Your Week in Seminars: Short Thanksgiving edition

Good Monday evening all, and welcome to another edition of Your Week in Seminars. Last week was a half week here in Cornell, but we still managed two talks, the general colloquium and the Wednseday-talk-on-Tuesday.

Problem of the Week #2: Solution

Thanks to all who sent in solutions! We are very happy with the vast number of responses, and we will put up a leader board shortly!

Solution

Your Week in Seminars: One for Two Edition

Hello everyone and welcome to another week of talks here at the physics department. I was out of Ithaca for a bit this past week, so in this very special edition I'm going to present a full week's worth of seminars (one from last week and two from the previous week) in one post covering two weeks.

Problem of the Week #3

We welcome you to send in solutions, or even any ideas you have about how to solve the problems to the.physics.virtuosi@gmail.com with “problem of the week” in the subject line. We will keep track of the top Virtuosi problem solvers.

Welcome to the third installment of Problem of the Week!  We are very pleased with the number of responses we have gotten so far and we super duper promise to put up some kind of leader board soon.  In fact, I super duper promise to relegate that assignment to Alemi.  We intend to keep this up as long as we can and give out prizes for high scores maybe...? They will be lame internet prizes...?

The solution to the last problem of the week will be up shortly.  Adam is the only one who knows the answer and he was busy all weekend taking a magic ring to Mordor.

One more housekeeping note.  Since we want everyone to have a clean shot at answering the question, we would prefer the solutions to be sent by email instead of posted in the comments.  However, we certainly don't want to stop discussion on the problem, so if you don't want any hints you might want to avoid the comments!

Now for the problem...

Problem of the Week #2

As always, we welcome you to send in solutions, or even any ideas you have about how to solve the problems to the.physics.virtuosi@gmail.com with “problem of the week” in the subject line. We will keep track of the top Virtuosi problem solvers.

Why did the ant cross the rubber band?

A rubber band is held fixed at one end. The other end is pulled at a velocity v. At time t = 0, the rubber band has a length of L, and an ant starts crawling from one end to the other at velocity u.

Does the ant reach the other side? If so, how long does it take to get there? Assume that the rubber band is able to be stretched indefinitely without breaking.

Pet Projects

You're doing it wrong!

Here at the Virtuosi, we have a very specific way of asking a very specific type of question that sounds anything but specific.  These are the "How come [blank]?" questions [1].  These are very simple questions that just about every four year old asks, but likely never get sufficiently answered.  To  get a feel for what I mean by these questions I provide the following translations of problems we have either considered or will consider:

Q:  How come trees?

Translation:  How tall can trees be?

Q:  How come plants?

Translation:  Why are plants green?

These are my very favorite types of questions because they are completely understandable by everyone and promise to have very interesting physics working behind the scenes.  So I've been thrilled to see two such questions considered by scientists lately that have also had a good run  in popular media.  They are:

Q:  How come cats?

Translation:  How do cats drink?

and

Q:  How come dogs?

Translation:  How do dogs shake?

Your Week in Seminars Dark Edition

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to another week of seminars here in the physics department. Our theme of the week is dark matter - where does it come from, how do we see it, and why is there so much of it. Along with that we have a little more AdS/CFT, seemingly continuing last week's subjects theme. All in all, it looks like seminars on similar subjects tend to condense here in the department.

Problem of the Week #1

I thought we could spice things up a bit with a more interactive post on The Virtuosi. Starting this week, a new problem of the week will be posted each week. Solutions will be posted the following week. These problems will be a collection of physics and math problems and riddles, and although hopefully challenging enough to be fun and interesting, they should mostly be solvable using concepts from introductory undergraduate physics and math classes.

We welcome you to ponder these problems, and send in solutions, or even any ideas you have about how to solve the problems to the.physics.virtuosi@gmail.com with “problem of the week” in the subject line. We will keep track of the top Virtuosi problem solvers.

Here it goes…

Your Week in Seminars: Conformal Edition

Another week has gone by here in Cornell. The last leaves are turning red, a hint of snow passed us on the weekend, and the undergrads have hit the streets and parties in minimal clothing, then did the same again next day wearing a set of cat ears. And in the physics department, we had the usual three talks.