Astronomy
drorzel | October 6, 2009The sneaky folks at the Nobel Foundation have thrown a spanner in the works when it comes to the Physics prize. All the speculation has surrounded exotic quantum effects and theoretical esoterica, and they turn around and give it to something -gasp- practical...
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics is split three ways: half to Charles K. Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and the other half to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor."
Now these aren't…
drorzel | August 20, 2009I tagged Steinn's post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it's been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like.
None of the subsequent discussion has answered what, to me, seems like the most obvious problem with the original story. Namely, why the insistence on publishing this as a Comment in the first place? I mean, here's the start of the saga:
1. Read a paper in the most prestigious journal in your field that "proves" that…
drorzel | July 30, 2009There's another paper about the Fermi Paradox highlighted on the arXiv blog today. This one describes extensive numerical simulations which purport to show that no more than 1,000 spacefaring civilizations can be exploring the galaxy with non-replicating slower-than-light robotic probes.
Of course, this is highly contingent on a bunch of assumptions about the behavior of these imagined aliens. Enough so that the numbers seem to be pulled out of the air-- why would you assume that robotic probes last 50 million years? What makes that a reasonable figure?
It's clear that the authors have put a…
drorzel | July 23, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Mike Sperry, who works for a planetarium company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a Research Specialist/Scientist for Sky-Skan, a planetarium company. The company focus on everything from the software…
drorzel | July 20, 2009The Internet has been all abuzz today over the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Tor has the best one-stop collection of reminiscences, but there are plenty of others. They're roughly equally split between "Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?" and "Isn't it a shame we stopped going.
I was a bit over -2 when the Moon landing happened, so I have no personal recollections to offer. It's a significant enough anniversary for a geek like myself, though, that I wouldn't want it to pass completely without comment.
Personally, while I have some sympathy for the laments that we stopped sending…
drorzel | July 20, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Dr. Richard Edgar of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory project at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which operates…
drorzel | July 20, 2009I'm watching an episode of NOVA scienceNOW (eccentric capitalization makes it hip!), and Neil deGrasse Tyson is doing a segment on extrasolar planets. I'm only half listening, because I'm also trying to keep SteelyKid from trying to eat any of the furniture, but it's quite good.
All of a sudden, Emmy's head snaps up. "Hey!" she says. "He owes me a cookie!"
"What?" I ask. "Who owes you a cookie?"
"The human on the tv. He was just explaining science using dogs. Inferior dogs. That's my job!"
"Technically, it's my job. I'm the one who does all the writing, after all." I rewind the DVR a bit to…
drorzel | July 17, 2009I've been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it's not hard to find more). For those who haven't read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the decision by the IAU to demote Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet."
I didn't think the point of this was all that difficult to figure out, but it seems to have created a great deal of confusion. Some of this is probably disingenuous, but a number of people seem to be genuinely…
drorzel | July 1, 2009I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled "Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light "-- somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish:
Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.
Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really…
drorzel | June 29, 2009While I've seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I'm not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik's Cube thing the next day, I figured I needed to read something of his, so I picked up a copy of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. Kate actually got to it before me (I was working on my own book, and didn't have much time for reading other people's non-fiction), but it's been serving as bedtime…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday:
Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus
Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life
An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. In a report published in the international science journal Nature today (25 June), European researchers provide evidence that this magnificent plume is fed by a salty ocean. The discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life as well as our understanding of how planetary moons are formed.
and:
Jets on Saturn's…
drorzel | June 10, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature's embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature's embargo.
So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I'd loooove to talk about), I'm writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors' potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged…
drorzel | May 8, 2009We had a colloquium yesterday from Ted von Hippel of Siena College, over on Route 9, about "White Dwarf Debris Disks and the Fate of Planetary Systems." The abstract was:
After a brief introduction to white dwarfs and debris disks, I will present observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes of metal-polluted white dwarfs with circumstellar debris disks. We measure the constituents of the debris disks, the elemental abundances of the material being accreted, and the accretion timescale. Our measurements support the idea that disruptions of asteroids created these…
drorzel | May 1, 2009Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can't recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn't also an SF fan.
So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were sorting through a bunch of old books left in the department after we cleared out Ralph Alpher's old office and some other old book collections, I grabbed it figuring I should check out some of his science writing. The book in question is The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes. It has a…
drorzel | April 28, 2009Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn't really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that the impact was as much as 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
One or two of the quotes in the piece sounded kind of snotty for a scientific report, but I marked this down as something to look at later. Later in the day, Ethan "Nitro"…
drorzel | April 17, 2009Via the arxiv Blog, a review article has been posted by the Haensch group with the title"Testing the Stability of the Fine Structure Constant in the Laboratory." The fine structure constant, usually referred to by the symbol α is a ratio of fundamental constants-- the electron charge squared divded by Planck's Contant times the speed of light (e2/hc)-- and usually assumed to be constant. Some beyond-the-Standard-Model theories of physics, though, include effects that could cause this ratio to change over time.
For this reason, people have been looking to see if the fine structure constant is…
drorzel | April 10, 2009My bedtime reading last night was an old pop-science book by Isaac Asimov, about black holes and astronomy generally. He talks at some length about the size and age of the universe, and just before I stopped and went to sleep last night, I reached his discussion of Cepheid variables, which begins thus:
In 1784 a Dutch English astronomer, John Goodricke (1749-1786)-- a deaf-mute who died at the age of 21-- noted that the star Delta Caphei (in the constellation Cepheus) varies in brightness.
After his death in 1770, Goodricke became a vampire, and continued his astronomical career for a…
drorzel | April 8, 2009New ScienceBlogger and American Gladiator Ethan Siegel of Starts With a Bang has a couple of nice posts about dark matter and how we know it's there (one, two).
These posts reminded me that I never did follow up on the discussion following my post about Magic World Media, who are looking to publish kids' books about science, and seeking kindergarten-level explanations about dark matter and dark energy. A few commenters expressed doubts about whether this could or even should be explained to kids at that level.
I don't have any strong feelings about the "should" question, but it seems to me…
drorzel | March 27, 2009The Tuguska event of 1908 is one of the most frequently "explained" events in recent history, trailing only the Kennedy assassination. The arXiv blog reports on the latest explanation of what knocked down all those trees without making a giant crater:
Now a new analysis by Edward Drobyshevski of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg Russia claims to have solved these problems. Drobyshevski concludes that the object that hit in 1908 was a comet (as have many scientists before him). But unlike the others, he has been able to calculate that this comet hit the Earth's atmosphere almost…
drorzel | March 26, 2009As a scientist with a blog, I am apparently contractually obligated to link to the New York Times Magazine profile of Freeman Dyson. If I don't, they'll take away my privileges as a scientist. (Of course, since those consist mostly of the right to review grant applications for the NSF, maybe it'd be worth the risk...)
I don't mind linking to it, though, because it is a nice piece of work. The focus is mostly on Dyson's (relatively) recent climate skepticism, because that's a high-profile offbeat opinion to have these days, but it gives a nice sketch of his background and accomplishments.
One…