MARC LECONTE
18 articles published in Tangente
History and CultureN°209Dec 23, 2022What's new in the International System of Units (SI)
The 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures was held in November in Versailles (Yvelines). Participants were delegates from the states that had signed the Metre Convention.
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History and CultureN°79Aug 24, 2021In the midst of the quantum revolution
At the dawn of the 20th century, quantum theory set the world’s scientific community abuzz.
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History and CultureN°79Aug 24, 2021Physics lectures in tune with their times
In the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, Henri Poincaré was the sole scientist keeping alive the great French dynasty of mathematical physicists, whose ranks included Laplace, Ampère, Poisson and Fourier.
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History and CultureN°79Aug 24, 2021Special relativity: a forgotten father?
At the dawn of the 20th century, spectacular advances in science reveal the limitations of Newtonian theories in physics. A revolution is in the air, and it will take shape with the advent of general relativity. Many scientists, including Lorentz and Poincaré, are working towards it. History will remember Einstein, who publishes a groundbreaking paper in 1905.
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Math for everyoneN°201Aug 20, 2021The mathematics of chance at the heart of physics
The idea of introducing probability measures into models of physical phenomena dates back to the 19th century and runs through the work of Josiah Gibbs. The approach can be illustrated quite simply using... two magnets.
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N°77Feb 18, 2021Deep fingerprint detection using 3D imaging
Who hasn't seen an action-film character use a severed finger to pass through a biometric security gate? With deep fingerprint detection, that is no longer possible!
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KnowledgeN°198Feb 01, 2021A Nobel prize for black holes
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics honors black hole astronomy. Thanks to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, general relativity has at last been recognized by the celebrated Swedish institution—something that, surprisingly, had rarely happened before!
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Math for everyoneN°195Jul 14, 2020Units of measurement
Metrology is the science of measurement. Measuring means comparing a quantity with a standard. This requires a system of units. Several such systems have emerged over the course of history, evolving as scientific knowledge advanced.
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Math for everyoneN°71Jul 15, 2019The unification of physics
Physicists have two dreams. The first is to find a beautiful equation. The second is for that beautiful equation to describe all of physics. The Standard Model, string theory and loop quantum gravity are all candidates for a "theory of everything."
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Math for everyoneN°71Jul 15, 2019Dirac and distributions
Distributions generalize the concept of a function to account for discontinuous phenomena in physics.
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KnowledgeN°71Jul 15, 2019The first image of a black hole
Soon after the detection of gravitational waves, astrophysics and cosmology are buzzing once again with the publication of the first image of a black hole. These discoveries match theorists' predictions and lend further support to the theory of general relativity.
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N°71Jul 09, 2019Indispensable symmetry groups
Since Galileo and Newton, symmetries have played an important role in the development of physical theories. A symmetry can be identified with the invariance of a structure under a transformation.
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