Physics
drorzel | December 20, 2009I've been playing around with the spiffy sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler wrote, because I'm a great big dork, and enjoy playing with graphs. Here's a graph of the sales rank vs. time through 2pm EST today (plotted in Excel from the data table at the bottom of the page):
As I noted in my previous post on this, the downward-going jumps are striking, and probably indicate discrete book purchase events. There also seems to be a clear trend that jumps starting at higher numbers are larger than jumps starting at lower numbers. If we assume that's the case, what does that tell us about the…
drorzel | December 20, 2009I was Googling for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" last night, to check whether a review of said book that I know is coming has been posted yet (side question: Does anybody know a good way to exclude the umpty-zillion versions of Amazon and other sellers from this sort of search? Most of the results are just product pages at one online retailer or another.). The review I was looking for isn't up yet, but I did find a goodreads page, a nice entry at the Cincinnati public library calling it "abstract science delivered painlessly," and this pre-publication alert from Library Journal.
"Wait a…
drorzel | December 19, 2009I gave a talk last night to the Albany Area Math Circle, a group of high-schoolers who are interested in science and math, and enter and do very well in national math competitions. I think there were 48 kids there last night, which was pretty impressive.
I gave basically the same talk I gave at Boskone on the Many-Worlds Interpretation, including reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4. I made an effort to update the SF references a little, to things that people born in the early 1990's might recognize. (Wow, I feel old.)
The talk was probably a little too abstract for the audience, and I…
rallain | December 18, 2009Fight Science is an entertaining show. Great graphics. The basic idea is to look at the science in different fighting styles. They had a clip-style commercial on it during a MythBusters episode I was watching. And from that, I can say that the kicking looked cool, but the science needs some work.
The Setup
The basic idea is that they wanted to compare kicks from different fighting styles. From what I can gather, they collected data by having some dudes kick this "kicking bag". During the kick, they measured the force exerted on the bag and they had a sensor on the kicker's leg - I…
esiegel | December 18, 2009One of the reasons I write here on ScienceBlogs is because of our associations with the New York Times, a journalistic news source that I'm proud of on most days.
Today is not one of those days.
It isn't just the Times, either, the BBC is busy botching this story, so is the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and pretty much everyone else, except for TG Daily, which got it right.
If you go down to the bottom of Soudan Mine in Minnesota, you'll see an usual site for a mine: a group of giant physics experiments! Why? At the bottom of mineshafts, you have up to hundreds of feet of Earth protecting you…
drorzel | December 18, 2009How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is now listed as "In Stock" at Amazon, so it's the perfect time to order a dozen or so copies for your last-minute holiday gift needs.
"But, wait," you say, "why do I want to teach my dog physics? Particularly quantum physics-- why does anyone need to know that?"
The answer is: "Lasers." Lasers are pretty awesome, right? Let's ask an expert:
If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!
OK, maybe he's a bad one to ask. Still, lasers are pretty awesome, and lasers…
drorzel | December 18, 2009I've been dimly aware that physics in the UK was being hit hard by a financial crisis for a while now. It seemed to be a bit deeper than what people in other countries complain about, but I hadn't given it much thought until I read this Physics World story on the latest cuts, which includes the following explanation:
The origin of the cuts can be traced back to December 2007 when the STFC announced that it had an £80m budget deficit for the UK government's current spending round that lasts from 2008 to 2011. It is thought that the deficit emerged by an accounting mistake was made when the…
drorzel | December 18, 2009As a physicist with a blog, I am contractually obligated to do a post on the CDMS almost-a-result. This is that post.
The short version: they expected at most 0.8 events (that's total events, not events per day, or anything-- this is a whole community built on detecting nothing at all), and got 2, with maybe a third that was close to making the cut, but didn't. I think Joe Fitzsimons on Twitter summed it up best, writing:
Isn't that the least informative number of events possible?
It's more events than expected, but not enough to really be meaningful. The probability of this level of signal…
drorzel | December 17, 2009Quantum physics can sometimes seem so arcane that even humans don't need to worry about it, let alone dogs. It's actually tremendously important to our modern world. In fact, if you're reading this on a computer (and how else would you be getting it?), you have quantum physics to thank for it.
Computers are based on millions of tiny transistors manufactured on chips of silicon. These transistors are combined together to make "bits" that can be in one of two states, which we call "0" and "1." Manipulating these bits lets us do mathematical operations, write books about dogs, and watch videos…
drorzel | December 17, 2009Yesterday's reason to love quantum was the CCD sensor, which relies on the photoelectric effect to take digital pictures. Sticking with the photoelectric theme, today's first quantum-enabled technology is the photovoltaic cell, the basis for solar panels.
Photovoltaic cells convert light into electricity, essentially via the same photoelectric effect used in CCD's. A photon of light comes along, and knocks an electron out of some material (typically something silicon-based), and that electron is used to create a current that can power electrical devices. There's some tricky business involved…
rallain | December 16, 2009Maybe this could fall under my "physics of parkour". It could also apply to the MythBusters "dumpster diving" episode. In both of these cases, the question is: how far can you jump off of something and not severely hurt yourself. They do this a lot in parkour. Here are some examples:
There are a ton of these things on youtube. Let me go ahead and say it. I would not recommend trying any of this stuff. Even reading this blog won't adequately prepare you. So, if you go ahead and try to do some cool jump, don't blame me for your injuries.
Now that the warning is out there - let me get on…
drorzel | December 16, 2009I've been writing a bunch of publicity copy for the book the last few weeks, and one of those things is a list of reasons why every dog should know about quantum physics. I've been planning to chop that up into a bunch of individual blog posts in the run-up to the book, but the Washington Post beat me to (one of) the punch(es):
Getting a digital camera for Christmas? Before you fire it up to capture Uncle Wally's fateful fifth trip to the punch bowl, take a moment to picture this: You've got a genuine scientific marvel in your mitts. In fact, it took nothing less than two Nobel prizes and a…
drorzel | December 16, 2009While I'm thrilled to see How to Teach Physics to Your Dog listed on Amazon, I am distressed to see it offered as a pair with something called The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. I'm not linking to the Amazon page for that book, because it's a giant pile of crap, and I wouldn't want anyone to accidentally one-click-order it after following a link from my page.
If you should choose to look it up, you can read bits and pieces of it via the "Look Inside" feature, and it's true that the opening chapter or so is a reasonable-sounding description of the physics of quantum entanglement,…
rallain | December 15, 2009Maybe you have noticed how much material there was (for me at least) in last week's MythBusters. One of the myths they looked at was the bus jumping over a gap in the road from the movie Speed. I am not looking at that myth, it has been discussed many times in many places. Rather, I am going to talk about scaling the motion. As typical with the MythBusters, they like to make a scaled down version of the event. It's cheaper that way. In this case, they made a 1/12th scale model of the bus and the road. The question was: how fast should the model go?
The first question to ask is: what do…
milhayser | December 15, 2009
On Aardvarchaeology, Martin Rundkvist tells us that the Geminid meteor shower is peaking tonight, so if you've got any wishes on the back burner, now's your chance to make them. Of course these shooting "stars" are really bits of extinct comet 3200 Phaethon's "sandy exhaust trail" burning up in the atmosphere—if you prefer some main sequence hydrogen-fusing affairs, head over to Greg Laden's Blog to learn about Alcor and Mizar. This binary star system in the constellation Ursa Major has been known since antiquity, but—surprise!—Mizar is actually four stars, and Alcor is now known to be two…
drorzel | December 15, 2009It's exactly one week to the release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and to celebrate, I'm setting off on an expedition to the local mall(s) in search of Christmas presents. May God have mercy on my soul...
Anyway, I wouldn't want you to be without entertainment while I'm off helping the economy, so here's another little video to mark the one-week anniversary. This one is the dog dialogue from Chapter 5, on the quantum Zeno effect, and while it doesn't have puppets, it does feature some happy dog video, before settling down into still pictures and graphics:
We're at the point, now…
rallain | December 14, 2009There was a question from Jerry in a previous post:
"A simple question for which I can't find an answer: Why do you have to collimate light spectroscopy? What would happen if you didn't collimate it?"
The basic idea of spectroscopy is to look at the different colors of light coming from some source. Typically light from a source (like an excited gas) is passed through a diffraction grating that makes different colors bend different amounts (like a prism, only better).
Collimated light is basically light that is all going the same direction. How about I go ahead and draw a picture. This is…
drorzel | December 14, 2009In response to my post about Amazon sales-rank tracking, Matthew Beckler created just such a tracker:
That's the last few days' worth of hourly rankings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, as of 10am Eastern. Enormous dork that I am, I find this really fascinating, and not just in an absolute-number sense (because, really, these numbers don't mean much of anything).
The big thing that jumps out at me is the quantization of books. You see a bunch of sharp, downward-going jumps in the graph, which presumably correspond to discrete book purchase events. In between jumps, there's a slow upward…
drorzel | December 11, 2009I was sitting in my office on campus, working on some computer stuff, when I noticed a bunch of guys from Facilities out in the hall, bustling around doing something. A few minutes later, one of them stopped right outside my door, and called into the main Facilities office on his cell phone.
"We're up here in Science and Engineering to do the annual fire alarm test but, um, there are a bunch of faculty still in the building. Could you, you know, send them an email or something to let them know we're going to ring all the alarms?"
This wouldn't be a big deal if it were a one-off thing-- we are…