Knate Myers - View From The ISS At Night

How do we know light is a wave?

Before I answer this question, I’ll need to briefly go over a wave property called superposition. Basically, superposition is the idea that two waves can be in the same position at the same time, and interfere with each other:

When the two waves add to each other and make a larger wave, we call this constructive interference. When the waves cancel each other out, we call this destructive interference. 

Now we’re going to move on to the Double Slit Experiment. Basically, you shine a beam of light at a piece of metal, cardboard, etc with two slits in it, with a surface behind it where you can see the light hit it. 

If light is a wave, what we’d expect to see would be an interference pattern created by the light from the first slit interfering with light from the second slit, which is exactly what we see. It’s a pattern of constructive interference (brighter regions) and destructive interference (darker regions), looking like this:

These images are helpful:

that is how we know light acts as a wave!!

Video: Camera inside a ball of water, in space!

During Expedition 40 in the summer of 2014, NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman — along with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst — explored the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity on the International Space Station. The crew “submerged” a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water the size of a softball and recorded the activity with a 3-D camera. (Video: NASA)

Comet shapes and characteristics from a Chinese silk book (Boshu) written during the Han dynasty (206 BC-22 AD)

Cameras, cameras, and more cameras. Cameras!

San Francisco sours on rampant delivery robots: 'Not every innovation is great'

Lawmakers pass regulations to cut down on delivery robots as pedestrians tire of sharing sidewalks with ‘aggressively entrepreneurial wet dreams’

Will it be appropriate to tip “robot handlers,” as when they were “delivery people”? Or will the robots pool their tips, and give their handlers a small cut?

When the wrong yoghurt is delivered two hours late and left dripping in the rain, will it be the robot or the handler who gets fired?

Just askin’. 

A Look Back At Astronaut Scott Kelly’s #YearInSpace

Map of Jupiter’s South

This map of Jupiter is the most detailed global color map of the planet ever produced. The round map is a polar stereographic projection that shows the south pole in the center of the map and the equator at the edge. It was constructed from images taken by Cassini on Dec. 11 and 12, 2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during a flyby on its way to Saturn. The map shows a variety of colorful cloud features, including parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the Great Red Spot, multi-lobed chaotic regions, white ovals and many small vortices. Many clouds appear in streaks and waves due to continual stretching and folding by Jupiter’s winds and turbulence. The bluish-gray features along the north edge of the central bright band are equatorial “hot spots,” meteorological systems such as the one entered by NASA’s Galileo probe. Small bright spots within the orange band north of the equator are lightning-bearing thunderstorms. The polar region shown here is less clearly visible because Cassini viewed it at an angle and through thicker atmospheric haze. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Great Red Spot of Jupiter

Calcite Cluster on Matrix

Locality:  Stoneco Auglaize Quarry (Maumee Stone Co. Quarry), Junction, Paulding Co., Ohio.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot as Viewed by Voyager 1 in February, 1979. The Great Red Spot is an anticyclone, three and a half times the size of Earth located in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. [1920 × 1080]