The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Wet dog shaking
This piece of study is something that should never be missed. It is perhaps one of the best examples exemplifying what science is all about: Just being curious and trying to find out how things actually happen. This work looks at how fast a wet dog wriggles its body to shake off the water sticking to its fur. These authors from Geogia Insttitute of Technology set up a model and compare the results out of this model to reality. They photographyed a range of animals and figure out the wriggling frequencies. Their model predicted the frequency should be proportional to the square root of the belly radius of the animals, close to the observations that yield an exponent of 0.75 rather than 0.5. [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/20/physicists-find-perfect-speed-for-wet-dogs-to-shake-at] In this link, there is a video that sumarizes their interesting and provoking work.
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