In the News
drorzel | May 11, 2014Over at Five Thirty Eight, Walt Hickey has a piece about cheerleading as a sport and injury rates, which is both a nice look at the way to use stats to measure the real danger level of an activity, and the sort of small details that can be teased out. The piece includes a table of injury rates for a wide variety of sports, seen above as the "featured image" and reproduced below. I don't really have anything much to say about cheerleading, but one thing did jump out at me from the table, leading to the question in the post title.
this table show concussion rates in competition and in practice…
drorzel | March 20, 2014So, there was this big story in cosmology the other day-- Tom Levenson's write-up is very nice-- which has been hailed as one of the greatest discoveries since the last greatest discovery, blah, blah, blah. And now that a few days have passed, we're starting to see the inevitable backlash, ranging from detailed technical analyses of possible other explanations to more general musings about the nature of peer review. I'm not qualified to evaluate the former, so I'm going to talk a bit about the latter.
The title of that Atlantic post is "'One of the Greatest Discoveries in the History of…
drorzel | March 18, 2014In which Rhett and I chat about the hot new discovery of primordial gravitational waves (maybe) very briefly before segueing into talking about LIGO, and Cosmos, and why "theory" is a terrible word, and the memorization of constants, and standardized tests, and time-lapse videos. You know, as one does.
Miscellaneous items:
-- I'm a little pixellated, as if I'm concealing my identity. I forgot to shut Kate's computer down, so it may have been doing online backups that chewed up bandwidth.
-- The von Neumann quote I butcher at one point is "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even…
drorzel | February 17, 2014In the previous post about luge, I mentioned that there was one thing that came up when Rhett and I were talking about this, namely why there are differences in times between racers. The toy physics model I set up last time suggests that the difference between riders is only a matter of aerodynamics-- two riders with the same mass and cross-sectional area ought to achieve the same speed. So why do they all get different times?
Well, if the sleds and other gear were all identical and locked into tracks, then mass and aerodynamics would be the entire story. But they're not-- the rules allow for…
drorzel | February 14, 2014In the Uncertain Dots hangout the other day, Rhett and I went off on a tangent about the physics of the Olympics, specifically the luge. If you're not familiar with this, it's basically psycho sledding: people riding tiny little sleds down a curved track at 80mph.
The "featured image" above shows Erin Hamlin of the US women's luge team during a training run (AP photo from here); she went on to win a bronze medal, the US's first in individual luge, so congratulations to her. The photo gives you an idea of what's involved: tiny sled, icy track, curved walls.
(In the Winter Olympics context,…
drorzel | January 31, 2014Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of "Dirac Monopoles". This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don't fully understand, so writing it up isn't a simple matter.
The really short version, though, is that a team of AMO physicists have created particles that are analogous to magnetic monopoles-- that is, to a particle that was only a "north" or "south" pole of a magnet, not both together like a conventional bar magnet (leading to my favorite social-media…
drorzel | October 31, 2013In 1967, a team of scientists hauled a big pile of gear-- electronics, particle detectors, a giant slab of iron-- into the burial chamber at the base of one of the pyramids at Giza. This sounds like a scene from a science fiction or fantasy novel-- throw in the fact that their first attempt was interrupted by the Six Day War and you've got an element of a Tim Powers secret history story-- but the goal wasn't the opening of an interdimensional portal or the raising of the dead. Instead, they were using astrophysics to do archaeology: their detectors measured the number of cosmic ray particles…
drorzel | October 6, 2013There was a great big New York Times article on women in science this week, which prompted no end of discussion. (I also highly recommend Bee's response at Backreaction.) It's built around the personal story of the author, Eileen Pollack, a physics major at Yale who decided not to go to grad school, and her story is compellingly told, providing a nice frame to her investigation of the question of why there continue to be so few women in the sciences.
Pollack comes out very much in favor of the notion that many women choose not to go to graduate school in the sciences because they don't…
drorzel | June 22, 2013One of the great things about "Fermi Problems" is that there are multiple ways of attacking them. So, for example, when considering the death ray plot yesterday, I used medical devices as an example system to assess the plausibility of the plot, while Physics Buzz talked total energy. But those aren't the only ways to approach this, and turning it over last night, I thought of another approach.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I normally think of light in terms of photon flux or energy flux, and one way to go at this would be to ask how many photons of light you'd be dealing with. The…
drorzel | June 21, 2013One bad thing about SteelyKid's preschool graduation yesterday was that it drained my phone battery, causing me to miss an interview request from a local TV station looking for somebody to talk about a a couple of local guys arrested for a plot to build a "death ray" from X-ray components. This is pretty far from my area of expertise, but, hey, I'd be willing to go on tv and talk about just about anything physics-related. And, as always, I promise to be at least 90% less wrong than Michio Kaku.
Of course, on another level, I'm kind of glad that I didn't get the message in time, because when I…
drorzel | April 12, 2013One of the reasons I held off on commenting on the whole E. O. Wilson math op-ed thing, other than not having time to blog, was that his comments were based on his own experiences. And, you know, who am I to gainsay the personal experiences of a justly famous scientist?
At the same time, though, this is one of the big things that makes the original piece so frustrating. He's speaking from his personal experience, but it feels like he's chosen to draw exactly the wrong lessons from it. The relevant anecdotes are:
During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright…
drorzel | April 12, 2013One of the hot topics of the moment is the E. O. Wilson op-ed lamenting the way math scares students off from science, and downplaying the need for mathematical skill (this is not news, really-- he said more or less the same thing a few years ago, but the Wall Street Journal published it to promote his upcoming book). This has raised a lot of hackles in the more math-y side of the science blogosphere, while some in less math-y fields (mostly closer to Wilson's home field of evolutionary biology) either applaud him or don't see what the fuss is about.
The split, I think, comes from the fact…
drorzel | March 15, 2013On Twitter and blogs, we're having another round of complaints about sensationalism and hype in science stories-- Matthew Francis and Gabrielle Rabinowitz are the latest to cross my social media feeds. I've also seen some stories recently (that I'm too lazy to dig up) complaining about the latest Higgs Boson stuff, and I'm sure if you wait ten minutes there'll be a biologist upset about something in Science this week.
The basic form of this is nothing particularly new: the argument is that by representing incremental improvements in science as Revolutionary! Developments! the media are…
drorzel | January 14, 2013Last week's post talked about the general idea of negative temperature, with reference to this much-talked-about Science paper (which also comes in a free arxiv version from which the figures used here are taken). I didn't go into the details of how they made a negative temperature gas, though, and as it's both very clever and hard to follow, I figure that deserves a post of its own.
Right, so last time you said that negative temperature just means you're more likely to find fast-moving atoms than slow ones, so all they need to do is whack these atoms in the right way? Right? No, it's more…
drorzel | January 8, 2013The most talked-about physics paper last week was probably Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom (that link goes to the paywalled journal; there's also a free arxiv preprint from which the above figure is taken). It's a catchy but easily misinterpreted title-- Negative absolute temperature! Below Absolute Zero! Thermodynamics is wrong!-- that obscures the more subtle points of what's going on here. So, in the interest of clarity, I'm going to attempt an explanation, over the course of a few posts, but given my schedule these days, that might spread over a couple of…
drorzel | October 15, 2012The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has just been announced, and goes to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design." I know basically nothing about these guys, but I assume they've earned their Sveriges Riksbank Prize, so congratulations to them. And congratulations also to John Novak, who correctly called Shapley in the annual betting pool.
I think that's all the winners for this year, both of Nobel Prizes and from the betting pool. If I missed one, please point it out to me. And if you…
drorzel | October 11, 2012In which we do a little imaginary Q&A to explain the significance of Tuesday's Nobel Prize to Dave Wineland and Serge Haroche.
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I did a quick post Tuesday morning noting that the latest Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two big names from my corner of the field. This would've been a great time to drop a long explainer post about what they did and why it's cool, but alas, I have a day job, and the Nobel committee stubbornly refuses to tell me who they're giving the prizes to in advance. Oh, well.
Still, I'm just vain enough to think I can add something a little different…
drorzel | October 9, 2012The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced this morning, going to Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland, "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems". This isn't a pair that was getting much love from the prognosticators, but they're an excellent choice. And, in fact, commenter KSC correctly picked Wineland in the betting pool and narrowly missed also getting Haroche.
Wineland has been on my mental list of people who ought to get a Nobel for a while, especially because he easily could've had a piece of the 1997 prize for laser…
drorzel | October 4, 2012It's that time of year again, when everybody pays attention to Sweden for a couple of months: the 2012 Nobel Prizes are about to be announced. Which means it's time for the game everybody loves to tolerate: the Uncertain Principles Nobel Betting Pool:
Leave a comment to this post predicting at least one of the winners of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. If one of your guesses turns out to be correct, you win the highly coveted right to choose the topic of a future blog post.
I'm adding an additional restriction to this year's contest, though: You're not allowed to pick anything related to…
drorzel | September 6, 2012So, it's been a while, but let's see if we can't hit the ground running with a good physics post. There have been a few notable physics events since I went on hiatus, but for a return to physics ResearchBlogging, we'll go with something near and dear to my heart, ultracold atoms. Specifically, this Science paper (free arxiv version) about passing atoms through a narrow channel. This is a cool bit of subfield-crossing physics, so let's dust off the Q&A format, and go through it.
Hey, dude, long time no see. So, what's the deal with this paper? Well, the title pretty much tells you what's…