Physics
This law can be stated as “Objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force).
What is Newton’s 1st Law?
This principle states that a floating object experiences an upwards buoyant force equal to the weight of fluid it displaces.
What is Archimedes' Principle?
These objects have gravitational fields so strong that not even light can escape them.
What are Black holes?
The instantaneous rate of change of a function.
What is the derivative?
This man’s annus mirabilis (miraculous year) papers were published in 1905 and revolutionized physics.
Who is Einstein?
These four equations form the basis of electricity and magnetism
What are Maxwell’s Equations?
Above energies of ~246 GeV, two of the four fundamental forces merge into this force.
What is the electroweak force?
This method of exoplanet detection uses the periodic decrease in flux from the star.
What is the Transit method?
The _____ of a linear transformation are vectors that do not have their direction changed by said transformation.
What are eigenvectors?
In 1906, she became the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and, among her many advancements in the field, coined the term “radioactivity.”
Who is Marie Curie?
This theoretical particle is the most accepted candidate for dark matter.
What is the Axion?
A “conservative” force is the gradient of this type of function.
What is a potential function?
The many instruments on the space-based James Webb Space Telescope and the Habitable Zone Planet Finder on the ground-based Hobby Eberly Telescope operate in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
What is infrared/IR?
This is the label given to geometries that do not obey the parallel postulate (“ If a straight line intersects two other straight lines, the two interior angles on the same side add to less than two right angles if and only if the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side.”)
What is Non-Euclidean?
While working as a grad student, she discovered the first pulsar.
Who is Jocelyn Bell Burnell
In Lagrangian Mechanics, this quantity remains “stationary” throughout the system’s trajectory
Action
This is a system of natural units defined by c, G, h-bar, and the Boltzmann constant.
What are Planck units?
This was a period of extremely low solar magnetic activity in the late 17th and early 18th century that led to lower global temperatures and even food shortages! (Additional fun fact: very few stars have been identified as having gone through one of these, but the first of which was HD 166620!)
What is the Maunder Minimum?
For a vector space, this is the set of linear maps from that vector space to the real numbers.
What is Dual vector space? (dual space, covector space).
Her eponymous theorem states that symmetries in a system’s lagrangian correlate to conserved quantities
Who is Emmy Noether?
The second most common semiconductor, this material is used in microwave frequency circuits, laser diodes, and solar cells.
What is Gallium Arsenide?
Rotations in 3D space distinctly do not have this mathematical property. This is part of the that angular velocity vectors are used to describe rotational motion, rather than an "angular displacement vector."
What is "commutativity?"
The first exoplanets ever discovered were found by Penn State faculty to be orbiting a pulsar. The planets found were of this type.
What is Terrestrial/super-Earth/rocky?
Although famous for his Hamiltonian Mechanics, Hamilton actually considered this complex number system his pride and joy. Consisting of 1 real part and 3 imaginary parts, it was a precursor to vector analysis and was the original language that Maxwell’s Equations were written in.
What are Quaternions?
Among many, many other achievements, this famous mathematician was the first to use the notation f(x) to represent the value of a function at a point and the first to use i to represent the imaginary unit.
Who is Leonhard Euler?