection of a cone and a plane. But how … Cont… Continue reading →

Wooster physics graduates do many things after Wooster, including graduate work. Below is a map of some of the graduate schools they have attended, one dimension of the influence of our department. If you are a recent Wooster physics graduate … C… Continue reading →

Sadly and unexpectedly Wooster physics senior Teague Curless ’21 died yesterday. I was fortunate to teach Teague some physics, especially in my Nonlinear Dynamics class last spring. Teague’s semester project beautifully illustrated chaos in… Continue reading →

Recently at its Boca Chica launch site, SpaceX stacked a Starship on a Superheavy booster to briefly form history’s largest rocket, dwarfing the Apollo Saturn V. Both a fit-check and a statement, SpaceX released the photograph below in black &#38… Continue reading →

Fermions like electrons, protons, and neutrons inhabit a 720° world: 360° rotations negate their quantum states, but 720° rotations restore them. In Dirac notation [latex display=”true”]R_{2\pi}|\psi \rangle = -|\psi \rangle = e^{… Continue reading →

Marvelously, the square of the sum of natural numbers is the sum of their cubes! Equivalently, the sum of their cubes is the square of their sum. This mathematical gem is attributed to Nicomachus of Gerasa who lived almost 2000 years … Continue r… Continue reading →

As I transition to emeritus status tomorrow, I reflect on 33 years at Wooster. I am thankful for the freedom I’ve had to design my own courses, including eight first-year seminars; for the flexibility to explore a wide range of … Continue r… Continue reading →