Physics
drorzel | March 15, 2007After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I'm not sure how it is that the French came to dominate quantum optics, but between Serge Haroche and Alain Aspect, most of the coolest experiments in the field seem to have been done in France.
In this particular case, they set up a superconducting resonant cavity for microwaves. Basically, this is like two mirrors facing one another, and a photon…
drorzel | March 14, 2007
Announcing the first round games of the Orbit Region of the 2007 Science Showdown: These games match central physics concepts against one another, in a bid to determine the greatest physics idea, which will eventually face and humiliate ideas from other fields of science.
I'll be announcing the winners on Friday, but ehre's your chance to contribute: The eight first-round match-ups are shown in the graphic above: Which do you think should win? Leave your votes in the comments, and help determine the outcomes.
The games:
1) Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation vs. 16) Newton's Second Law of…
drorzel | March 11, 2007A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens).
It's probably possible to draw some sort of parallel between the two-- after all, the notion of dark matter was viewed as bordeline kookery for decades before gaining wide acceptance, and SETI is still widely viewed as a little bit off. I'm a little discombobulated from yesterday's long trip, though, so I'll…
sb admin | March 8, 2007This post was copied and slightly edited from a post I made a year or so ago at my blog's former location.
More bullshit has been written about entropy than about any other physical quantity.
—Prof. Dave Beeman, 1988
There is a popular-level understanding of entropy that is "randomness" or "disorder". This is not a bad way of looking at it, but brings along with it some associated concepts that are misleading. Creationists exploit this ambiguity by turning the argument around to information, where, even though ultimately we're talking about the same physical quantity, the implications…
drorzel | March 7, 2007On Monday, I lectured about the strong nuclear force. It's called that because it's, well, a force, that acts within the nucleus of the atom, and is, um, strong.
On Wednesday, I'm lecturing about quarks, which are called that because, um, well, because Murray Gell-Mann is a pretentious git, and wanted to show off the fact that he'd read Joyce.
These pretty much span the full range of names in physics, which are either incredibly dull, or painfully dorky. Physicists have many talents, but coming up with good names for things isn't one of them.
The worst offenders, in terms of sheer numbers,…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Arcane Gazebo provides a picture of a giant blue bear, a few notes on talks about quantum computing, and thoughts on the Kook Session.(*)
Cocktail Party Physics offers thoughts on Irish giants and large-scale pattern formation in geological systems.
Physics World offers three posts: on carbon-trapping windmills, the physics of icicles, and the 20th anniversary of Woodstock.
Know of any other reports from the meeting? Leave a link in the comments.
(* - Background for non-APS types: The American Physical Society meetings accept essentially all contributed abstracts, even the ones from crazy…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Physics World has a story today about a new addition to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't maybe-it's-a-Higgs-boson signals seen at Fermilab. (See here and here for a flavor of the earlier discussions). This one is a beyond-the-Standard-Model particle that would require a supersymmetric theory to explain.
Of course, the evidence at this point consists of a whopping three events. Color me skeptical.
drorzel | March 5, 2007It's been a while since I did a "Basic Concepts" post. They tend to take a good bit of effort, and things have been hectic enough at work that I haven't had the energy. To make up for the blizzard of basketball-related stuff over the last week (with more to come), here's a look at the concept of measurement.
This one is almost more philosophy than physics, and there is a distinct possibility that I'll accidentally say something really stupid. The question of measurement in physics, particularly modern physics, is a very subtle and fascinating one, though, and it's worth a little discussion.…
drorzel | March 3, 20071) Take a 20 oz Poland Spring bottle, or other lightweight plastic container with a screw-on lid.
2) Using a pocket knife, cut a small (~2 mm diameter) hole in the lid.
3) Put ~5 oz of liquid nitrogen in the bottom of the bottle.
4) Screw on the cap.
5) Shake vigorously once, then quickly place the bottle on the floor on its side.
(This was an improvised demo yesterday, after a late decision to lecture about superconductivity. I had liquid nitrogen for use with the high-Tc supercondustor we use to demonstrate the Meissner effect, but none of the other usual liquid nitrogen props, so I had to…
drorzel | March 2, 2007As I've noted many times, I grew up out in the sticks, in a small town which nonetheless has a Wikipedia page. I should note, though, that I am not hick enough to have been the ScienceBlogger to discover this article about cutting-edge physics research:
Margo Lillie, a doctor of zoology at the University of British Columbia, and her student Tracy Boechler have conducted a study on the physics of cow-tipping.
Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to…
drorzel | March 2, 2007Over at metadatta, Sujit has video of Jim Carrey and Conan O'Brien talking about experimental physics.
(There are a bunch of more serious things that I really ought to be posting-- I owe Dave an answer to his questions about X-Ray lasers, for example-- but there's an ice storm, I have a class to teach and an NSF progress report to write, and my brain appears to have turned to cheese, so you're getting fluff this morning. Maybe later I'll have something to say about science.)
drorzel | March 1, 2007This is probably too arcane to be an official Dorky Poll, but I thought of it yesterday, and sort of like the idea. In pop-culture circles, it's very common to find people making list of "Desert Island Books" or CD's or DVD's, or whatever. The idea being to list those pop culture items that are of sufficient quality that they would be sufficient entertainment if you were stranded for years on a desert island.with nothing else to read/ listen to/ watch.
So here's an extremely nerdy variant of the "Desert Island" idea: imagine that you're being exiled to a remote island or a a space colony or…
drorzel | February 28, 2007Back when I first mentioned the idea, people were kind of down on the idea of SciRate.com, Dave Bacon's project to make a collaborative filter for the arxiv.org prerprint server. Not one to be easily discouraged, Dave has continued to work on it, and it now features papers from all the different arxiv categories, instead of just quant-ph.
If you've been sitting around thinking "Gee, I wish there were a Digg for hep-th, well, today's you're lucky day. If you haven't, well, umm... Look over there! Shiny thing!
drorzel | February 27, 2007Terence Tao explains quantum theory as a game of Tomb Raider:
Imagine first that Lara is about to navigate a tricky rolling boulder puzzle, when she hears a distant rumbling sound - the sound of her player saving her game to disk. From the perspective of the player, what happens next is the following: Lara navigates the boulder puzzle but fails, being killed in the process; then the player restores the game from the save point and then Lara successfully makes it through the boulder puzzle.
Now, how does the situation look from Lara's point of view? At the save point, Lara's reality diverges…
drorzel | February 26, 2007Check out the DeMille group rigid rotor photo. Truly, a remarkable display.
(One of my students stumbled across this while researching grad schools, and showed it to me today.)
drorzel | February 26, 2007Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne (not JoAnne, as I originally typed) has a very nice post about the cult of genius in physics, and its relationship to research on the problems caused by excessive praise. Doug Natelson also has some comments. There's some fascinating stuff in the articles about praise, with some likely relevance to once and future education arguments, but I need to think about it more before I comment.
My reason for posting, though, is found in the comments. Specifically, comment #10, by "mclaren", which reads in part:
Sure, I've got a degree in physics, but basically I'm…
drorzel | February 23, 2007It's a good day for people posting about science I don't understand...
Peter Woit points to the Non-Commutative Geometry blog, at which Alain Connes, the godfather of non-commutative geometry, is posting. It's not the most polished blog, but if you can understand what they're talking about, it's probably interesting.
Scott Aaronson is excited about new results in quantum computing, where somebody has "announced a quantum algorithm for evaluating NAND trees in O(âN) time." I'm not quite sure what he's talking about either, but it has something to do with ants, sugar cubes, and teaching…
drorzel | February 22, 2007This is an approximate transcription of my physics talk from Boskone, titled "Spooky Action at a Distance," in which I attempted to give a reasonable explanation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen ("EPR" hereafter) paper and Bell's Theorem. This was sort of a follow-on from last year's "Weird Quantum Phenomena," meant to highlight a specific class of weird quantum phenomena.
There's some SF relevance to the ideas involved in EPR and Bell's Theorem. A number of authors have name-checked the idea, most notably Charlie Stross citing "entangled particles" as the mechanism for FTL communications in…
drorzel | February 22, 2007I was busy yesterday at work, so I managed to avoid looking at the "Conservapedia" until James Nicoll, the bastard, drew my attention to the entry on Relativity:
Unlike most advances in physics, the theory of relativity was proposed based on mathematical theory rather than observation. The theory rests on two postulates that are difficult to test, and then derives mathematically what the physical consequences should be. Those two postulates are that the speed of light never changes, and that all laws of physics are the same in every (inertial) frame of reference no matter where it is or how…