Here in Bristol the climate is ideal for a carefree lawn – it rarely gets very hot and we usually get enough rain to make it through the summer without the need for a lawn sprinkler. As a result, I miss the hiss of sprinklers that were part of my youthful summers in Canada. In Wired, the physicist Rhett Allain looks at the fascinating physics of lawn sprinklers – and the optical illusions they can create – in “The mesmerizing science of garden sprinklers”.
Unfortunately, Allain does not look at the physics of impact sprinklers (see above image), which used to fascinate me as a child with their seemingly chaotic behaviour.
If I had a penny for every time a wrote a phrase like “…this new experiment could provide tantalizing hints of what physics lies beyond the Standard Model” I would be a pound or two richer. In “The once and present Standard Model of elementary particle physics” James Wells of the University of Michigan looks into the “hazy mist” of the model since its birth with the discovery of charm in 1974 (Wells’ definition, not mine).
One chapter is called “Facts, mysteries and myths”, which advocates constructing a myth for how neutrinos obtain mass and describes the cosmological constant, dark matter, baryogenesis, and inflation as four “mysteries of the cosmos”.
If you have given up on improving the Standard Model, you might fancy becoming a medical physicist. There is a nice article in Symmetry that asks five former particle physicists why they chose that career path and what they do now as medical physicists. You can read more in “Transitions into medical physics” by Catherine Steffel.
