John Carlos BaezThere's a bunch of bigshots on YouTube who pontificate about string theory, the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and other profound issues in physics. But you can't really learn much physics from most of them. It's just chat.
Angela Collier here is so much better! So much more humble - and so much more fun if you really care about physics. I actually *learned* something: how to estimate the distance of a pulsar!
When pulses of radio waves from a pulsar move through space, they get smeared out as they go, and you can use this to guess how far away the pulsar is. Why? Because waves of lower frequency move a bit slower. Why? Because they interact more with the ionized gas in the Milky Way.
But how much slower, and why? That's what she explains - and actually this part, how radio waves interact with ionized gas, is what will stick with me.
This is the first episode of a series she calls Coffee and The Problem:
"We have coffee and I solve a problem, and the idea is that it's like a cozy weekend morning and you pull out your notebook and you solve the problem right along with me. I will give you time to pause and solve it yourself if you want and compare your answer with mine if you want. That's the game! That's the fun."
This time she's solving a problem about estimating the distance of pulsar. The problem just hands you a formula. But she's good. She doesn't just use the formula, she shows how to derive it from more fundamental principles! And also, at the end, she raises the question I was worrying about all along: how reliable is this method in practice? So she's not blindly solving a problem: she's thinking about physics.
rob pike
MicroPython
Everything Open Conference
Julia Evans
Valerie Aurora
Laurens Valk
Kathy Reid
