"Synthetic" motion can be faster than light! The trick is to change the properties of a material in a way resembling a Mexican wave: Although no one leaves their seat, their organised motion creates a wave. We can make such a change in a material, faster than light, with intense laser illumination.
It works by reducing the game to an exact cover problem and using my implementation of Knuth's Algorithm X with Dancing links. If you give it a dictionary (and some forbidden words), It looks for valid placements of allowed words with depth-first search and finds an exact cover.
If anyone likes to play the NYT game #Strands, I just wrote a solver for it: github.com/razimantv/Da...
Cover of the "Solid state Physics" textbook by Ashcroft and Mermin. (Source|: Wikipedia)
#PhysicsFactlet:
The "Ashcroft/Mermin Project"
I will try to (likely very slowly) make one or more visualization per chapter of "Solid State Physics" by Ashcroft and Mermin, with the hope that they will be useful to people teaching/learning solid state Physics.
1/
Since Steven Strogatz now has a special chapter on the Kuramoto model, this seems like a good time to retweet my movie of 4 metronomes synchronizing! Pantaleone's derivation of the Kuramoto model from the mechanics of the system is here: pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/art...
I like the demonstration of asking someone to pluck their hair and showing that shining a pocket laser on it gives a diffraction pattern.
#Introduction - I am a theoretical nanophotonics researcher at Imperial College London. I study the cool things that happen when light meets materials at the nanoscale.
Here is an article I wrote a while ago on why nanophotonics is cool (and important!): qr.ae/pG3l20
Most of these academic pet peeves seem to arise from scientists being forced to play clown games for jobs and grants that we all would much rather not.