Neptune

Night sky

Lieksa, Finland

October 2018

One of the challenges in studying tornadoes is being in the right place at the right time. In that regard, storm chaser Brandon Clement hit the jackpot earlier this week when he captured this footage of a tornado near Sulphur, Oklahoma from his drone. He was able to follow the twister for several minutes until it apparently dissipated. 

Scientists are still uncertain exactly how tornadoes form, but they’ve learned to recognize the key ingredients. A strong variation of wind speed with altitude can create a horizontally-oriented vortex, which a localized updraft of warm, moist air can lift and rotate to vertical, birthing a tornado. These storms most commonly occur in the central U.S. and Canada during springtime, and researchers are actively pursing new ways to predict and track tornadoes, including microphone arrays capable of locating them before they fully form. (Image and video credit: B. Clement; via Earther)

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope

While we’re waiting for some hopefully good news that the amazing instrument is returning to service (down since October 5 due to a gyro dyfugalty) here are some of the Hubble Space Telescope’s top pics.

:’(

The IAU reclassifies Pluto as a dwarf planet. (2006)

Liquid oxygen is magnetic

Liquid oxygen sticks between the poles of a strong magnet until it boils away into its gas state. This is because it has unpaired electrons, which make each oxygen molecule a tiny magnet with a dipole. Normally, when oxygen is in a flask or in the air, these microscopic magnets point in all directions, cancelling out and meaning that there’s no net magnetic field. When it pours over the permanent magnet, the magnetic molecules all slightly align, creating an induced magnetic field, which reacts with the permanent magnet, making the oxygen stick to the poles. This is called paramagnetism. Click here to watch the video.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in  the Natural Sciences

Scholars have often expressed astonishment for how well mathematics works to describe our physical world. In 1960, Eugene Wigner published an article with the title above commenting that

…the mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads, in an uncanny number of cases, to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

Here are some others’ thoughts:

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

— Albert Einstein

Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.

— Max Tegmark

Physicists may have fallen prey to a false dichotomy between mathematics and physics. It’s common for theoretical physicists to speak of mathematics providing a quantitative language for describing physical reality… But maybe… math is more than just a description of reality. Maybe math is reality.

— Brian Greene

More info at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences

[Mathematics is] a very powerful and effective language invented by humans to describe and discover patterns in nature. When we perceive beauty in the mathematics, I think what we’re really perceiving is an underlying beauty in nature itself.

Jim Baggott, Quantum Space