Physics
drorzel | March 5, 2010Another dramatic reading of a chapter from How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, just because. This is Chapter 4, which is based on the original Many Worlds, Many Treats post that kick-started the whole thing:
I'm sitting at the computer typing, when Emmy bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she's sniffing the floor around my feet intently.
"What are you doing down there?"
"I'm looking for steak!" she says, wagging her tail hopefully.
"I'm pretty certain that there's no steak down there," I say. "I've never eaten steak at the computer, and I've certainly never dropped any on the floor."
"…
rallain | March 4, 2010Check out this thing.
That is where the guy (Jem Stansfield of BBC's Bang Goes the Theory) shows how he built this thing. Here is part 2 where he uses it to climb a building.
Here are some questions:
Why does it not matter how powerful the vacuum is?
How does a vacuum cleaner work anyway?
How does the vacuum cleaner work?
I know this is not HowStuffWorks.com, but I guess I should show some stuff. The cool thing about a vacuum cleaner (think shop vac so that I don't have to deal with the brushes) is that it is just one thing - a fan. The fan essentially moves air out of the vacuum part of…
drorzel | March 3, 2010I've been buried in work, so I haven't had time to do any real blogging, but I do want to post a quick reminder of this week's signing:
-- This FRIDAY, March 5 (that is, the day after tomorrow), I will be signing books at the Vestal, NY Barnes and Noble at 7pm. I'm not entirely sure what they expect, but at the very least, I will be signing books and answering questions. If they want me to read stuff, I can do that, too, and will bring along the unpublished dialogue that I read at Boskone.
If you're in the Binghamton area, and are looking for a way to kick your Friday night off with some…
esiegel | March 2, 2010Yesterday, I wrote to you about part 5 of The Greatest Story Ever Told, about how the Universe came to have more matter than antimatter in it. And many of you correctly responded that I had given too much detail and not enough explanation.
So, I want to try again for all of you. Here's the explanation, starting at the beginning.
The Universe inflated first, stretching it flat and making it uniform, both everywhere in space and in all directions equally. Then inflation ended, and all the energy that was making it inflate got dumped into particles and radiation. This part, when inflation ended…
esiegel | March 1, 2010For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained - and that's our present universe. -Albert Einstein
Welcome back to our series, The Greatest Story Ever Told, where we're recounting the physical history of the Universe, from before the big bang up through the present day. We're currently in a hot, dense, expanding Universe, filled with equal parts matter and antimatter, bathed in radiation, and it's been only a tiny fraction of a microsecond for all of this to happen.
But…
pontiff | March 1, 2010Summer school:
We would like to inform you of the upcoming 10th Canadian Summer School on Quantum Information & Research Workshop.
Save the dates: July 17-30, 2010
Location: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
For more information, visit our website: qi10.ca
Contact us: info [atatat] qi10.ca
This summer school on quantum information marks the 10th anniversary of the highly renowned series. This year the emphasis will be on quantum algorithms and models of quantum computation, with particular attention to mathematical methods. This summer school also includes a research workshop…
drorzel | February 26, 2010A couple of upcomign events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
-- Next FRIDAY, March 5, I will be signing books at the Vestal, NY Barnes and Noble at 7pm. This is the big-box chain store closest to my hometown, and my parents report already getting calls about it, which is weird but cool. If you're in the Broome County area, stop on by.
-- I will be at the APS March Meeting in Portland March 14-18 (getting in a little early, leaving a little early). I'm giving an invited talk, but haven't been able to line up anything more public, alas.
-- I'm giving a Physics colloquium at Williams…
drorzel | February 25, 2010One of the weird-but-cool things about being C-list famous on the Internet is that some publishers now send me unsolicited review copies of forthcoming books about science. These aren't always the books I would really like to get free copies of, but, hey, free books.
Among the books I've received in the last year or so is Anil Ananthaswamy's The Edge of Physics, which I got as an ARC several months ago-- I read a bunch of it in Houston at the Sigma Xi meeting back in November-- but I just realized that it's due out next Tuesday, and I really ought to post a review of it.
As you can guess from…
esiegel | February 24, 2010When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. -Harriet Beecher Stowe
Last week, our longtime reader Pamela asked if I could explain how the tides work. As you all know, when the tide comes in at the ocean, the water level appears to rise (and can do so significantly), while at low tide, the water level appears to drop.
This goes in a cycle twice per day, with the ocean level reaching its highest point twice daily (high tide),…
milhayser | February 23, 2010
Equations can hurt, although not as much as wiping out on the downhill or faceplanting in the halfpipe. On Dot Physics, Rhett Alain explains the amazing angles at which Apolo Ohno leans around the short track, writing "a skater wouldn't have to lean at all if the skater was stopped. As the angle gets smaller (approaching zero), the skater would have to be going faster and faster." On Built On Facts, Matt Springer investigates the somewhat more subdued sport of curling, where men with brooms lead forty pound stones to their targets. Crunching numbers, Matt concludes that "granite on…
drorzel | February 23, 2010What's the application? CD and DVD players use lasers to read (and in some cases write) digital information from convenient plastic disks.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do we store a large amount of digital information in a convenient and stable fashion?" 2) "How do we make everybody buy the White Album a second time?"
How does it work? The optics at the core of a CD player are very simple, and illustrated in this graphic that I lifted from the excellent explanation at HyperPhysics:
Light from a diode laser is collimated and then focused down onto the surface of the CD. The…
cevans | February 23, 2010
I made this compilation of so-called "hyperspace" scenes from science-fiction movies last year with my friend, the artist and businessman Mike Merrill. Although the film was initially meant to be a catalog of these scenes, the finished product has an ambient, meditative effect that speaks to the power of the very idea of the hyperspace.
The hyperspace (or, in the case of Star Trek, "warp speed") is an enduring concept in science fiction, seemingly because it provides a panacea for all conflict. Romulans hot on your tail? Human understanding reaching its limits? Unsurmountable distances to…
drorzel | February 23, 2010A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. What with one thing and another, this didn't get posted last week, but I don't intend to drop it completely, and will be finishing the series up in the next week or so. Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Lunar laser ranging
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/…
milhayser | February 22, 2010
Science is knowledge, and knowledge can inspire certainty. But certainty, as much a fruit of science, can be its enemy. Whatever wonders may meet the eye, there has always been more to the world. On Oscillator, Christina Agapakis explores the frontiers of synthetic biology, where researchers hope to manufacture "altered proteins or entirely different biological polymers" by creating a "parallel genetic code" that uses four-letter codons instead of three. On Starts With A Bang!, Ethan Siegel recounts two centuries of paradigm shifts, and asks what the next "new" law of nature will be.…
rallain | February 19, 2010Red Bull is sponsoring this sky dive from really really really high up - Stratos: Mission to the Edge of Space. Seems dangerous. The basic idea is that Felix Baumgartner will take a balloon ride up to 120,000 feet and jump out. Here are some questions:
Will he reach supersonic speeds?
The Red Bull site says: "can Felix react to a 35 second acceleration to mach 1?"
How about the claim that he will free fall for 5 minutes and 35 seconds? That seems pretty short.
In 1960, Joe Kittinger jumped from 102,800 feet. Will 20,000 feet make a large difference?
Assumptions
Clearly, this can be a…
grrlscientist | February 19, 2010tags: Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog, amazing science, sonic boom, Atlas V, rocket launch, amazing, beautiful, atmosphere, physics, astronomy, streaming video
This amateur video is absolutely amazing: recording the precise moment when a rocket goes supersonic, which coincides with the moment it passes through a layer of ice crystals in the atmosphere, creating a rippled effect that is just astonishing to see.
Solar Dynamics Observatory Launch, Feb 11, 2010: A sun dog is a prismatic bright spot in the sky caused by sun shining through ice crystals. The Atlas V rocket exceeded the speed of sound in…
pontiff | February 18, 2010The twelfth annual SqUINt conference is being held this week and unfortunately I'm missing my favorite conference (though a gaggle of grad students have been sent Santa Fe bound.) The schedule looks really good this year including a great list of invited speakers (Scott Aaronson (MIT), Rainer Blatt (Innsbruck), Matt Hastings (Station Q), Dieter Meschede (Bonn), Keith Schwab (Caltech), and John Watrous (Waterloo)). Notice the awesome mix of theory and experiment...good stuff. Hope everyone who is attending is having a fantastic time: have some green chiles for me please.
esiegel | February 17, 2010You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. -Albert Einstein
One of the most exciting parts of any scientific field is to imagine what the next big discovery is going to be. In the late 1800s, we thought we were almost at the end of physics. We had Newton's laws for gravity, our entire system of classical mechanics for describing force and motion, and…
drorzel | February 17, 2010A couple of reviews, an offer, and a mystery regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The reviews:
A review at suite101 that went up a while ago, but I somehow missed in the vanity search. It's a nice, detailed review, and if I had to pick a pull quote it would probably be: "You can be prepared for a good scientific romp throughout Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thinking like a dog is a big help."
Scott at a physics teaching blog has a more recent review: "I often pick up books and don't bother finishing them. This book kept pulling me back to discover what oddity was next. I…
drorzel | February 16, 2010Boskone this past weekend was held at the Westin Waterfront in Boston, which has these funky double showerheads that they charmingly call the "Heavenly(R) Shower" (hype aside, they are very nice showers). The picture at right is courtesy of lannalee on Twitter, as I didn't bring a camera.
Why am I telling you this? Because there was a sign glued to the wall in the shower that read:
Refresh yourself, restore our world
One of your Heavenly(R) Shower heads has been turned off in an effort to minimize water usage and protect one of our most precious natural resources.
The smarmy enviroweenieness…