ND Physics Dept.
The student-run committee of physics students dedicated to coordinating activities, events, and outreach programs for physics interested students on campus.
The Society of Physics Students (SPS)
The insect who's name is attributed to chaos theory graphs because of the flapping of its wings and the Lorenz attractor's shape.
What is a butterfly?
Hold a sheet of the gold leaf up to a light, and it glows this color.
What is green?
ND's 8 MV accelerator, completed in 1942, was immediately drafted into the Manhattan Project. It sat in the basement of the old Science Building.
What is LaFortune Student Center?
Kepler used his precise naked-measurements to uncover the Laws of Planetary Motion. He had a pet elk and a fake metal nose. He died of a bladder infection from "holding it in" at the dinner table of Baron Peter von Rosenberg.
Who is Tycho Brahe?
ND's 0.8-meter Krizmanich Telescope, one of the largest in Indiana, sits on the roof of this building.
What is Jordan Hall of Science?
In quantum mechanics, every observable must be represented by this kind of operator, which guarantees real measurement outcomes.
What is Hermitian?
From the muon's point of view, it reaches the ground because the atmosphere is squashed thin.
What is length contraction?
The year Einstein published his four groundbreaking papers on 1) the photoelectric effect 2) Brownian motion 3) special relativity 4) mass-energy equivalence (E=mc^2)
When is 1905?
The oldest leftover light in the universe, forming a faint microwave glow that fills all of space.
What is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMBR)?
The theme for 2026 physics disso...
What is Ultraviolet Catastrophe?
T2 ∝ a3.
What is Kepler's Third Law?
Short wavelengths scatter off air molecules far more than long ones, which is why the sky is blue.
What is Rayleigh scattering?
In 1899, before trying Saint Mary's, Green sent wireless signals from the physics lab in Science Hall (today's LaFortune) to this residence hall.
What is Sorin Hall?
In 1867, this French emperor gave ND a 6-inch telescope lens. It's still in use today, in a dome atop Nieuwland.
Who is Napoleon III?
The Nuclear Science Lab runs the FN tandem and the 5 MV St. ANA, and feeds beams into the St. George recoil separator. Its 3 MV tandem, installed in 2017, is named after this saint.
What is St. Andre?
The physical property whose SI base units are kg/(m*s^2).
What is Pressure?
X-rays bounce off electrons and come out with longer wavelengths, proving light carries momentum.
What is Compton scattering?
A major failure of late 19th-century classical physics predicting that a heated object would emit an infinite amount of energy at very short, ultraviolet wavelengths
What is The Ultraviolet Catastrophe?
ND is a partner in this Arizona telescope, the largest in the world on a single mount.
What is the Large Binocular Telescope?
Professors Hildreth, Jessop, Lannon, and Wayne lead ND's work on this CERN detector, which helped discover the Higgs boson in 2012.
What is CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid)?
A mathematical reformulation of classical mechanics that describes a physical system using position and momentum variables instead of position and velocity.
What is Hamiltonian Mechanics?
Experiments on entangled particles violate this, ruling out any theory where particles carry hidden pre-set answers and nothing travels faster than light.
What is Bell's inequality?
A Catholic saint. He championed the scientific method in medieval times, proposed the Milk Way is a vast cluster of stars, and that lunar dark spots are actually surface features.
Who is St. Albert the Great?
The most recently launched NASA space telescope designed to investigate dark energy, discover exoplanets, and advance infrared astrophysics. It has 100 to 200 times the field of view of Hubble.
What is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope?