Physics
esiegel | December 16, 2015“For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.” -T.S. Eliot
It's the end of the year, and so you know what that means: time for lazy recaps of "the year that was" everywhere you look. Why settle for last year's news, though, when you can start making predictions about what next year will hold?
Image credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory.
I make 10 bold predictions for what 2016 will hold, including:
the first detection of a gravitational wave,
a new record for the smallest exoplanet atmosphere with water,
that the "super-Earth" discovered in…
drorzel | December 13, 2015The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days-- the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports in One Chart. You can go over there to look at their specific chart, which is drawn from a medical study of cheerleading; I don't find the general ordering of things all that surprising.
There was, however, one aspect of this that I found sort of surprising, namely the difference between…
esiegel | December 11, 2015“I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don’t believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world.” -Ed Witten
If you calculate the forces between two fundamental particles separated by subatomic distances, you find that the strong, electromagnetic or weak nuclear force could all be the strongest, dependent on the particulars of your setup. But throw gravity in there, and it turns out to be weaker by some 40 orders of magnitude…
esiegel | December 10, 2015“Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?” -Audre Lorde
One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it's untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification. Yet some have attempted to address this failing not by coming up with concrete predictions or falsifiable tests, but by redefining what is meant by theory confirmation.…
oracknows | December 4, 2015Blog topics seem to come in waves, where I'll be stuck on more deeply examining a topic for days, only to have that topic dry up. Sometimes, you, my readers, make me aware of a topic. This is an example of the latter case. It's something I had been debating about whether to blog about because I just wasn't sure what to make of it, and it's also a very, very depressing—even tragic—story. But the drip, drip, drip of people pointing me to the story reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility. (OK, with middling blog power comes a modicum of responsibility.) So I thought I'd try…
drorzel | December 4, 2015So, yesterday was my big TEDxAlbany talk. I was the first speaker scheduled, probably because I gave them the title "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning," so it seemed appropriate to have me talking while people were still eating breakfast...
The abstract I wrote when I did the proposal mentions both quantum physics and relativity, but when I actually wrote the talk, that made for a really awkward transition, so it's all quantum, all the time. I cover quite a bit of ground-- the no-animation-effects version of the slides is 42 slides and Word has it as just over 2500 words written out…
drorzel | December 2, 2015A longer-than-usual gap between recap posts, but thanks to some kid illnesses and the Thanksgiving holiday, not all that many new physics posts over at Forbes:
-- Football Physics: Checking The Odds On Wild Bounces: A backyard experiment to see how often a bouncing football takes a big hop. Follows from this rant and prompted this post on rotation.
-- Physics Demands Many Kinds Of Literacy: Some musings about the many different ways physicists process information, prompted by graphs generated for the previous item.
-- Football Physics: How Would Changing The Laws Of Physics Change Football?:…
drorzel | December 1, 2015I've been a little bad about self-promoting here of late, but I should definitely plug this: I'm speaking at the TEDxAlbany event this Thursday, December 3rd; I'm scheduled first, at 9:40 am. The title is "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning":
You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run at different rates depending on how you’re moving– and only come into play in physics laboratories or near black holes. In fact, though, even the strangest features of modern physics…
esiegel | November 27, 2015"We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try." -Lewis Thomas
One of the most important characteristics of a planet, at least according to the IAU definition, is that it clear its orbit of all other bodies. But if we allowed for a special caveat -- the possibility of two similarly-sized objects sharing the same orbit…
esiegel | November 21, 2015"Twinkle, twinkle quasi-star.
Biggest puzzle from afar.
How unlike the other ones.
Brighter than a billion suns.
Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star.
How I wonder what you are." -George Gamow
One of the most interesting classes of objects in the entire sky is one that's invisible to the naked eye, yet appears brighter than anything else in radio wavelengths: the quasar. Originally coined as an acronym (QSRS) for Quasi-Stellar Radio Source, these were later determined to be incredibly energetic sources of accelerated matter powered by a supermassive black hole.
Image credit: Aurore Simonnet, NASA /…
drorzel | November 19, 2015A little while back, I did a comparison of the different ISO settings on my camera, and a bunch of people commented that it would be interesting to try to match two photos at different levels. So, here's that:
Trying to match two photos at the extremes of the ISO settings on my camera.
These aren't quite perfectly matched, because the time settings give me a limited range of options, but it's pretty close. The higher ISO setting ought to be 128 times more light-sensitive than then lower, and it's 1/125th of the exposure time.
And... those look pretty similar. I'm honestly not sure how one…
esiegel | November 19, 2015“Cheap little rhymes
A cheap little tune
Are sometimes as dangerous
As a sliver of the moon.” -Langston Hughes
4.5 billion years ago, a giant object collided with our proto-Earth, kicking up debris that eventually coalesced into the Moon.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
While the near side contains dark maria and lunar lowlands, the far side is almost exclusive heavily cratered, high-mountainous regions. This was a mystery for a long time, but it appears that heating from the hot, young Earth caused a chemical and crustal difference between the two faces.
Images credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech…
drorzel | November 18, 2015As threatened yesterday, another staged shot for a "quantum is difficult" image for an upcoming talk.
Some notes and caffeine.
This is a piece of a homework solution that was on a pad I had lying around-- those are infinite square well wavefunctions. It's about as trivial as you can get from quantum, but looks math-y enough to make the point I want to make.
The Pip is home sick again today, so that's about it for me.
drorzel | November 17, 2015I followed up my ranty-y post about "Sports Science" with an experimental investigation over at Forbes, tossing a football around on the deck out back and then doing video analysis of the bounces. This provided a wealth of data, much of it not really appropriate for over there, but good for a physics post or two here.
One of the trajectories I looked at was this "forward bounce":
Here's the trajectory reconstructed in Tracker:
Trajectory of a football bouncing forward.
This is notable because not only does it bounce forward, it includes one of those big pop-up bounces that take people off…
drorzel | November 17, 2015Another talk-prep photo, because I wanted a shot to suggest the academic side of quantum physics. Of course, my actual textbooks are all in my office on campus, but then, they mostly have boring covers and titles, so they're not a great visual. So I stacked up some pop-physics books:
A selection of quantum physics books.
I meant to write out a couple of pages of equations, too, but I had to break off to cook dinner, and then I fell asleep at 9pm, so that never happened. Maybe today.
Anyway, I liked all these books, so, you know, check them out. Or read this post about good pop-quantum…
esiegel | November 12, 2015"It's not the job of the theorist to defend his model at all costs!" - Joel Primack
One of the more puzzling phenomena in our quantum Universe is that of entanglement: two particles remain in mutually indeterminate states until one is measured, and then the other — even if it's across the Universe — is immediately known.
Image credit: Ulf Leonhardt.
In theory, this should be true even if one member of the pair falls into a black hole, although it's impossible to measure that. However, we can (and have) measured that for the laboratory analogue of black holes, known as "dumb holes," and the…
drorzel | November 11, 2015It's a grey, dismal, rainy day here at Chateau Steelypips, and I'm a little groggy from cold medication. Which means it's not a great writing day, but it is a good day to stay inside and do a little SCIENCE! for the photo of the day. thus, this:
Some toys and the cable box in our basement, shot at every ISO setting my camera offers.
This is a small assortment of toys set on the table in our basement next to the cable box, and photographed at every one of the eight ISO settings my camera offers. Everything else is the same in these shots-- I put it on manual focus, the maximum aperture (f/1…
esiegel | November 10, 2015"Some kind of celestial event. No — no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea." -Dr. Ellie Arroway, Contact
Back in 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined the term "planet" for the first time by three criteria: its ability to orbit the Sun, to pull itself into hydrostatic equilibrium, and to clear its orbit. This not only excluded all exoplanets, but it set up impractical criteria for measuring exoplanet properties.
Image credit: ESO.
But UCLA scientist Jean-Luc Margot found a new planetary test that…
drorzel | November 10, 2015Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this "Sports Science" clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I've been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett's just working on a "misery loves company" theory, here:
It's a cool play, but as science, this leaves a lot to be desired. It's less "sports science" than "sports technobabble"-- mostly, they seem to be going for a science-y air by quoting lots of largely irrelevant numbers. I'm not sure why it matters how far most of…
drorzel | November 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of physics-y posts over at Forbes:
-- Why Scientists Should Study Art And Literature: My big defense of "the humanities," explaining why those subjects are worth studying even if you plan to go into a STEM field instead. I'm very happy with how this came out.
-- Baseball Physics: How Batters Beat The Best Computers: In honor of the World Series. "How" here means "look, they do this"-- I don't have a detailed explanation of the mechanics that make it all work.
-- Football Physics (With Bonus Rugby): The Physics Of Bouncing Balls: Mostly about a really cool try in the…