Mastodawn

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 28, 2019

I'm so easily amused...
https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 28, 2019

We look at our lines which are not straight and someone else's lines which are not straight and find out that ours are better because we use more of them. We try to guess what the small shaking things in space are and where the even smaller things inside them are. We talk about what we find out and what that means for how very small space things are made and what happens to them in space.

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 28, 2019

A lot of pictures of coloured light from space that you can't see were taken with a very big space camera while it was still working, for a large number of big bright space things. This paper uses lines which are not straight to do the same thing as the bright light from very small shaking things in space which are made from even smaller things in different places.

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 28, 2019

Wait, there's an entire journal called pteridines? Official Journal of the International Society of Pteridinology?

I feel like maybe I've underestimated this one weird type of molecule...

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 28, 2019

Some journal papers are a bit like Ikea furniture. If you just pick one thing off the shelf, you don't quite get everything you need.

Especially with letters and other short, rapid publications, you'll find separate supplementary information documents. And I just wish they'd let people put all the necessary information into a single document, as appendices if need be, instead of imposing arbitrary page or word limits.

It just bugs me TBH.

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 27, 2019

Doing quantum chemistry calculations on any metal heavier than Xenon is such a headache. Why are all of these basis sets so rubbish?

Show thread

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 23, 2019

Incidentally, for anyone who isn't a physicist, rest masses have units of MeV/c² because, as Einstein showed us all, E = mc².

Show thread

Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons May 23, 2019

The correct answer, surprisingly, is the Top Quark!

Here are the rest masses of these particles, from highest to lowest, in MeV/c².

Top Quark 173210 MeV/c²

Higgs Boson 125180 MeV/c²