A London-based Physicist.
Unless otherwise specified, or a "reblog", the still pictures used here are taken by me.
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Requiem for Flute by Kazuo Fukushima
Played here by the flautist Onorio Zaralli, this piece for solo flute dates from 1956. It is one I have just acquired as sheet music and is a “challenge” for me this summer.
Page from a massive (86 volume) encyclopedic dictionary by Brockhaus and Efron,
I chose this page because it shows things (physical and conceptual) related to optics which is a personal (and professional) interest of mine. They don’t make figures like this anymore!
Picture sourced from Wikimedia and is from a book whose copyright has expired
Le chat by Frans Masereel, 1955
My kind of animal!
Information on the artist, Frans Masereel, can be found here.
(Source: frenchtwist)
Interesting concrete textures on a railway bridge.
In flight entertainment
Listen to the whole song over here at Cover Me:
http://www.covermesongs.com/2013/04/unwoman-brings-cello-goth-to-florence-and-the-machine-cover-cover-me-premiere.html#more-41859
The album drops next Tuesday.
I’m not generally a huge fan of covers, but this is fantastic! Well done Unwoman.
Green Moss, Perthshire, April 2013
Reading the latest issue of Gramaphone this week I saw that the organist Marie-Claire Alain had died recently. I had the pleasure of hearing her play on two occasions in London, the first time at The Festival Hall where she played a number of pieces by her late brother the composer Jehan Alain whose music deserves to be much better known. I chose the piece Litanies by him for the embedded video above. Had Jehan lived longer (he died in the early stages of WW2) he would surely have been seen as the equal of Messiaen. Marie-Claire Alain was a prolific performer and recorded the entire set of organ works by J S Bach on no fewer than three occasions!
In the visible region and during normal daylight it has been understood for about 100 years that molecular scattering (Rayleigh scattering) is responsible for the blue colour of the sky and (by subtraction of blue from the direct beam) for the red-orange colour of our sun at dawn and at dusk. The scattering of light by particles much smaller than the wavelength under consideration follows a law that states that the scattering increases as the fourth power of the frequency. This implies that blue light is scattered approximately ten times more strongly than red light hence the sun-lit sky above our head looks blue. A question that took much longer to understand, and which I only appreciated recently from reading Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life (see my earlier post) is why the sky at twilight is still blue and not a blue-green colour which is what pure Rayleigh scatter theory would predict. The answer, surprisingly, is due to ozone in the upper atmosphere. At twilight, after our sun has set, the sun’s rays illuminate preferentially the upper atmosphere. Ozone (a tri-atomic oxygen molecule) absorbs light in the green-yellow-orange-red region of the spectrum (see figure above) and this causes the twilight sky to appear blue. The graph illustrates the absorption spectrum, green light starts at about 500 nm and red light ends at around 750 nm, though for most of us it has to be very bright to be visible at wavelengths longer than 700 nm.
Figure taken from this page http://www.patarnott.com/atms749/notes2006.htm and is copyright. I’m not sure whom to credit with the copyright, but probably either Dr W. Patrick Arnott or The University of Nevada, Reno
Dramatic clouds behind the top of Primrose Hill in London this morning. This is a test shot using a Nikon D7000 14-bit RAW file converted with UFRaw and then edited further in GIMP. Primrose Hill is unusual for a Royal Park in that it is open 24 hours a day every day of the year. You can see in the foreground some of the distinctive, though not very “dark sky friendly”, lamposts that illuminate the main paths in my picture above.
