Physics
drorzel | February 20, 2008Regular commenter Johan Larson writes with a suggested blog topic:
The Human Genome Project (yes, you have to pronounce those capitals) cost about $3 billion. If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money?
That's a great question, and a great topic for a Dorky Poll. I'll narrow my response a little, because if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc. For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for…
drorzel | February 19, 2008An interesting tidbit that occurred to me in thinking about the "unexpected uses of technology" panel (well, along with the "Total Eclipse of the Heart" thing): In a certain sense, my entire professional career is derived from unexpected uses of technology.
I'm not talking about the physics-with-the-dog thing, though that's pretty unexpected, but rather my research career. I work in atomic physics, specifically the subfield of laser-cooled atoms, and the most important paper I wrote involved Bose-Einstein condensates of rubidium. In fact, I got my start in the field as a skinny undergrad…
drorzel | February 18, 2008I gave a talk at Boskone in the prime Sunday 10 am slot, on quantum teleportation. I read the opening dialogue from Chapter 8 of the book, and then did a half-hour (or so) explanation of the real physics behind quantum teleportation.
If you weren't one of the thirty-ish people who watched at least part of the presentation, you don't know what you missed. But you can get a little flavor of it by looking at the PDF version of my PowerPoint slides (1.1 MB). I think they're mostly comprehensible on their own, but even if they're not, there are cute dog pictures galore. So, you know, there's that…
pontiff | February 16, 2008Yes we work on Saturdays. Okay work may be the wrong word. Updated as the day goes along and my brain doesn't fill up (plus I'm chairing a session, so is it ethical to chair and blog at the same time?)
The first talk of the morning was by Edward Farhi. Farhi talked about the NAND tree algorithm (see the Optimizer along with quant-ph/0702144 and its plethora of follow up works.) This was only the second computer talk Farhi has given. That's right, hell has frozen over, and MIT physic professors have given up transparencies and are now using computers. I feel like an era has come to pass…
pontiff | February 15, 2008Live blogging from day one of the talks at SquInT 2008. Updated as the day goes along. So hit that refresh button :)
In a sign that history may be warping itself into a cirlce, the first speaker of the day was Serge Haroche, who was the first speaker at the first SqUinT conference ten years ago. Close time like curves anyone?
Haroche talked about quantum nondemolition measurements of a photon number in a cavity (see 0707.3880.) A quantum nondemolition measurement is a measurement of eigenstates which commutes with the free evolution of the quantum system (thus only external interactions…
drorzel | February 14, 2008The Physics Central Nanobowl collected YouTube videos using football to illustrate something about physics. They've got a bunch of finalists, and the polls are open for the People's Choice Award. Check out the nine semi-finalists, and vote for your favorite.
The slickest is probably "Theoretical Football":
I'm not sure whether they gain or lose points for using "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burena. There's also the extravagent use of the old-film jitter effect in "Fysics of Phootball":
And then... Well, just go look for yourself...
drorzel | February 13, 2008I'm not hugely enthusiastic about the ResearchBlogging.org project, but it's a little ridiculous that they've been active for weeks now, and there still isn't a single post in the "Physics" category. If they're going to offer the category link, something ought to come up when you click it, so let's give them some blogging on peer reviewed physics research.
The recent paper that most seems to lend itself to a quick explanation is this Phys. Rev. Letter from the Katori group at the University of Tokyo on the trapping of neutral mercury atoms. Full disclosure: Dr. Katori was a student of Prof.…
grrlscientist | February 11, 2008tags: Egg in a bottle, air pressure, streaming video
This is an amusing video demonstration of how to get an egg into a bottle (and then, how to get it out again) without breaking anything -- neither the egg, nor the bottle, nor anything in your parents' kitchen [2:18]
esiegel | February 8, 2008To follow up on the faster than light post here, let's ask another question:
If you can make a way of transferring information that doesn't involve matter, is that information limited by the speed of light?
First off, let's go over what information is, and then we'll talk about how transferring information without matter is even possible. Information is anything that's organized in a meaningful manner. Take a look at the following three sentences:
This sentence contains some information.
Tihs scnnteee cainntos smoe imnfriatoon.
Not a imfro nimsoe mnoisn ctrnsnet sihto.
Each of the three…
pontiff | February 8, 2008New results out of the Martinis lab at UCSB have shown single qubit gate fidelities of 0.98 for a superconducting phase qubit. This is significantly better than previous single qubit gate fidelities in their system and in any other superconducting qubit system. It is an extremely impressive number. (Seems that carefully crafted microwaves pulses were a big help in getting the gate fidelity to this level.) Martinis is speaking at SQUINT 2008, but just in a tutorial section. Maybe we will get lucky and a bit of these new fidelities will leak into his talk.
drorzel | February 5, 2008The Paper of Record reports on a science debate, of sorts:
On one side of a vaunted cultural divide were Doug Liman, director of the coming movie "Jumper," about a young man who discovers he can transport himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it, and Hayden Christensen, the film's star.
On the other were a pair of the institute's physics professors, Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark, experts on the type of physics the movie was purporting to portray, who had been enlisted to view a few scenes from it and talk about science.
On the one hand, I find this Physics of Star Trek sort of…
esiegel | February 4, 2008Apparently, this is becoming a good place for people to get their questions answered! My friend Brian, recently wanted to know what the possibilities were for faster-than-light travel. Specifically, he was interested in it because he wants humans to do it.
Brian: but otherwise how will we ever have a civilization like that in Star Trek?
Presumably, Brian's goal is to be able to travel nearly instantaneously between any two points in the galaxy. The problem is that there are physical laws we have to obey; we don't have a choice. One of them is special relativity, which tells us that the…
drorzel | January 28, 2008The folks at Physics Central are running a video contest, with the winner getting the world's smallest trophy:
Get your camera out... 'cause the world's smallest trophy is up for
grabs! You could win the smallest trophy ever made, and $1000 of (normal
sized) cash in the Physics Central Nano Bowl Video Contest To enter the
Nano Bowl video contest, make a video that demonstrates some aspect of
physics in football. Upload the video to YouTube with the tag
*nanobowl.* The deadline is Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, 2008.
More info: www.physicscentral.org/nanobowl/ The trophy will be created
in…
esiegel | January 28, 2008Okay, so I got a question from my friend Tamara, who's a high school teacher in my hometown of New York City. It concerns a recent article she read on the front page of the New York Times about something funny that us scientists are calling Boltzmann Brains.
I've read this article three times since it was featured on the front page of the science section in the NYT and I'm still confused about the Boltzmann brain problem, it's (non?)validity, the reason it made it's way onto the front page and whether Emerson's philosophy about imagined worlds came from this...
There's a lot of interesting…
drorzel | January 24, 2008A little while ago, the Corporate Masters asked us to answer a couple of questions for possible inclusion in the first '08 issue of Seed. I originally posted this back in November, but got asked to take it down because the issue was hush-hush. The street date for the magazine in question was this week, though, and I busted up my wrist playing basketball yesterday, so I'm dragging it back out because typing hurts.
The question is:
What scientific development do you hope to be blogging or reading about in 2008?
The original question was more general, asking us just what we'd like to be…
drorzel | January 22, 2008In comments to my review of "The Race for Absolute Zero", I promised to try to write up an explanation of BEC on the blog. A bit of preparatory Googling demonstrates, though, that I already did, in the fall of 2006, talking about identical particles, Pauli Exclusion, and BEC. You might've thought I would remember doing that, given that I have a mind like a steel wossname....
Having spent a bit of time thinking about this in the last day or so, though, I don't really want to waste that effort, so I'll repeat a little of the earlier discussion in a slightly different way, starting with an…
drorzel | January 22, 2008In comments to my complaint about the over-identification of physics with particle physics, I noted that this is largely because high-energy physicists have been successful in getting the media and general public to buy into their belief that high-energy physics is the coolest and most important thing in physics, for a number of reasons. Jonathan Vos Post asks:
The reasons being what, in your opinion, Chad?
And, if so, what should we do (as citizens or a physicists)?
I think most of it comes down to the scale of the experiments and the collaborations that run them. There are two components…
pontiff | January 21, 2008A while ago a message from Kris Krogh appeared on Scirate.com about ariXiv:0712.3934 stating Kris' belief that the paper appeared under a pseudonym (the comment contains the contents of the link which was sent to the arxiv's administrator.) Today I checked with the arxiv and found that the paper had been removed:
This submission has been removed because 'G.Forst' is a pseudonym of a physicist based in Italy who is unwilling to submit articles under his own name. This is in explicit violation of arXiv policies.
Roughly similar content, contrasting the relative merits of the LAGEOS and GP-B…
drorzel | January 19, 2008It's not often that I find myself agreeing with the Incoherent Ponderer, but he's exactly right regarding Scientific American's "The Future of Physics" issue (via PhysMath Central):
[T]his month's issue of Scientific American has a special titled "The Future of Physics". I was quickly disappointed when I realized that the article covers only "terascale" physics, primarily focusing on LHC.
I guess I am tired of arrogant statements like "physics" = "high energy physics", which is how a lot of popular media characterizes it. The irony, however, is that with ILC construction in serious peril,…
drorzel | January 18, 2008Ernest Rutherford once said
In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.
So, a really simple question: which do you prefer? Physics or stamp collecting? Leave your answer in the comments.