Saturday, 22 April 2017
Jerry Nelson
The March for Science ended at the Capitol, where the Tax March and Climate Marches begin.
On the stairs of the US Capitol at the end of the first March for Science.
Yup, he's an engineer, and here's the other side of his sign.
E equals M c-squared is perhaps the world's most famous equation. It comes from Albert Einstein, who was a refugee admitted by the United States.
Mass and energy are equivalent. Splitting the atom produces pieces whose mass doesn't add up. The missing mass has been converted into energy, the energy of atom bombs and nuclear power plants. The energy is equal to the missing mass times the speed of light squared. (Mass is in kilograms, speed of light in meters/second, energy in Joules.)
Albert Einstein was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler persuaded lesser men to hand him a dictatorship in 1933. Being Jewish, Albert Einstein would be damned if he'd return home, and became a US citizen instead (1940). Einstein alerted President Franklin Roosevelt that is was theoretically possible to create a bomb based on atomic energy: the atomic bomb. Einstein's 2 August 1939 letter got to FDR on 11 October 1939. Physicist Enrico Fermi immediately got a $6,000 grant to expand his work on neutron chain reactions. Fermi got the world's first nuclear reactor going (a sustained neutron chain reaction) by December 1942, but the Manhattan Project proved to be a lot more expensive (about two billion in 1945 dollars).
I like plastic-coated paper clips, the colors are so cheerful. Converting two of them (1 gm) to pure energy releases the power of the Nagasaki A-bomb, about 20,000 tons (20 "kilotons") of TNT, the stuff Alfred Nobel sold to raise money for the Nobel Prize.
It is said that Hitler crippled German physics and lost any chance of achieving nuclear weapons by driving Jewish scientists such as Lise Meitner (girl power!) and Albert Einstein out of the country. As a faculty member in a German physics department, I heard an older German physicist deny that wartime Germany had any interest or projects in atomic weapons anyway. This is a lie, but perhaps it made him feel better.
The wealth and geopolitcal power of the United States is driven by science, scientific technologies, and technology-based companies and weapons systems. Science has been a pillar of our civilization. A civilization that attacks the pillars of its greatness is a civilization on the way down.
Top (You are in The March for Science)
The Climate March
home for this website, such as it is
Revised 24April2017 25April; 27April forgot sponsor and dino figs. 13May
Jerry Nelson (J. I. Nelson, Ph.D.) jerry-va is at speakeasy.net
T
The March for Science ended at the Capitol, where the Tax March and Climate Marches begin.
On the stairs of the US Capitol at the end of the first March for Science.
Yup, he's an engineer, and here's the other side of his sign.
E equals M c-squared is perhaps the world's most famous equation. It comes from Albert Einstein, who was a refugee admitted by the United States.
Mass and energy are equivalent. Splitting the atom produces pieces whose mass doesn't add up. The missing mass has been converted into energy, the energy of atom bombs and nuclear power plants. The energy is equal to the missing mass times the speed of light squared. (Mass is in kilograms, speed of light in meters/second, energy in Joules.)
Albert Einstein was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler persuaded lesser men to hand him a dictatorship in 1933. Being Jewish, Albert Einstein would be damned if he'd return home, and became a US citizen instead (1940). Einstein alerted President Franklin Roosevelt that is was theoretically possible to create a bomb based on atomic energy: the atomic bomb. Einstein's 2 August 1939 letter got to FDR on 11 October 1939. Physicist Enrico Fermi immediately got a $6,000 grant to expand his work on neutron chain reactions. Fermi got the world's first nuclear reactor going (a sustained neutron chain reaction) by December 1942, but the Manhattan Project proved to be a lot more expensive (about two billion in 1945 dollars).
I like plastic-coated paper clips, the colors are so cheerful. Converting two of them (1 gm) to pure energy releases the power of the Nagasaki A-bomb, about 20,000 tons (20 "kilotons") of TNT, the stuff Alfred Nobel sold to raise money for the Nobel Prize.
It is said that Hitler crippled German physics and lost any chance of achieving nuclear weapons by driving Jewish scientists such as Lise Meitner (girl power!) and Albert Einstein out of the country. As a faculty member in a German physics department, I heard an older German physicist deny that wartime Germany had any interest or projects in atomic weapons anyway. This is a lie, but perhaps it made him feel better.
The wealth and geopolitcal power of the United States is driven by science, scientific technologies, and technology-based companies and weapons systems. Science has been a pillar of our civilization. A civilization that attacks the pillars of its greatness is a civilization on the way down.
Top (You are in The March for Science)
The Climate March
Revised 24April2017 25April; 27April forgot sponsor and dino figs. 13May
Jerry Nelson (J. I. Nelson, Ph.D.) jerry-va is at speakeasy.net
T