Physics and Computing

This short story is about a surprising effect: you put something on the web without much advertising for it - and it might find perhaps more users than if you publish it in a traditional Journal. Here I talk about scientific or educational text. I often find similar cases the other way - things I am looking for might be at private pages and not in Journals. Often because some pieces of information which really are useful do not fit policies of any Journal, or the "referees" throw such trivial information away. This might be a long discussion, so let us rather go to my own little story.

Recently scientifically 2.0 so topical Schrödinger's cat jumped into being in the 1935 three-part article (in German) in Die Naturwissenschaften, just at the end of part one:Man kann auch ganz burleske Fälle konstruieren. Eine Katze wird in eine Stahlkammer gesperrt, zusammen mit folgender Höllenmaschine …

I have once before put down some thoughts about computing devices and the situation for scientific use of computer technology, hoping to get some response and start some fruitful discussion. It remained with the hopes, some comments appeared there, but not really in the direction I think is important.

For years now the generic PC was getting somewhat cheaper and that was generally good for science. Lots of PCs are running or assisting in many different ways experiments and measurements in laboratories of many sorts. The generic PC could have been getting much cheaper and perhaps specialized, but the complicated interplay between the dominating operating system and consumer market social aspects lead to the development which simply happened. But somehow everybody in science was happy.

The competitors in this racing are introduced in the previous entry about Galileos inclined plane experiments Galileo And Relativity - But More About Inclined Planes And Fun Simulations, which perhaps have not been really performed, but which we can find in museums.

Talking about relativity one should not forget Galileo's great contributions to - or perhaps in fact foundations of - physics. But more fun are Galileos researches on falling bodies and motion of projectiles, all mainly carried out by either real or Gedanken-experiments, the historians are not quite sure there.But these Galileo experiments have been realized later and are both on YouTube and in Italian museums. Here is a schematic picture, the rolling ball will produce regular bell sounds.

I am taking part in discussions with Sascha Vongehr about the MIT video - here on this site - Falling Faster Than Freefall: A Lesson In Didactics And Critical Thinking.I have played with the problem in a toy simulator  ( see PHUN (download), scroll a bit down) and have fun..From my post there: