www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Science Stuff (See also my pages on Biology, Cosmology, and Evolution...)

"...I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

"I have become a lonely old chap who is mainly known because he doesn't wear socks and who is exhibited as a curiosity on special occasions."

"Werner Heisenberg enunciated the 'Uncertainty Principle.' You can never perform the same experiment twice. Heraclitus, living in the old acoustic world before Greek literacy, said, 'You can't step in the same river twice.' And today in the electric world we say, 'you can't step in the same river,' period."

"First we are all struck with awe and wonder when we contemplate the universe around us, whether we think of the depths of space in astronomy, or of the incredible complexity of even the simplest forms of life, or of the structure of mountains, or of ecology, or of the intricate web of human relationships. Anyone not so impressed must be very insensitive."

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

In the early 2000s, Roger studied at LSU's CAMD facility and then at a test reactor in Maryland.

Do Not Feed the Scientists! CAMD Synchrotron Facility, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Roger visiting Roger at CAMD October, 2000

RVW's Nuclear foot at NIST Summer 2001

KamLAND:
(Kamioka Liquid scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector)

In May, 2004, RVW took us on this fantastic tour of KamLAND, a Neutrino detector he'd been working on a kilometer or two inside a Japanese zinc mine. We took a jeep ride into the bowels of the mine and then hopped out to get a close-up view the detector and the experiment KamLAND is engaged in. (Super-Kamiokande was the first experiment to show that neutrinos have a non-zero mass. However, even today we don't know exactly what the mass is, just that its much smaller than than of other particles. KamLAND confirmed that an important theory of neutrino oscillations and thereby confirmed that we have a good understanding of nuclear processes happening in the sun.) Click Here for KamLAND's homepage...

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6	7	8	9	10

Click Here for more on our visit to Japan...

Click Here for Roger A. Wendell's Neutrino Animation!

The Three Families of Fundamental Particles:

Family 1

Particle	Mass - in multiples of the proton mass	Electric charge	Weak charge	Strong charge*
Electron	.00054	-1	-1/2	0
Electron-Neutrino	<.00000001	0	1/2	0
Up Quark	.0047	2/3	1/2	red, green, blue
Down Quark	.0074	-1/3	-1/2	red, green, blue

Family 2

Particle	Mass - in multiples of the proton mass	Electric charge	Weak charge	Strong charge*
Muon	.11	-1	-1/2	0
Muon-Neutrino	<.0003	0	1/2	0
Charm Quark	1.6	2/3	1/2	red, green, blue
Strange Quark	.16	-1/3	-1/2	red, green, blue

Family 3

Particle	Mass - in multiples of the proton mass	Electric charge	Weak charge	Strong charge*
Tau	1.9	-1	-1/2	0
Tau-Neutrino	<.033	0	1/2	0
Top Quark	189	2/3	1/2	red, green, blue
Bottom Quark	5.2	-1/3	-1/2	red, green, blue

*Each type of quark can carry three possible strong-force charges that are labeled as colors that represent charge values.

Miscellaneous Definitions:

• Angular Velocity - "...is the correct measure of rotation."  "The higher the angular velocity, the faster the body is turning."

Relativity and Common Sense by Herman Bondi)  Mathematicians say it's the time a body takes to turn through an angle of just over 57 degrees [180°/Π to be precise (Your browser may not be displaying 180 Degrees divided by Mathematical Pi)].

• A slice of Phi - 1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980... (The Divine Proportion)
• A slice of Pi - 3.14159265358979323846264...
• Birefringence - the separation of a ray of light into two unequally refracted, plane-polarized rays of orthogonal polarizations, occurring in crystals in which the velocity of light rays is not the same in all directions.
• Cerenkov Radiation - Highly radioactive objects, when observed under water, become bathed in an intest blue light. In the water used in nuclear reactors, including the storage of spent fuel pieces, this light is easily seen and photographed. This "Cerenkov Radiation," as it is called, is caused by particles entering the water at speeds greater than what light is capable of traveling through that same medium. As these particles slow down, to that of light through water, they produce a cone of light that's analogous to the bow wave of a boat. Such a bow wave, in the case of a boat, is caused when the boat is moving through the water at a speed greater than the wave speed on the water's surface. This bow wave effect of Cerenkov Radiation is also similar, in ways, to the sonice boom of high speed (greater than the speed of sound) aircraft.
• Jiffy - 1/100th of a second.
• Laccolith - a volcano that never erupted.
• Mole - a basic chemistry measurement using Avogadro's Number 6.023 X 10²³ (National Mole Day takes place every October 23rd...) [Also defined as the amount of pure substance containing the same number of chemical units as there are atoms in exactly 12 grams of carbon-12 (i.e., 6.02 x 10^23)].
• Planck Length: - a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimerter (Actually, it's 1.6 times 10 to the negative 35th centimeters, or about 10 to the negative 20th times the size of a proton).  For a sense of scale, imagine an atom being magnified to the size of the known universe, the Plank legnth would be the height of the average tree...
• Planck Time: - is the time it would take a photon, travelling at the speed of light, to cross a distance equal to the Planck length.  This is "Quantum Time," (Not to be confused with "Miller Time") the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10 to the negative 43rd seconds.
• Precautionary Principle - In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. [Article 15 of the Rio declaration of 1992]
• Precession of the perihelion of Mercury - A long-time problem between Newtonian physics and General Relativity concerning the orbit of Mercury. As Mercury, or any other planet, orbits the Sun the path it takes follows, approximately, an ellipse. The point of closest approach of Mercury, to the sun, does not always occur at the same place but that point of closest approach slowly moves around the sun. This rotation of the orbit is called a precession.
• Vacuum Energy - underlying background energy that exists in space even when devoid of matter.

Papers, Theses, Dissertations, and other Text:

• Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillation Analysis With Sub-leading Effects in Super-Kamiokande I, II and III Roger Wendell, et. al (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration)
• Three Flavor Oscillation Analysis of Atmospheric Neutrinos in Super-Kamiokande by Roger Alexandre Wendell (PDF file, 12 mb)
• Triple Phasor Paradox - The Polarization Puzzle explained by Roger A. Wendell (Click Here for the YouTube video)
• Unitary Integration (Embedding dissipation and decoherence in unitary evolution schemes) A. R. P. Rau and R. A. Wendell
• Detector Efficiencies and muon tracking at KamLAND - Roger A. Wendell (PDF file, 651 kb)
• Detector Efficiencies and muon tracking at KamLAND - Roger A. Wendell (PS file, 3.285 mb)
• Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation with KamLAND: Evidence of Spectral Distortion - T. Araki et al, The KamLAND Collaboration (including R. A. Wendell)

Links, Pix, Games and Graphs:

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