Tag Archives: physics

Cooking chicken with a powerful slap

A question has been going around social networks: If kinetic energy is converted to thermal energy upon impact, how hard do you need to slap a chicken to cook it? One response suggested raising the chicken’s temperature to 400 °F, which is far too hot, and it used an “average slap energy” that was notContinue reading “Cooking chicken with a powerful slap”

Schrödinger’s Cat, a sonnet

Should quantum physics e’er be standardized, when taken in a thought experiment, its terms of meaning judged and analyzed, absurdity prevails, not merriment. A cat both dead and living cannot be. That was the point old Erwin tried to make. To measure is to interfere, you see, some photon must be thrown to cause aContinue reading “Schrödinger’s Cat, a sonnet”

Nobel Prize Laureate Eric Betzig

“I would never call myself a chemist,” said Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 recipient Eric Betzig. Betzig was the 2015 speaker at the annual Mark Gurevitch Memorial Lecture Series, hosted by the Physics Department at Portland State University. During his lecture at Hoffman Hall on May 14, Betzig spoke about his career and his prize-winningContinue reading “Nobel Prize Laureate Eric Betzig”