For two minutes during an intermission, Irving Langmuir filmed his fellow participants at the famous 1927 Solvay conference on electrons and protons. Langmuir’s 1927 Solvay conference film is now available online, thanks to Nancy Greenspan, who found the film while researching her recent biography of Max Born.
The aim of the Everyday Classroom Tools project is to encourage elementary-school children to make scientific sense of the world through their own observations and experiences. Among the tools offered is a lesson about Scandinavian Daymarks, an ancient, Sun-based way of telling time without a clock. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics hosts the project.
The weights-and-measures gurus at NIST have provided a set of links to online unit conversions. NIST doesn’t endorse the accuracy of the converters, which it didn’t produce, but does affirm their usefulness.
To suggest topics or sites for Web Watch, please visit http://www.physicstoday.org/suggestwebwatch.html.
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