By Hamish Johnston
Everyone knows that water in a draining sink or toilet swirls in opposite directions on opposite sides of the equator…or does it? For the answer, watch the instructions in the above video and then go to “The truth about toilet swirl”.
Physicists at CERN are a lucky bunch. As well as having the world’s most energetic collider at their disposal, they are also surrounded by the natural beauty of the Alps and the Jura mountains. However, I’ve always felt that the CERN site itself and the flat farmland that overlays the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are rather dull.
Not so for two University of York academics: the physicist David Jenkins and the archaeologist John Schofield have written a paper called “A journey to the heart of matter”. Published in the journal Landscapes, the paper is subtitled “The physical and metaphysical landscapes of CERN” and looks at how both archaeology and physics can be understood as explorations of time and space. As well as exploring obvious locations such as the underground hall of the CMS experiment, the pair also highlights equations that appear to have been casually inscribed onto a standing stone at CERN’s Prevessin site. A weathered wooden hut associated with the LHC – arguably the world’s most sophisticated piece of technology – makes it clear that CERN is all about science, not good looks.
Earlier this week we celebrated 60 years of the atomic clock and now blogger Chad Orzel is reminding us that it is also the 20th anniversary of the first Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC). Writing on the Forbes website, Orzel points out that on this day in 1995 Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell and colleagues at JILA in Boulder managed to cool a cloud of rubidium atoms to such a cold temperature that all the atoms were in the same quantum state. Orzel explains why this is such a big deal in “Twenty years of Bose–Einstein condensation”.