Physics
drorzel | December 20, 2007As previously mentioned, I plan to end the book with a chapter on quantum flim-flam. As research for this, I've been looking at kook sites on the web, and Googled "quantum healing," which turns up all manner of gibberish from Deepak Chopra. It also includes a helpful little item at the bottom of the page:
Searches related to: quantum healing
maurice chevalier hugh grant deepak chopra ectomorphic
The Chopra search makes sense, and "ectomorphic" is a gibberish word that shows up in that sort of stuff. But Maurice Chevalier? And Hugh Grant?
If I could just figure out the connection between…
drorzel | December 19, 2007Travis Hime of Arcane Gazebo has just finished his Ph.D. on Solid-State Qubits with Current-Controlled Coupling. Go congratulate him on bringing quantum spam that much closer to reality.
("Dear sir or madam, I may or may not be the widow of the former president of Nigeria, and I may or may not have the sum of ninety billion dollars...")
drorzel | December 18, 2007Today's ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! is in honor of the cold water dripping into our kitchen cabinet yesterday:
That's a glass icicle, with bonus dramatic shadows. If you're a homeowner, you might think that this stands for ice damming, but this is about SCIENCE!!! not property mishaps. This ornament stands for phase transitions.
Phase transitions are a big part of physics and chemistry. Exactly what constitutes a "phase of matter" is a little murky, and seems to proceed on a sort of Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart rule, but transitions between phases are a rich area of study. Solid to…
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007Since we all had so much fun explaining the video to each other, I thought that all of you might be interested to read physicist Chad Orzel's explanation, along with cool pictures, of the physics underlying the 'two-fork toothpick trick' video.
drorzel | December 17, 2007Chris Mooney posted a couple of things last week-- one article at ScienceProgress and one blog post-- talking about the supposed shortage of scientists in the "pipeline." Following an Urban Insitute study, he says that there's really no shortage of scientists being trained, but rather a shortage of jobs for those scientists. Coming as he does from the policy/ journalism side of things, he brings the article to a ringing conclusion:
The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren't going to be working in purely scientific positions.…
drorzel | December 17, 2007Last week, GrrlScientist posted a cool video showing a trick with two forks and a toothpick:
http://view.break.com/410281 - Watch more free videos
It's a nifty demonstration of some physics principles, so I thought I would explain how it works, with a couple of pictures (several of her commenters have the right idea, btw).
The key concept here is the idea of the "center of mass" of a system, which is basically the point at which you consider all the mass to be concentrated if you need to treat an extended object as a point particle. If you're going to throw it through the air, for example,…
pontiff | December 14, 2007Murray Gell-Mann always makes me laugh. Via Asymptotia here is what Murray said while giving a Ted talk:
I won't go into a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and what it's like and so on...you've heard a lot of wrong things about it anyway!
Which got me wondering: is more said which is wrong about quantum theory than any other theory in physics? Now certainly there are those who will interpret Einstein's relativity (which one they probably won't tell you) as some postmodern "everything is relative" mantra. But (and maybe because I'm locked in a quantum closet all day) it seems to me that…
drorzel | December 14, 2007It's mid-December, which means it's time for the annual run of "Best Noun of 2007" stories in every major media outlet. Being kind of a mid-major media outlet, ScienceBlogs doesn't produce an official list, but there'll be a lot of discussion here about the top science stories of the year. This will mostly involve wrangling about stem cells and global warming and suchlike, which I'm happy to leave to my colleagues, while we take up the really important question:
What was the most significant development in physics or astronomy in 2007?
Was it Garrett Lisi's Exceptionally Simple Theory for…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week.
No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…
purepedantry | December 13, 2007I am not even close to qualified enough to critique this paper, but I did find it interesting. The authors speculate about how you could create a warp drive -- an engine for faster than light travel -- by creating a bubble of expansion and contraction in spacetime. They speculate that an advanced enough civilization could in theory do so.
However, I was particularly struck by this sentence:
Assuming some arbitrarily advanced civilization were able to create such an effect we might postulate that this civilization were able to utilize the most efficient method of energy production - matter…
grrlscientist | December 12, 2007tags: two-fork toothpick trick, physics, streaming video
This streaming video shows a fun trick that you can use to impress your friends! But seriously, how does this trick work? [2:01]
Awesome Toothpick Fork Trick
drorzel | December 11, 2007Dave Ng over at the World's Fair is at it again, asking what sort of science background Santa Claus has:
So the premise is that Santa is at least several hundred years old, and you've got to assume that somewhere along the line, he spent some time in academia and probably got a degree or two. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he is a man of science, but I guess the question to ask is in what way specifically?
Now, you might think that there are lots of ways to go with this. You could note the flying reindeer, and say that they're clearly the product of either genetic…
drorzel | December 11, 2007Faith in theory and curve-fitting, at least...
Tommaso Dorigo reports some new results, which are based on a figure that could be titled "Why I Am Not a Particle Physicist #729":
"What's the problem?," you ask, "There's a nice big peak there, looking a little like a black-body spectrum."
Ah, but that's not the signal. The green shaded region in the big plot is all background. The signal is in the tiny little gap between the green background line and the blue data points on the right-hand side of the enormous background peak.
Now, this is actually a pretty solid result, as you can see from…
drorzel | December 7, 2007Kind of a technical question, but typing it out might provide some inspiration, or failing that, somebody might have a good suggestion in the comments.
Here's the issue: I'm starting on a chapter about quantum teleportation for the book, and one of the key steps in the teleportation scheme is an entangling measurement of two of the particles. If you're teleporting a photon polarization state, the easy way to do it is to make a joint measurement of the polarization of the photon whose polarization you want to "teleport" and one photon from the entangled pair you're using for the teleportation…
pontiff | December 6, 2007There's some interesting new work out on supersolid helium, a subject of great interest and controversy. The work was performed by John Beamish and James Day at the University of Alberta and is reported in this weeks Nature (Day, J. & Beamish, J. Nature 450, 853-856 (2007). Article here, Perspective here.)
As a refresher for what supersolid helium is, there is an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2005:
Yesterday I went to a condensed matter seminar on "super solid Helium" by Greg Dash. What, you ask, is super solid Helium? Well certainly you may have heard of superfluids. When you…
pontiff | December 5, 2007Since I got into trouble for posting about the need for more, not less, funding for science and engineering, (and, I might add, a reengineering of our approach to what it means to produce a successful Ph.D.), I thought I'd continue the trouble by linking to a post over at the Computing Research Policy Blog, "Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations Expected to Grow Quickest Over the Next Decade."
jstemwedel | December 4, 2007Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad's about the "fundamental difference" between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes.
One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Physics World has an interview with Alastair Reynolds, who was trained as an astrophysicist but is now a full-time SF author:
How does your physics training help with your writing?
Less than people imagine. I think the most important attribute for a science-fiction writer is to be fascinated by science -- in all its manifestations. It's not necessary to be able to understand all the details, but just to be inspired and stimulated. Most of the ideas that have fed into my writing have come from reading popular articles on subjects far away from my own very limited specialization, such as…
jstemwedel | December 3, 2007Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel tries to explain the fundamental difference between physics and chemistry:
My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study.
Chad's rough breakdown is fine as far as it goes. But it wouldn't (in my experience) be a terribly accurate guide to discerning what (say) a physical chemist actually worked on in his or her research.
Chad describes the corresponding…
drorzel | December 3, 2007I burned out some diode lasers a while back, and needed to buy replacements. Here's one of the replacements on top of the tube containing the other, with a US quarter for scale:
Here they are, with the box and packing material used to ship them to me:
I realize that this is probably due to somebody at the laser company deciding to save money by standardizing on a single size of shipping container. Still, this seems just a tiny bit excessive...