Tag Archives: muon

March 20, 2019

Spring Forecast: Muon Showers

In the March Mathness post I mentioned that one reason I love March is that it contains the Vernal Equinox, the official astronomical start of Spring. More importantly to me, it means six months of more daylight than darkness, and as much as I’m a night person, I prefer long, sunny days.

Well, today is the day! The equinox happened at 21:58 UTC (two minutes before 5:00 PM locally). What’s better is that, after all the miserable bitter cold and all that snow in February and into March, the weather is indeed finally turning. Deeply embedded in our mythologies is the idea of spring rebirth; New Year’s parties aside, this, today, is the true new year.

And the forecast is for muon showers!

17 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, equinox, muon, Special Relativity, spring, spring equinox, tau, vernal equinox | posted in Physics

April 13, 2015

SR #19: “It’s Twins!”

By Wyrd Smythe

sr19-0 We’ve covered a great deal of ground in the last four weeks. (Writing a series of posts this long is a new experience for me! I hope you’re getting something out of it, too.) We’ve learned that motion, velocity, simultaneity, and length, are all relative to your frame of reference — motion changes your perception of these things. This week we’ll see that time is also relative — motion changes that, too!

So far, we only needed a (very imaginary) train to demonstrate the effects of Special Relativity. An Earthly frame of reference was enough to illustrate how motion affects velocity, simultaneity, and length.

But when it comes to time, we’re gonna need spaceships!

51 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, cosmic rays, Emmy Noether, length contraction, light speed, light year, muon, space-time, Special Relativity, time, time dilation, time-space diagram, Twins Paradox | posted in Physics