Sunday, 2 September 2012

Sunday: The Quantum Workshop

I went to a public science event in London today. It's called The Quantum Workshop:


It seemed to consist of shining lasers at pieces of dust or ash in a vacuum.


I think the idea was to demonstrate that photons have mass as well as energy: hit something with enough light and you can cause it to move as per Newtons third law of motion. A laser is an awful lot of light in one small space, the ash is light enough, and gravity isn't that strong, so you can levitate the ash particle.

As an aside, I noticed that there were a number of quite attractive young women attending the stand, whether deliberately selected for this or not I couldn't say. Remember, this is theoretical physics, so maybe this is the Cox effect in action, attracting bright young things to an otherwise unattractive (for women) field.

I went for some lunch near Tate Modern and noticed how the Shard now dominates the sky line:

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