Lagrangian mechanics lectures by Michel van Biezen (2017) Updated 2025-07-16
Author: Michel van Biezen.
Lattice Microbes Updated 2025-07-16
GPU accelerated, simulates the Craig's minimized M. genitalium, JCVI-syn3A at a particle basis of some kind.
Lab head is the cutest-looking lady ever: chemistry.illinois.edu/zan, Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten.
- 2022 paper: www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)01488-4 Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell by Thornburg et al. (2022) published on Cell
- faculty.scs.illinois.edu/schulten/lm/ actual source code. No Version control and non-code drop release, openess and best practices haven't reached such far obscure reaches of academia yet. One day.
- blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/01/20/living-cell-simulation/ Nvidia announcement. That's how they do business, it is quite interesting how they highlight this kind of research.
Lamb-Retherford experiment Updated 2025-07-16
Published as "Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom by a Microwave Method" by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford (1947) on Physical Review. This one actually has open accesses as of 2021, miracle! journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.72.241
Microwave technology was developed in World War II for radar, notably at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. Before that, people were using much higher frequencies such as the visible spectrum. But to detect small energy differences, you need to look into longer wavelengths.
This experiment was fundamental to the development of quantum electrodynamics. As mentioned at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Shrinking the infinities", before the experiment, people already knew that trying to add electromagnetism to the Dirac equation led to infinities using previous methods, and something needed to change urgently. However for the first time now the theorists had one precise number to try and hack their formulas to reach, not just a philosophical debate about infinities, and this led to major breakthroughs. The same book also describes the experiment briefly as:
Willis Lamb had just shined a beam of microwaves onto a hot wisp of hydrogen blowing from an oven.
It is two pages and a half long.
They were at Columbia University in the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Robert was Willis' graduate student.
Previous less experiments had already hinted at this effect, but they were too imprecise to be sure.
Laser Updated 2025-07-16
What makes lasers so special: Lasers vs other light sources.
How Lasers Work by Scientized (2017)
Source. An extremely good overview of how lasers work. Clearly explains the electron/photon exchange processes involved, notably spontaneous emission.
Talks about the importance of the metastable state to achieve population inversion.
Also briefly explains the imperfections that lead to the slightly imperfect non punctual spectrum seen in a real laser.
- youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=188 says LED is "also monochromatic", but that is not strictly true, it has way way larger frequency band than a laser. Only narrower compared to other sources such as incandescent light bulbs.
- youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=517 stimulated emission. This is the key to laser formation as it produces coherent photons.
- youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=581 spontaneous emission happens too fast (100 ns), which is not enough time for stimulated emission to happen. Metastable electrons to the rescue.
- youtu.be/_JOchLyNO_w?t=832 the parallel mirrors select perpendicular photons preferentially
Laser vendor Updated 2025-07-16
Latin phrase Updated 2025-07-16
Levi-Civita symbol as a tensor Updated 2025-07-16
An Introduction to Tensors and Group Theory for Physicists by Nadir Jeevanjee (2011) shows that this is a tensor that represents the volume of a parallelepiped.
It takes as input three vectors, and outputs one real number, the volume. And it is linear on each vector. This perfectly satisfied the definition of a tensor of order (3,0).
LA-UR Updated 2025-07-16
Publicly released documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory are marked with this identifier. This is for example the case of each video on ther YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@LosAlamosNationalLab. E.g. Video "Historic, unique Manhattan Project footage from Los Alamos by Los Alamos National Lab" is marked with "LA-UR 11-4449".
www.osti.gov/biblio/1372821 contains "How to Get an LA-UR: Using RASSTI to Release Your Work" which is of interest: permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-17-26023. That document documents the acronym's expansion, plus it leaks some internal-only URLs such as lasearch.lanl.gov/oppie/service.
TODO is there somewhere you can search for the document for a given identifier? Some PDFs are listed at: sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/index2b.html
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Updated 2025-07-16
Founded partly due to the influence of Edward Teller who thought Los Alamos National Laboratory was not making good progress on thermonuclear weapons, large part of which was developed there.
LC circuit Updated 2025-07-16
When Ciro Santilli was studying electronics at the University of São Paulo, the courses, which were heavily inspired from the USA 50's were obsessed by this one! Thinking about it, it is kind of a cool thing though.
That Wikipedia page is the epitome of Wikipedia failure to explain things in a way that is of any interest to any learner. Video 1. "Tutorial on LC resonant circuits by w2aew (2012)" is the opposite.
Tutorial on LC resonant circuits by w2aew (2012)
Source. - youtu.be/hqhV50852jA?t=239 series LC circuit on a breadboard driven by an AC source. Shows behaviour on oscilloscope as source frequency is modified. We clearly see voltage going to zero at resonance. This is why thie circuit can be seen as a filter.
- youtu.be/hqhV50852jA?t=489 shows the parallel LC circuit. We clearly see current reaching a maximum on resonance.
Introduction to LC Oscillators by USAF (1974)
Source. - youtu.be/W31CCN_ZF34?t=740 mentions that LC circuit formation is the root cause for Audio feedback with a quick demo. Not very scientific, but cool.
LC circuit by Eugene Khutoryansky (2016)
Source. Exactly what you would expect from an Eugene Khutoryansky video. The key insight is that the inductor resists to changes in current. So when current is zero, it slows down the current. And when current is high, it tries to keep it going, which recharges the other side of the capacitor. Lean (proof assistant) Updated 2026-01-30
Source code:
- github.com/leanprover/lean4 why a separate repo per version... but it is what it is.
- github.com/leanprover/lean
The way Lean and Coq mix programming and mathematics is a thing of great beauty. This is especially notable in lean as you start to play with with things such as:
partialenv lean functions, and usingterminates_byto prove that certain functions terminate. Lean requires explicitly known if functions terminate or not to be able to use them in proofs.noncomputablefunctions. Lean allows you to define mathematical functions which you can't actually execute, and it tracks that explicitly
They are huge fans of Unicode characters! Check this out from a formal proof of the prime number theorem: github.com/AlexKontorovich/PrimeNumberTheoremAnd/blob/fbdbb5310d036d33b9797b35f3b04b08f2447a6e/PrimeNumberTheoremAnd/ZetaBounds.lean Here's map to Ascii: proofassistants.stackexchange.com/questions/954/does-lean-have-a-standard-ascii-representation/5289#5289
Their dependency graph thingy is just beautiful however: alexkontorovich.github.io/PrimeNumberTheoremAnd/web/dep_graph_document.html
Leanpub Updated 2025-07-16
Founder: Peter Armstrong
ruboss.com/ documents their stack, a somewhat similar choice to OurBigBook.com as of 2021, notably Next.js. But backend in Ruby on Rails. They actually managed Apollo/GraphQL, which Ciro Santilli would have liked, but din't have the patience for.
The founder/CEO Peter Armstrong www.linkedin.com/in/peterburtonarmstrong/ He looks like a nice guy.
Learning management system Updated 2025-07-16
A website, usually hosted by an university, that takes what is done in class, and pastes it online. It is already much more rational and efficient, and opens up the way for potential sharing outside of the institution (or by default paywalling as the University of Oxford did.
The fundametnal problem with VLEs is that they tend to not have enough incentives for students to contribute at all to the content. This is basically the major motivation behind OurBigBook.com.
Lebesgue integral of is complete but Riemann isn't Updated 2025-07-16
is:
- complete under the Lebesgue integral, this result is may be called the Riesz-Fischer theorem
- not complete under the Riemann integral: math.stackexchange.com/questions/397369/space-of-riemann-integrable-functions-not-complete
And then this is why quantum mechanics basically lives in : not being complete makes no sense physically, it would mean that you can get closer and closer to states that don't exist!
Liquid helium Updated 2025-07-16
4 K. Enough for to make "low temperature superconductors" like regular metals superconducting, e.g. the superconducting temperature of aluminum if 1.2 K.
Contrast with liquid nitrogen, which is much cheaper but only goes to 77K.
Lebesgue integral vs Riemann integral Updated 2025-07-16
Advantages over Riemann:
- Lebesgue integral of is complete but Riemann isn't.
- youtu.be/PGPZ0P1PJfw?t=710 you are able to switch the order of integrals and limits of function sequences on non-uniform convergence. TODO why do we care? This is linked to the Fourier series of course, but concrete example?
youtube.com/watch?v=PGPZ0P1PJfw&t=808 shows how Lebesgue can be visualized as a partition of the function range instead of domain, and then you just have to be able to measure the size of pre-images.
One advantage of that is that the range is always one dimensional.
But the main advantage is that having infinitely many discontinuities does not matter.
Infinitely many discontinuities can make the Riemann partitioning diverge.
But in Lebesgue, you are instead measuring the size of preimage, and to fit infinitely many discontinuities in a finite domain, the size of this preimage is going to be zero.
Which is why we then fall into measure theory!
Legato Updated 2025-07-16
Legendre polynomials Updated 2025-07-16
Show up when solving the Laplace's equation on spherical coordinates by separation of variables, which leads to the differential equation shown at: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Legendre_polynomials&oldid=1018881414#Definition_via_differential_equation.
Legendre transformation Updated 2025-07-16
This is how you transform the Lagrangian into the Hamiltonian.
Length contraction Updated 2025-07-16
Suppose that a rod has is length measured on a rest frame (or maybe even better: two identical rulers were manufactured, and one is taken on a spaceship, a bit like the twin paradox).
Question: what is the length than an observer in frame moving relative to as speed observe the rod to be?
The key idea is that there are two events to consider in each frame, which we call 1 and 2:Note that what you visually observe on a photograph is a different measurement to the more precise/easy to calculate two event measurement. On a photograph, it seems you might not even see the contraction in some cases as mentioned at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation
- the left end of the rod is an observation event at a given position at a given time: and for or and for
- the right end of the rod is an observation event at a given position at a given time : and for or and for
By plugging those values into the Lorentz transformation, we can eliminate , and conclude that for any , the length contraction relation holds:
The key question that needs intuitive clarification then is: but how can this be symmetric? How can both observers see each other's rulers shrink?
And the key answer is: because to the second observer, the measurements made by the first observer are not simultaneous. Notably, the two measurement events are obviously spacelike-separated events by looking at the light cone, and therefore can be measured even in different orders by different observers.
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