So.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging works on the basis of looking

each electron has a pair, so this would be invisible to ESR.

at how the nuclei of atoms interact with big external magnetic fields.
but all of the electrons in an atom also have little magnetic fields, so… we can do the same sort of thing to the electrons in an atom!

the technique is called “Electron Spin Resonance” and we can use it to look at all sorts of amazing things: from how much radiation an object has been pelted with, to the shape of a folded up protein, to how locating free radicals in our bodies.

our guest today is Diana Goodman, genius movie buff, and host of the Thirty Twenty Ten Podcast.

Physicists:Dr. Nicole Prent, Dr. Jacqueline Townsend

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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Finally, a little glass from the titanium physicists podcast.
this episode is fascinating!!

hold onto your glass

the deal with glass is that it’s not a crystal.
i’m sure you’ve heard that before but what does it mean?
the answer is amazing.

materials science is amazing!!!

our guest today is Bobak Ferdowsi, the handsomest man at NASA. You can follow him on twitter right here, and his webpage is here,  but if you keep following him you might end up wandering around a distant planet for the rest of your life.

Our physicists are Dr. Jessica Rimsza, a materials physicist currently at Sandia National Labs; and Dr. Jane Cook, a materials physicist who is the chief scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Physicists:Dr. Jessica Rimsza, Dr. Jane Cook

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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Okay

i don’t want to alarm you but the moon is shrinking

it’s getting smaller.

and smaller

and smaller.

and as it shrinks, its surface SHAKES.

and we’ve known for years.

The unchanging moon, sitting in the sky since the dawn of time? It is a figment of our collective imagination.

Today’s guest is an expert on Imaginary Worlds! Indeed, Eric Molinsky hosts a podcast by that very name!

To help me through all of this, I have recruited two notable planetary physicists! Meg Rosenburg and Briony Horgan. oh man this episode rocks.

Physicists:Dr. Meg Rosenburg, Dr. Briony Horgan

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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Okay, i’m going to be straight with you: i couldn’t think of a good pun for this episode. I’ve been working on it for so long, I just published it with the best name i could think. I’m sorry i’ve let you down.

BUT THIS EPISODE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN BECAUSE IT’S AMAZING.

this is from the wikipedia page about the reports of measuring faster than light neutrinos.

beams of neutrinos!

remember neutrinos? the little particles that nothing can touch?

well we make beams of them.

why? how?

these are great questions.

to ask them, i’ve invited WILL SMITH. Will is a science and technology journalist par excellence.One of the founders of the tested.com websites, his current project is to start the world’s first virtual reality TV talk show: The Foo show!

Physicists:Dr. Ken Clark and Dr. Tia Michelli

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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Muons are very small fundamental particles that are much heavier than they should be. their name is pronounced “mew-on” btws.

anyway, they fall apart pretty quickly, but they rain down on us from the upper

i got this picture from this other webpage

atmosphere at almost the speed of light. It’s magical, and fascinating and pretty useful. They cascade down from spaaace!

Our Guest this time is Sarah Gailey, the author of “River of Teeth” a story about hippos versus cowboys!!  She also wrote a ton of awesome essays about harry potter and you can also follower her on twitter.

Physicists:Dr.Ryan Martin and Diana Cowern (host of Physics girl youtube videos!!!)

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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There is a mystery.

in the center of our galaxy is an ENORMOUS black hole.
MILLIONS OF TIMES the mass of the sun.

Stars orbiting the black hole, 4 million times heavier than the sun, at the center of our galaxy

so large that it throws enormous stars around like they were pebbles thrown by an elephant. not a human, human’s aren’t heavy enough. an elephant.

but that’s not the mystery.

you know, these are the most powerful things in the universe, and as gas pours into them they are capable of producing light powerful enough to outshine entire galaxies… and we’re not even quite sure how all of that business with the plasma and the gas and the magnetic fields and the spiralling in works.

and that’s a mystery, but it’s not THE mystery.

see… in order for them to reach their ENORMOUS SIZE would, as normal physics would have it, take LONGER THAN THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE. hahaha! what a wonderful thing to discover!

Today our guest is a person I’ve wanted to meet for years: The founder of the Skepchick website, Rebecca Watson. Here is her Twitter, here is her Youtube channel, and here is her Patreon page.

Physicists:Dr. Katie Mack and Hannalore Gerling-Dunsmore

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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Okay, lets get the spelling over first:
“The Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect.“

The idea is that the photons we see from the cosmic microwave

This is the Picture of Temperatures/Densities in the Cosmic Microwave Background. It was taken by the WMAP satellite!

background will backlight everything that we can see. Most things don’t really interact with these cold photons… but some things can. The hot gasses surrounding giant clusters of galaxies.

and so, we can see the shadows of these things in the cosmic microwave background pattern!

OH MAN OH MAN!

The guest is Ted Leo, the dude who made the intro to our show!!

Physicists: Danica Marsden and Michael Zemcov

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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Oh man! It’s season 6!

Listen. Today’s episode is bananas.

it’s about a type of thing called a “quasiparticle:” a phenomena that acts like a particle.
Today we’re talking about Phonons: quantized vibrations in a crystal.

that’s right. vibrations in a crystal are mathematically particles.

Absolutely bananas.

Today’s guests are Megan and Anthony Leon from Hawaii!!!

Physicists: Fiona Burnell, Darren Peets

Intro Music: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists 

Exit Music: John Vanderslice 

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My name is Dr. Ben Tippett, and I have some people I would like you to meet. Over the course of my travels, I have collected a team of the world’s smartest, most clear thinking, and well spoken physicists and astronomers.

I call them my Titanium Physicists!

Every episode, I bring together two of my physicists with some of the most fun and interesting people I have ever met, and we have a conversation about a wizard-level physics topic.  It’s fun, and fascinating, and entirely unique.

If there is a specific physics topic you are interested in learning more about, have a look through our “Topics” section. The blog below will feature our most recent episodes as they are posted.

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I Just want to take a moment to celebrate this enormous achievement.

ligo detects gravitational waves, chirp, ringdown

The LIGO collaboration has just announced that it has directly detected the gravitational wave signal from a pair of colliding black holes.

We have already done a ton of shows on the topic (here is a list), so i’m going to leave the technical explanations of black holes to past and future shows.

this episode is just me, reflecting on the announcement. it was a heroic effort, and a massive accomplishment. The names of the physicists involved  surely will live forever.

congratulations, everyone!

*ADDENDUM*
i just read the paper. so many many people worked so hard on it. and the paper is so well written.

it is indeed a 36 (ish) solar mass black hole colliding with a 29 (ish) solar mass black hole to make a 64 (ish) solar mass black hole. The event is being called “GW150914”. In the end, they were going too fast, and were too close together to be neutron stars.

i want to take a moment and talk about the process, because careful scientists will want to know the probability that this is a false detection.

1. There are (were) 2 detectors online (at the time), and they both have to detect the same type of signal at about the same time to be taken seriously.
2. They have TWO independent ways of analyzing the data, to make sure that it’s good. Their data is potentially contaminated with sound waves and vibrations from earth, so a lot of work goes into isolating the system, listening for the earth-based sound waves, and using it to eliminate potential events.
   1. One of the methods listens for things that are weird (both detected it) and loud and definitely aren’t sound waves (based on their other instruments). GW150914 was All of these.
   2. The other method analyzes the data as it comes out of the detector, “listening” for certain signals, as described by a catalogue of 250,000 different templates (theoretical waveforms generated  using numerical simulations of different possible mergers). signals aren’t taken seriously unless both LIGO sites heard the same “type” of signal. GW150914 also passed this test.

So yeah. Both tests detected the same thing, and  they are very very very very confident that what they heard was black holes merging.

The data from the LIGO paper in phys. rev. lett.

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