Monday, December 22, 2014

Chaos: The Film


Chaos: The Film

Hadamard's Pamphlets contains the paper "Les surfaces à courbures opposées et leurs lignes géodésiques" (p. 71; cf. Jaki's Uneasy Genius p. 350fn113), a classic in chaos theory that inspired "Duhem's bull" (e.g., in his Aim & Structure of Physical Theory p. 139 ff.). "Duhem's bull" is mentioned in part 5 of this Chaos: The Film.

Pierre Duhem & Thomas Kuhn

Friday, December 12, 2014

The Ultimate Speed by Dr. Bertozzi

description:
In his
youth, Dr. William Bertozzi, an MIT professor who has long been a
leader in experimental nuclear physics using beams of electrons, carried
out an experiment in which he explored the relationship between the
velocity of electrons and their kinetic energy by measurements over a
range of accelerating voltages between 0.5 MeV and 15 MeV. The kinetic
energy is measured using calorimetry and the velocity is measured by
time-of-flight. This educational film, made in 1962, documents the
experiment and shows that the electrons have a limiting speed equal to
that of light, in agreement with Einstein's theory of relativity.
cited in:

A. K. T. Assis and R. A. Clemente, The ultimate speed implied by theories of Weber's type,
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 31, pp. 1063-1073
(1992). Abstract: As in the last few years there has been a renewed
interest in the laws of Ampère for the force between current elements
and of Weber for the force between charges, we analyze the limiting
velocity which appears in Weber's law. Then we make the same analysis
for Phipps' potential and for generalizations of it. Comparing the
results with the relativistic calculation, we obtain that these theories
can yield c for the ultimate speed of charges or for the ultimate
relative speed between the charges but not for both simultaneously, as
is the case in the special theory of relativity.
reviewed in:

The Ultimate Speed W Bertozzi, I Aron - Am. J. Phys. 32, 234