Stars Young and Old (APOD 2009 March 26)
Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 9:05 pm
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090326.html
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Stars Young:
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Stars Old:
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Stars Young:
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Stars Old:
----------------------------------http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Plateau wrote: Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (October 14, 1801 – September 15, 1883) was a Belgian physicist.
<<Born in Brussels, he studied at the University of Liège (Liège), where he graduated as a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences in 1829. His thesis for the doctorate had been "On certain properties of the impressions produced by light upon the organ of sight". In 1835, he was appointed Professor of experimental physics in Ghent University. In 1836, Plateau invented an early stroboscopic device, the "phenakistiscope". The projection of stroboscopic photographs, creating the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of cinema. In the course of his researches he once kept his naked eye fixed on the sun for twenty-five seconds, and this imprudence brought on a choroid inflammation which, in 1843, resulted in total blindness. Being obliged to give up teaching, he nevertheless continued his experimental work. To this period belong almost all his famous researches on the statics of liquids freed from pressure, on surface tension, and on the properties of thin liquid plates. After 1844 Joseph Plateau had no laboratory but his study in his own modest home. He himself planned all the experiments and arranged all the details in advance. His assistants would announce in a loud voice everything they were doing, all that they observed, and the results of each process. Joseph Plateau would then dictate the notes and, later on, the text of the memoirs for publication. Plateau studied the phenomena of capillary action and surface tension (Statique expérimentale et théorique des liquides soumis aux seules forces moléculaires, 1873).
The mathematical problem of existence of a minimal surface with a given boundary is named for him. He conducted extensive studies of soap films and formulated Plateau's laws which describe the structures formed by such films in foams.>>
Plateau-Rayleigh Instability:
