This is available on a t-shirt from xkcd.com - the mouseover on the website says 'bonus points if you can identify the science'. Neal took one look, muttered something about blackbody radiation and is now explaining the maths and telling the tragic tale of Boltzmann's Constant, which helps explain why this curve isn't a straight line (his critique of classical physics was vindicated a couple of months after his death - the little k is his constant in this equation). It plots the energy carried by a photon of light by its frequency (though light's a particle too). A blackbody radiator radiates all the heat/light it absorbs.
I shall buy Neal the t-shirt in honour of his superior nerding.
4 comments:
That is impressive ultra-violet range nerding fo' sure! I wish I had my life again with a slightly different brain. When the class did maths the teacher let me do colouring.
Err I got the definition of a Blackbody wrong, it has been 12 years since I've given this a second thought, but thanks to wikipedia:
A black body is an idealized object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that falls on it. No electromagnetic radiation passes through it and none is reflected. Because no light (visible electromagnetic radiation) is reflected or transmitted, the object appears black when it is cold. However, a black body emits a temperature-dependent spectrum of light. This thermal radiation from a black body is termed black-body radiation.
This is actually a really important bit of science as it was the first step to understanding quantum mechanics, which is important to the world in general because, amongst other things, without quantum mechanics we wouldn't understand how semiconductors behaved, and without this microchips wouldn't have been developed and we'd still have computers the size of a tennis court to do what a pocket calculator can do.
And it's all down to the genius of Ludvig Boltzman, who hanged himself because everyone thought his ideas were bollocks, so he came to the conclusion that his life's work had been a waste of time. Not long after one of his fiercest critics Max Planck, out of total desperation, applied Boltzmann's ideas to the problem of how the energy of the radiation emitted by a blackbody is related to it's frequency, and bingo, success. Light can be described as particles as well as waves, and the movement of the molecules of a gas is based on probability. Planck still refused to believe boltzmann was right and thought it was just a mathematical trick, and even Einstein couldn't reconcile himself with the concept, even thought he proved that it worked, famously saying “God doesn't play dice”.
This is very cool. www.thetransporterroom.com
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