Physics
drorzel | November 6, 2015I've known this for a while now, but they just announced it officially: I'll be speaking at TEDxAlbany this year, on "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 are essential for everything around us. The mundane process of getting up and getting…
drorzel | November 6, 2015I love a lot of things about our neighborhood, which is all pleasant tree-lined streets and stuff, but it's not a great place for taking pictures of sunset-- I pretty much need to get in the car to get to a place with a clear view of the western horizon. This knocks out a big category of imitation-Scalzi photos, but every now and then there's a cool sunset-related effect, like these clouds last night:
Red patches of cloud at sunset.
This is kind of similar to the sunrise squirrel from a few days ago, but the lit-up clouds are a little more sparse, which makes it more dramatic.
And, of…
esiegel | November 5, 2015"Studying whether there's life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there's something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That's something that is almost part of being human, and I'm certain that will continue." -Sally Ride
If you came to the Solar System some 500 million years after its formation, you would've found two world with oceans of liquid water, continents and all the conditions we know of for life to begin thriving: Earth and Mars. But unlike our own world, Mars' organic history was cut short when it lost its atmosphere and became a barren, desert…
drorzel | November 5, 2015A little while back, I used a photo of SteelyKid's toy Newton's cradle as the photo of the day, with a bonus video:
I mentioned that I was going to do some analysis of this at some point, but didn't have time right then. I had a bit of time to poke at this yesterday, though, so here's some physics making use of the normal-speed part of that video (I have another purpose in mind for the high-speed stuff; you'll need to wait for that).
The obvious thing to do with this is to plug it into Tracker and measure the position as a function of time. Here's a graph tracking the position of the two end…
esiegel | November 4, 2015"Historically, when we have better clocks, we have better navigation." -David Wineland
If you want to keep time in the Universe, you need a reference point that everyone can agree on, so that when you talk about things like "meters," "seconds," or "the speed of light," everyone else in the world is in agreement. In addition, you need a reproducible standard, where anyone can measure the same ticking phenomenon.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user PoorLeno.
In the case of our Universe, atomic clocks are the best standard of all, although they didn't reach that point until a generation ago…
drorzel | October 30, 2015I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:
-- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:
It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…
esiegel | October 29, 2015“I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.” –Robert Browning
You've heard it said often that one thing remains true no matter what we discuss: that this, too, shall pass. The stars will eventually burn out, the galaxies will be driven apart, gravitational interactions will unbind everything, and even collapsed entities like black holes will decay away. But at a fundamental level, is that actually the case for matter itself?
Image credit: Super Kamiokande.
We've observed plenty of particle interactions and…
esiegel | October 21, 2015Mr. Strickland: “I noticed your band is on the roster for the dance auditions after school today. Why even bother, McFly? You don’t have a chance. You’re too much like your old man. No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!”
Marty McFly: “Yeah, well, history is gonna change.” -Back To The Future
If you've ever wished you could go back in time and undo that mistake you made, to have a second chance to get it right the first time, you're certainly not alone. Indeed, for as long as the concept of time has been around, humans have dreamed about this possibility, as some of…
esiegel | October 20, 2015When you take a large amount of mass and put it all together in a small volume of space, you fully expect gravity to do its thing, and eventually collapse things down as far as they'll go. You can imagine that for compact masses with large distances between them -- like planets in the solar system or stars in the galaxy -- this will take a very long time: longer than the age of the Universe.
Image credit: NASA/ESA and A. Feild, of the known globular clusters around the Milky Way.
But what about globular clusters: hundreds of thousands of stars collected in a spherical region of space just…
drorzel | October 19, 2015A few years back, I did a couple of posts on the physics of a sad balloon (that is, a helium balloon that can no longer lift itself up to the ceiling), the first on simple buoyancy, the second on how long it takes for the helium to leak out. These were based on only a couple of data points, though, and it's always risky to extrapolate too far from just two points.
Of course, in a house with two kids, we have helium balloons show up with some regularity, and SteelyKid's birthday this year provided a bounty of them-- four shiny Mylar balloons, bearing cheerful images of Scooby-Doo, some cartoon…
drorzel | October 13, 2015For the 42nd installment of this photo-a-day thing, it seems appropriate to try to do some SCIENCE! to get an Answer. So, here's a composite of a bunch of images I took yesterday in order to investigate something:
Graph paper shot with several different lenses, to look for distortion of the images.
OK, this needs some explanation...
So, I do a lot of shooting with moderately wide-angle lenses (either a 10-18mm zoom or the 24mm fixed "pancake" lens), because SteelyKid and The Pip tend to want to be right on top of me a lot of the time, and it's hard to get good pictures with them fully in…
drorzel | October 10, 2015Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went out to the local science museum for a bit, to break up the cartoon-watching that was the other primary activity of the day.
I've posted a bunch of cute-kid photos already, though, so here's one that's just science museum stuff:
Smoke tornado at MiSci.
That's the artificial tornado exhibit-- a…
esiegel | October 9, 2015“Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight.” -Victor Hugo
Whether you're at rest or in motion, you can be confident that -- from your point of view -- the laws of physics will behave exactly the same no matter how quickly you're moving. You can move slowly, quickly or not at all, up to the limits that the Universe imposes on you: the speed of light.
Image credit: Noreen of http://thecampgal.com/2014/06/17/flashlight-…
drorzel | October 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of science-y blogging at Forbes:
-- Football Physics: Deflategate Illustrates Key Concepts: In which I use the ever-popular silly scandal over deflated footballs as an excuse to talk about three-body recombination.
-- The Annoying Physics Of Air Resistance: Air resistance is an annoyance to be abstracted out in intro physics classes, but looking for its influence with video analysis is kind of fun.
-- How NASA's Viking Mars Probes Helped Prove Einstein Right: We think of missions to Mars as primarily about searching for life, but they have also helped test fundamental…
esiegel | October 8, 2015“It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.” -Enrico Fermi
At 13 TeV of proton-proton energy collisions, CERN's Large Hadron Collider gives us the greatest number of the most powerful particle collisions ever seen on Earth, far more than any cosmic source from the Universe and far more energetic than any other terrestrial accelerator. It's already found us the Higgs boson and has helped better measure other Standard Model particles' properties, but has yet to turn up anything beyond the Standard Model.
Image credit: Gordon Kane,…
esiegel | October 6, 2015"Indeed some of the users were advised by their older colleagues to “abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” I fear that I bear the responsibility for this fiasco." -Robert R. Wilson
Back in 1967, the National Accelerator Laboratory was first commissioned, which would later become Fermilab, making such discoveries as the bottom and top quarks, the tau neutrino, and the discovery of CP-violation. In short, this was the machine, the laboratory and the home of the people who confirmed for us the validity of the Standard Model in a way never before achieved.
Image credit: University of Glasgow.…
jdupuis | October 4, 2015Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball and Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon R. Brown are two of the best history of science books I've read in a very long time. And even though they're both about World War II, some seventy years in the past, they've both also very topical because they are both very much about the relationship between politics and science. In a sense, what comes first, the political chicken or the scientific egg. Are scientists responsible for how their work is put to use by their political "masters?" Do scientists…
esiegel | October 2, 2015“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?” -Rose Kennedy
It's a good thing that sunlight doesn't reach us simply from its moment of creation in the core of stars, otherwise we'd be bombarded with lethal gamma rays, rather than the life-giving UV, visible and infrared light we actually experience.
Image credit: Don Dixon of http://cosmographica.com/.
But that doesn't mean it isn't possible that the ultimate form of direct sunlight -- light from a nuclear reaction in the Sun -- to reach us, does it? Today's Ask Ethan focuses…
esiegel | October 1, 2015“This is evidently a discovery of a new particle. If anybody claims otherwise you can tell them they have lost connection with reality.” –Tommaso Dorigo
Three years ago, we announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered fundamental particle predicted by the standard model. In addition to the quarks, leptons, gluons, photon and W-and-Z particles, this was the last piece of the puzzle.
Image credit: Fermilab / E. Siegel.
But the Higgs boson meant something else: that the Higgs field was real, and was the thing responsible for giving mass to the Universe. That's not a very…
drorzel | September 30, 2015It's rained fairly steadily for the last couple of days, which is to be expected. This also sent me to the back yard in hopes of getting a very particular effect for the photo of the day, that I had seen on a poster from the APS's student photo contest a few years ago:
Water drops on the canopy on our deck, with little inverted images of the back yard.
Here you see a large-aperture shot of drops of water hanging off the edge of the canopy over the patio table on our deck. The drops are in focus, but the rest of the yard is blurred out. If you look closely at the drops, though, you can see…