Talk on The Math, Physics of Drag Racing

Thursday (4 Nov) there is a public lecture at COSI in Columbus you don't want to miss.  The talk will be given by Dr. Richard A. Tapia -- a big name in applied mathematics, an entertaining speaker, and long-time "champion of under-represented minorities in the sciences."

Tapia has received numerous professional and community service honors and awards including the annual Blackwell-Tapia Conference being named in his honor (his reason for visiting Columbus) and being inducted into the Texas Science Hall of Fame (yes, such a thing really does exist!).

Here are the details of his talk from the event flier (PDF):

Math at Top Speed: Exploring and Breaking Myths in the Drag Racing Folklore

November 4, 2010; 7:00pm @ COSI (doors open @ 6:00pm) Admission is free

For most of his life, Richard Tapia has been involved in some aspect of drag racing. He has witnessed the birth and growth of many myths concerning dragster speed and acceleration. Some of these myths will be explained and validated in this talk, while others will be destroyed. For example, Dr. Tapia will explain why dragster acceleration can be greater than the acceleration due to gravity, an age-old inconsistency, and he will present his Fundamental Theorem of Drag Racing. Part of this talk will be a historical account of the development of drag racing and several lively videos will accompany this discussion.

Speaker: Richard Tapia
University Professor Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering, Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM), Rice University

More about Dr. Tapia can be found here, here, and here.  More on the Blackwell-Tapia Conference can be found by clicking the "Blackwell-Tapia" link on this website.

Methane Hydrate Crystals Hamper Efforts to Contain BP Oil Spill

So what is a "methane hydrate", and how do methane and sea water mix to form the solid crystals currently growing on BP's 4-story containment dome?  The beauty of basic science is that we already know something about these crystals, and that knowledge may be the key to overcoming this setback in the ongoing efforts to manage the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Also known as methane clathrate, these crystals are a mixture of methane (CH₄) and water (H₂O) in which methane molecules are enclosed in a cage of water molecules (see the inset in the picture of the flaming ice on the left). Together, these complexes form the crystalline solid (see Figure 2 below) known as methane hydrate.

To understand more about how this mixture forms a solid at relatively high temperatures (Figure 3), let's first do a quick review of the physics of freezing and melting.