Physics
drorzel | July 1, 2007Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don't take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit:
Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology....), even the…
drorzel | June 28, 2007I'm going to drop back a bit, and steal an idea from Doug Natelson, who posted about Grand Challenges in condensed matter physics almost two weeks ago. This was prompted by a report from the National Research Council listing such challenges, including things like "How do complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients?" and "How will the energy demands of future generations be met?" They're certainly grand, and challenging.
So, the question for the audience is:
What are the Grand Challenges in your own field?
If you're a scientist, what are the big questions that need to be answered in your…
drorzel | June 27, 2007It's been ages since I posted a True Lab Story, mostly because I've been too busy to do anything really dumb. I had a good day for True Lab Stories yesterday, though, so here's a tale of something idiotic I did, or, rather, had my students do.
I have a student working on a project to put anti-reflection coatings on some diode lasers, which will help improve their performance in various ways that don't really matter here. This requires the deposition of a very even layer of material that's a couple hundred nanometers thick, which we do using a vacuum evaporator. This consists of a bell jar…
drorzel | June 22, 2007The great media relations debate is starting to wind down, but there's still a bit of life in it. In particular, I want to comment on something that Bora said, that was amplified on by Melinda Barton. Here's Bora's comment:
Everyone is afraid to use the F word, but the underlying tension is, at its core, the same as in the discussion of Framing Science:
The scientists want to educate.
The journalists want to inform (if not outright entertain, or at least use entertaining hooks in order to inform).
There is a difference between the two goals. The former demands accuracy. The latter demands…
drorzel | June 22, 2007The other day, while we were walking from my office back to the lab, one of my students asked me a question that's perfect for a Dorky Poll:
What's the coolest single word you've encountered in physics?
His vote was for "antineutrino," but I've got to go with "counterintuitive," as in "Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage uses a counterintuitive pulse sequence to excite atoms without populating the intermediate state," or "the idea of making atoms cold by shining laser light on them is somewhat counterintuitive."
"Counterintuitive" captures a lot of what I enjoy most about physics. We work…
drorzel | June 22, 2007Here's my achievement for the week:
OK, that may not seem like much, but this is what it looked like before I started:
OK, that's not really my only accomplishment for the week-- I have three students for the first half of the summer (two of them for the whole summer), and all three got off to good starts on their summer projects this week. That's why it's taken me a whole week to clean my office-- I've been run ragged getting them all going, and keeping on top of their progress.
Still, the important papers have been filed, the unimportant ones recycled, and the trash taken away. Time to…
drorzel | June 21, 2007The mysterious saga of "supersolid" helium continues this week. If you recall, there were some new results a little while back showing that the effect depends on disorder in the samples, followed by neutron scattering studies that didn't show the expected distribution of states in the sample. These results suggest that something else is going on in these samples, and the explanation of the observed effects isn't all that simple.
Now, Moses Chan and co-workers at Penn State, who made the initial discovery, have returned with a new paper in which they see "supersolid" behavior in single…
drorzel | June 18, 2007In response to a question about "Other aspects of the instructor's teaching," one student in my recently completed E&M class wrote:
Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics and the course was taught in that slightly utilitarian approach.
I've been looking for something to replace "Ramblings about life as a physicist on the tenure track at a small liberal arts college" in the left sidebar (now that I have tenure), and "[A]n everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics" might be just…
drorzel | June 18, 2007Lots of people are down on physics or physicists these days:
Cosma Shalizi is down on power-law fits, or, more precisely, annoyed at people who misuse power-law distributions. He's written a paper about how to use them correctly, and provides a handy list of take-home points on his blog.
Travis Hime is down on the academic job market, and cities that aren't San Francisco. I think he's a little too harsh on academia, but then it's well established that I'm an optimist with a rosy outlook on these matters. I can't help with the Bay Area thing.
Dave Bacon has gotten so down about quantum…
drorzel | June 14, 2007Since it seems to be a good day for posting things that may be unwise, I'll throw this out. In the middle of a news release dump from the APS, there's a story about a new study of physics pedagogy that found gender gaps persisting in spite of "active learning" techniques. This is in contrast to a previous study from Harvard.
What moves me to post, though, is a sentence from the middle of the news squib:
On the bright side, both male and female students performed better in the interactive classes than students laboring in traditional lecture-based classes. Overall, however, male students…
drorzel | June 13, 2007His Holiness posts a YouTube video of a cartoon explanation of double-slit interference. Apparently this was made by the "What the Bleep" people, and it sort of shows in the gosh-wow tone that shades toward mysticism at the end.
As always with YouTube, though, the real fun is in looking at the related videos, which includes some total crap (a video talking about how to explain traditional Chinese medicine with quantum mechanics), but also this charming home demonstration from Down Under:
Fire and science: two great tastes that taste great together.
And, as long as I'm embedding things, a…
drorzel | June 12, 2007Clifford Johnson is pointing to a pair of stories about extrasolar planets. One is a news piece about the "flood" of new discoveries, and the other is a Top 10 list from space.com (warning: irritating web design).
This provides a good excuse to roll out a blog suggestion from Ron Walsworth, who pointed out a possible connection to the ultra-stable lasers that Jun Ye and Jim Bergquist talked about on the first day of last week's conference. He suggested that, in the future, these ultra-stable lasers may be useful not only for comparing clocks on Earth, but as a crucial reference to help detect…
sb admin | June 8, 2007Most of the misconceptions about and misuses of quantum mechanics (QM) comes a misunderstanding of the stochastic nature of QM. In the 20th century, as we came to understand that QM is how the world works on a fundamental level, we had to abandon the idea that physics was in principle deterministic. Alas, too many have read too much into this abandonment. Recently, one of the typical creationist nutters was commenting on the Gonzales tenure denial, and had this to say:
Now, materialism is shot to pieces anyway, and has been ever since quantum mechanics began to be understood.
Er, no.
But…
drorzel | June 8, 2007I was trying to think of something deep and meaningful to post today, but I've been in conference mode too long to do anything all that deep. So here's a simple binary choice for all the nerds in the audience:
Bosons or fermions?
It's a tough call after a few days of conferencing: On the one hand, I'm typing this Thursday night, and I'm about to head out to get a few more beers, so I can appreciate the sociable nature of bosons, but then again, another day of this, and I may not want to talk to anyone at all next week. Plus, fermions in a spin-polarized sample are absolutely forbidden from…
drorzel | June 4, 2007Once again, physics news stories are piling up in my RSS reader, so here's a collection of recent stuff:
My old group at NIST has done cool things with Bose-Eisntein condensates in an optical lattice. They load atoms into a regular array of sites, and then split each site into a double well, which is a classic test system for quantum theories. This is cool not only because it was done by people I know, but also because it's really similar to work that I did as a post-doc.
A French group has made a single electron source, that produces, well, single electrons more or less on demand. Like…
drorzel | June 4, 2007The LOLcat phenomenon has reached the world of physics, with this Schrödinger cat picture, which is pretty good. I'm also amused by Serge's poem from Making Light:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Is Schrödinger's Cat dead?
That remains up to you.
I may need to get out more.
drorzel | June 2, 2007Just when I'm finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what's going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with "Unparticle Physics":
I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field theory--physics that cannot be described in terms of particles. I argue that it is important to take seriously the possibility that the unparticle stuff described by such a theory might actually exist in our world. I suggest a scenario in which some details of the production of…
drorzel | May 25, 2007Philosophia Naturalis #10 is now up, providing all sorts of physics-bloggy goodness. I particualrly liked mollishka's explanation of the Lyman-alpha forest and Scott Aaronson's math-free explanation of Shor's factoring algorithm is a classic, but there's lots of good stuff there.
drorzel | May 22, 2007Every day, a handful of physics news items pass through my RSS feeds, and every few days, one of them looks interesting enough that I check the little box to keep it unread, so I can comment on it later (I don't blog from work if I can avoid it). Of course, most of the time, I don't get around to commenting, so these press releases and news squibs tend to pile up.
It's starting to get a little silly, so I'm going to clear them out, and post a brief comment about each one, and why I thought it looked interesting here. This probably tells you something about the state of the field, but mostly,…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2007In part I of the interview, my mother described what it was like to be propelled by her dream of being an astronomer from being at home with four children to being in an undergraduate physics classroom and finding a serious mentor.
Part II: Out of the comfort zone and into the graduate program:
Were you encouraged by the folks at Rutgers-Newark with whom you were taking physics coursework to move on to graduate work?
As I was nearing the point of exhausting the undergraduate physics curriculum, and with no graduate physics program offered on that campus, my professors all encouraged me to…