oscillations

What happens when your kids won't give you a turn on the Wii? Simple. You take their LEGO bricks and their slinky and do some physics. I will keep this simple. Basically, I created a slinky holder out of LEGO pieces and added LEGO bricks to the end to stretch it. Here is the video. Lego + Slinky = Physics from Rhett Allain on Vimeo. Maybe in an un-Dot Physics fashion, I am not going to analyze this data. I am not going to even describe the physics. Instead, I will leave this as a What Can You Do With This in the style of Dan Meyer. I will give a couple of hints. First, I put this on…

So as a full member of both the American Astronomical Society and the American Physical Society, I get sent issues of the magazine Physics Today. Well, I was going through the April issue, when I saw this article: Cosmic Sound Waves Rule by Daniel J. Eisenstein and Charles L. Bennett That first name sounds familiar. Why? Because he's my boss! The article requires a subscription, but seeing as how this is what my research is, why don't I tell you what the big idea is. The Universe is full of dark matter, normal matter, and radiation. When it's young, the radiation is more important than matter…