So apparently I got a 5/40 on my first advanced fluid mechanics homework. Oops.
But today we learned how the famed physicist/mathematician Boltzmann (like Boltzmann's Constant!) killed himself after his work was roundly criticized by Mach (like Mach number!) and some other contemporaries (except for Maxwell, like Maxwell's Equations, who worked with him... hence Maxwell-Boltzmann!)

He had just discovered the second law of thermodynamics, the law of Entropy, that is, the law that says that the net state of the universe will always tend towards increasing disorder. So basically, if you have a closed system, (no energy is entering it!) then everything will get more and more disordered as a function of time. It was rejected by many scientists for whom he had great respect. He actually killed himself *just* before experiments proved that he was right.

I may be appallingly bad at advanced fluid mechanics, but I am smart enough to know that killing yourself is a really stupid idea.

Which technically makes me smarter than Boltzmann.


Sweet.


Boltzmann's actual tombstone:

lol, awesome! There should totally be a math and science history class. I think that would be pretty sweet.

Happy Valentine's Day!
» jinyu on 2008-02-14 02:59:18

I remember that story from P-Chem. (Generally not a fun class. Especially the part where after studying continuously for hours and hours, I walked into the midterm so full of knowledge that none of it was able to exit my brain, having been crammed in there too densely. I literally wrote my name and nothing else. Luckily, my prof believed me when I said I studied super hard for the test and gave me a chance to work out the problems on the test the following day ON THE BOARD IN HIS OFFICE, where I managed to do exceedingly well. Well, "exceedingly well" relative to how I had been doing in that class previously [which was not very well at all].)
» ranor on 2008-02-14 03:54:42

So today I was reading my physics textbook's chapter on magnetism and they made reference to cyclotrons and our famous (?) fellow Pomona alumnus Robert S. Livingston and his more famous collaborator, E.O. Lawrence, for whom the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs are named.

The odd thing was that in the book, they called Livingston "M.S. Livingston" instead of "R.S." This is either a typo or an example of complete ignorance, neither of which I will stand for!

The author of the textbook should know better; he's a professor at Cal Poly Pomona so he could easily have traveled all the way to Claremont to do some factchecking. Or, you know, he could have used GOOGLE for crying out loud...
» ranor on 2008-02-14 02:01:26

Completely unacceptable!
That's why I like my name. As far as I know, there is no R.B. Basa out there publishing scientific papers. And if there is, there probably isn't an R.C.B. Basa out there. So take THAT, name clones!

R.S. is the one who went to Pomona. Maybe they're brothers. Or cousins. Or... not. Maybe their identical middle initials and last names means they are somehow fated to work with cyclotrons. Who knows?
» ranor on 2008-02-14 05:28:25

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