Conner Dailey Physics graduate student, hobby photographer

Blog


Rigid Body Rotation

A neat and easy physics experiment is to try to rotate a tennis racket head-over-handle. If you do, it won't do it in a stable manner, it will flip along other directions too. You can also try this with your smartphone (carefully). There is always an unstable rotation axis for non-symmetric objects, and this is why.

A Quantum Mechanical Anecdote

Many people do not formally learn what quantum mechanics actually is, and unfortunately the closest many people might get to understanding what it really means is scenes from popular culture, like the movie Ant-Man. Here, I describe in the simplest terms possible to subject that has made physicists scratch their heads for over 100 years.

Thomas Rotation

I have found special relativity to be a very interesting subject. One thing I had a hard time with was replacing my non-relativistic intuition. On a quest to fully understand relativistic dynamics, I came across a concept known as Thomas (or Wigner) rotation. This subject is very math intensive, but I will try to make it as accessible as possible.

Content formatting in this blog

Here I show the Markdown syntax one can use to make HTML documents appear on the web, and some of the tools I have built to make reading this blog easier and more appealing.

Lanyon Theme for GitHub Pages

Lanyon is a website theme using Jekyll. It works beautifully with GitHub pages, and it places content first by tucking away navigation in a hidden drawer. It's based on Poole, the Jekyll butler.