The first photo is a pack of timber wolves at the Haliburton Forest wolf center in Ontario. The second photo is our dopey golden doodle warming his butt on a radiator.

@tim hahahaha

Same species.

Truly, I mean "wonderfully bonkers” in the best possible way.

"Time Without End" is the physics version of indulging in a late-night dorm room conversation, the sort of paper you get to write every so often after a string of more serious works. It's a flight of fancy with a foot in both physics and science fictions.

Freeman Dyson, who passed away three years ago, would have been 100 today.

Here is a thread I wrote last year that talks about his foundational contributions to quantum electrodynamics; his (possibly contrarian) bad take on climate science; and the wonderfully bonkers adventure in eschatology "Time Without End,” in which he images the ultimate limits of life based on the understanding of cosmology at the time.

https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109518631792805808

@joelvanderwerf loll

@annaghughes That’s not especially long. It’s just okay.

I am once again asking McSweeneys’s to stop posting lists that are about me, specifically.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-national-lyrics-or-things-my-dad-says-while-refusing-to-check-google-maps

@TheSauce Ack! Thppt!

@ak Classic Street Fighter villain M. Boltzmann

The transition from classical to quantum physics went about as smoothly as you would expect. Happy #QuantumDay.

(Sorry, I don’t know who made this classic physics meme. If you know, please tell me!)

That’s right, the factor of “k” that appears in the formula “S = k log W” — the formula engraved on Boltzmann’s memorial! — was actually introduced by Max Planck. Boltzmann expressed his results in terms of the ideal gas constant R.

Image: user Daderot on Wikipedia

Something that isn’t as widely known is that “h” is not the only fundamental constant that was introduced during Planck’s presentation to the German Physical Society #OTD in 1900!

Planck was investigating emission and absorption by blackbodies, so he needed a way to relate energies and temperatures. Thus, he had to introduce what we now refer to as “Boltzmann’s constant.”

The results of Planck’s December 14th lecture were submitted to Annalen der Physik a few weeks later, on January 7th, and published not long after that.

You can see the original (in German) here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.19013090310

An English translation of Planck’s paper, taken from Dirk ter Haar’s “The Old Quantum Theory,” is available here:
http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Planck%20(1900),%20Distribution%20Law.pdf

Planck’s hypothesis was in fact a deep statement about the nature of Nature. Electromagnetic adiation of frequency f comes in discrete chunks of energy E=hf. It's not some artifact of a complicated interaction with matter.

Nowadays we refer to the proportionality constant h as "Planck's constant." In the SI system it takes the value h=6.626 x 10⁻³⁴ kg*m²/s, or 4.136 x 10⁻¹⁵ eV*s.

As far as we can tell, h is a fundamental constant that is hardwired into our Universe.

This sequence of events was a not uncommon narrative in the transformative years of late 19th and early 20th century physics.

An experimental result wouldn't make sense, and a physicist would propose a radical solution. The solution would seem too weird to be true so they'd write it off as a convenient "trick.” Eventually, everyone would realize that it wasn't a trick at all and reality was in fact weirder than they'd expected.

@tim quantum day-bar

@tim this is the reduced quantum day

Here's a great APS Landmarks entry where you can read more about Compton Scattering and the reality of photons:

https://physics.aps.org/story/v13/st8

Many physicists remained skeptical. But Arthur Compton’s 1923 explanation of X-rays scattering off electrons was near-incontrovertible evidence that quanta were real.