Physics
drorzel | December 3, 2007An off-line question from someone at Seed:
Fundamentally, what is the difference between chemistry and physics?
There are a bunch of different ways to try to explain the dividing lines between disciplines. 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.
At the most fundamental level, you have particle physics and high-energy nuclear physics, which sees everything in terms of quarks and leptons,…
drorzel | December 1, 2007Another Jonah Goldberg moment-- can anybody recommend a reasonably neutral discussion of Bohm's non-local hidden variable version of quantum theory? A little Googling turns up this encyclopedia article and a tutorial dialogue on the arxiv, but I'd like to see a fairly complete treatment of it that doesn't go to great lengths to make proponents of other interpretations sound like clueless goobers who are just too dim to perceive the obvious correctness of the Bohmian approach.
This isn't critical by any means-- the hour and a half I've just spent reading these pieces is really more cat-…
drorzel | November 30, 2007Via Kate, a story from a legal blog about a decisions in the case of a messy professor:
"Clean your room or get out!" Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to clean up his dangerously cluttered lab space. When University officials decided to clean it themselves, the professor caused such a disturbance that campus police had to lead him away in handcuffs. The professor was eventually fired, which prompted a lawsuit claiming that the University retaliated…
oracknows | November 30, 2007
I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon.
I…
pontiff | November 29, 2007One good reason to subscribe to the New York Times is that they have what I consider far above average science reporting for a newspaper. Their Tuesday Science Times section is a must read for me pretty much every week. Over the last three weeks I've been keeping track of the stories that were run in Tuesday's science section. By my count, three weeks ago there were two stories which might be considered as articles about physics, one of which the categorization is a stretch (swarm models have been studied by physicists, but I doubt many physicists would consider this physics), and since…
drorzel | November 28, 2007Over at Unqualified Offerings, "Thoreau" offers some musings about peer review. I saw this and said, "Aha! The perfect chance to dust off an old post, and free up some time..." Sadly, I already recycled the post in question, so I feel obliged to be less lazy and contribute some new content.
I generally agree with most of what he says, but I would raise one quibble about his list of criteria:
What scientists are looking for when we evaluate a paper is whether the paper clearly addresses 3 points:
1) What is the question or issue being studied in this work?
2) What are the methods being used,…
drorzel | November 26, 2007The infamous Davies op-ed has been collected together with some responses at edge.org, and one of the responses is by Sean Carroll, who reproduces his response at Cosmic Variance. Sean's a smart guy, and I basically agree with his argument, but I'm a contrary sort, and want to nitpick one thing about his response.
He builds his response around the question, raised by Davies, "Why do the laws of physics take the form they do?" He considers and discards a few responses, before writing:
The final possibility, which seems to be the right one, is: that's just how things are. There is a chain of…
pontiff | November 24, 2007Paul Davies essay in the New York Times on "Taking Science on Faith" is sure to raise some hackles from the science community. Me, I'd just like to point out how silly some of Davies arguments specifics are. Yes, its another edition of "Nitpickers Paradiso."
Davies begins with a mantra yelled by theists ever since science began getting things right and removing the need for supernatural explanation (here done valley girl style): "But, like, what you're doing must be taken, like, on faith because, like, why do you have, like, faith in science? Wah! Wah!" But lets skip ahead and not deal…
jstemwedel | November 24, 2007This New York Times op-ed, to be precise. My questions for Paul Davies can be boiled down to these two:
What kinds of explanations, precisely, are you asking science to deliver to you?
Just why do you think it is the job of science to provide such explanations?
Let's back up a little and look at some of what Davies writes in his op-ed:
... science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends…
pontiff | November 21, 2007Books recently removed from the queue. "Mathematicians in Love" by Rudy Rucker, "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets" by Donald Mackenzie, "Financial Calculus : An Introduction to Derivative Pricing" by Martin Baxter and Andrew Rennie. "109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos" by Jennet Conant.
Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker
Best described as a cross between a Philip K. Dick novel, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, but not nearly as good as the first two. The story of a surfer mathematician…
drorzel | November 21, 2007On a happier science-related note, the AIP's Physics News Update highlights a very nice article in The American Journal of Physics about the wide-ranging scientific investigations of Luis Alvarez:
Scientist as detective: Luis Alvarez and the pyramid burial chambers, the JFK assassination, and the end of the dinosaurs
Luis Alvarez (1911-1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century. His investigations of three mysteries, all of them outside his normal areas of research, show what remarkable things a far-ranging imagination working with an…
drorzel | November 21, 2007I generally like Gregg Easterbrook's writing about football (though he's kind of gone off the deep end regarding the Patriots this year), but everything else he turns his hand to is a disaster. In particular, he tends to pad his columns out with references to science and technology issues. I'm not quite sure what the point of these is supposed to be, other than to demonstrate that he, Gregg Easterbrook, is so much smarter than the average football fan that he knows, like, rocket science and stuff. The problem with that is that his knowledge of rocket science seems to owe more to Star Trek…
pontiff | November 20, 2007So you want to learn quantum theory in ten minutes? Well I certainly can't give you the full theory in all its wonder and all its gory detail in that time, but I can give you a light version of the quantum theory in about that time. And won't that impress your friends!
To learn quantum theory you first need to learn classical theory. (Walk slowly little grasshopper.) What classical theory should we talk about: mechanics or general relativity or maybe electromagnetism? None of those! Those are crazy overwhelming and intimidating classical theories. Instead we can take a classical theory…
drorzel | November 20, 2007Believe it or not, this is actually book-related: I have in mind to do a chapter at the end of the book about the use of misrepresentations of quantum physics to promise magical results. I've been writing the dialogue to go with that this morning (because it's more fun than what I'm supposed to be doing), and it struck me that this might be a decent question for the audience. So,
What's your favorite example of quantum chicanery?
By "quantum chicanery," I mean somebody using the language of quantum theory to make wildly unrealistc promises of magical results. Examples abound-- Bob Park got…
grrlscientist | November 19, 2007The fourth edition of the new Natural Sciences Blog Carnival is now available for you to read and enjoy. They saw fit to include a few pieces that I wrote -- considering that I have felt very discouraged and depressed this past month (terminal unemployment combined with lots of job rejections can do that to a person after a few years -- try it sometime if you don't believe me), it is a great compliment to see that someone out there considers my writing to be worthwhile, at least.
oracknows | November 16, 2007Pity poor Nikola Tesla.
Again.
It looks as though the woomeisters have found a way to abuse him yet again. I don't know what it is about Tesla, but he seems to be a magnet for such woo. Well, actually, I sort of do. Tesla was definitely a character and was known for a variety of strange beliefs during his lifetime. I'm pretty sure, though, that he never came up with anything like the Tesla Purple Energy Shield, which was lovingly described in this very forum about seven months ago. I'm also pretty sure that he never came up with anything like the Body Regenerator Tesla Coil, which starts out…
drorzel | November 15, 2007Via email, a plug for the newish site 60 Second Science, which is a project from Scientific American built around a podcast featuring one-minute explanations of, well, science.
The email was specifically highlighting their new project, a set of video podcasts going by the name of Instant Egghead. The first video (also the only one so far) is a one-minute explanation of how we know there's dark matter using items found in editor George Musser's office.
It's a well-done video, and a nice explanation of galaxy rotation curves using coffee, crumbs, and a CD. I do have one quibble about the…
drorzel | November 14, 2007Dave Bacon watched "Judgement Day" last night, and has a question:
It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is "just a theory" wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn't illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial?
The answer: Because quantum physics involves math, and Math Is Hard.
If you want to construct a cockamamie theory that can pretend to be an alternative to quantum mechanics, it needs to have…
pontiff | November 13, 2007Tonight I watched NOVA's Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial. Ah shucks, us quantum physicists never get to have so much fun (err, I mean, experience so much pain and deal with so much silliness) trying to defend our science. It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is "just a theory" wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn't illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial?
I mean, let's talk about…
pontiff | November 13, 2007Grad school opportunities, postdoc opportunities, interference experiments, more D-wave, and sabbatical at the Blackberry hole
Pawel Wocjan writes that he has positions open for graduate students in quantum computing:
Ph.D. Position in Quantum Computing & Quantum Information with Dr. Pawel Wocjan, School of EECS, University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, in sunny Florida
I am accepting applications for a Ph.D. position in Quantum Computing and Quantum Information starting in Fall 2008. You can learn more about my research and the research in quantum information science at UCF by…