Some of my earliest memories are of having my foot measured at a shoe store in suburban New Jersey. I’m a little unclear as to why this memory is so vivid, but it might have something to do with those visits also being paired with a soft pretzel. I can still remember my mother scraping comically large salt grains into the trash before I could get a bite of strip-mall, de-salted pretzel. Salt wasn’t something I was allowed to have much of as a kid, so opportunities didn’t come along often. While most of that salty goodness ended up in the Meadowlands, the residual salt was more than enough to keep me happy before my mother needed to duck into Macy’s to discover the latest that early-1990s office-core had to offer.
Continue readingPhysics
Blondlot’s Folly: The Science of Seeing Things
In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot announced something extraordinary: a brand-new form of radiation he called “N-rays” after his home base at Nancy University. According to Blondlot, these mystery rays could make a barely visible spark a little bit brighter.
Soon, French labs were identifying N-rays everywhere. Possible sources of N-rays included:
- A specialized gas burner called a WeIsbach mantle
- An incandescent lamp called a Nernst glower
- Heated silver and sheet iron
- The sun
- Living and dead bodies
- Nerves
- Muscles
- Isolated enzymes
This list of sources remains so broad and varied one starts to wonder what couldn’t produce N-rays. The only limitation seemed to be imagination. By 1906, nearly 300 articles had been published on the topic. There was one small issue standing between Blondlot and immortality in Halliday and Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics: N-rays don’t actually exist.
Continue readingTry to stay still for your bone portrait.
I was recently at the dentist for a check-up and they had a chart on the wall, kind of like this one here. In short it tells you how much radiation you’re exposed to when you engage in different activities. For example flying from New York to Los Angeles exposes you to about the same amount of radiation as eight dental X-rays. Believe it or not, flying exposes you to an increased amount of radiation coming from space. A single flight across the ocean is no big deal but long-term elevated radiation exposure can increase your risk of some kinds of cancer, and it’s why workers that are exposed to elevated levels of things like X-rays are monitored to make sure exposure is kept to a minimum.
It got me thinking, while I listened to the slow and steady suction of spit from my oral cavity, “I wonder if Lois Lane, would have to wear a radiation safety badge?” I am totally unsure about the radiation output Continue reading
The Retro Scientist 