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2014 Hales Expedition to Japan
Discovery of India
Hales Expedition 2018 – Australia
Hales Fund – China Trip
Hales Fund – Iceland
Hales Group 2017 – London
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan
Jordan and Jerusalem: A Hales Group Expedition
Author Archives: John F. Lindner
Astronomy Christmas Present
I awoke early this Christmas morning to watch the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. I remember the genesis of the telescope a quarter of a century ago when it was called the Next Generation Space Telescope. (The … Continue read… Continue reading
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Burning Plasma
In August I received an urgent email from my brother with the title “Fusion”. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) had created a burning plasma — a star on Earth — a major milestone on the long road to controlled nuclear fusion…. Continue reading
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Part Science, Part Art, Part Luck
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
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4D Unknot
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
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Punch it, SpaceX
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
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Dandelin Spheres
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
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Grad Schools
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
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For Teague
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
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21st Century Skyscraper
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 &… Continue reading
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Spinors
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
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