Physics
purepedantry | August 22, 2006Right:
An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.
The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy -- a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics.
It claims the technology can be used to supply energy for virtually all devices, from mobile phones to cars.
Steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the Economist magazine this week quoting Ireland's Nobel…
purepedantry | August 21, 2006Dark matter definitely exists:
New observations of a great big cosmic collision provide the best evidence yet that invisible and mysterious dark matter really does exist.
The collision, between two huge clusters of galaxies, is the "most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, that we know about," said Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The impact split normal matter and dark matter apart, rendering the dark matter's gravitational presence observable.
Dark matter is sort of like the G-spot. We knew it was there. We knew it…
drorzel | August 17, 2006Some new additions to the physics blogroll:
1) Not all that new, but I keep forgetting to post a link: Clifford Johnson has spun off Asymptotia from Cosmic Variance, to house his own brand of bike-riding, concert-going, vegetable-buying physics blogging. If you read Clifford's stuff at Cosmic Variance, you know what you're getting. If you haven't read his stuff, well, go check it out.
2) A new group blog: The n-category Cafe, featuring John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber. It's a little tough to say what this will really be about, since they only have two posts up, but they all have…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Over at Gene Expression, Razib is collecting ten-word summaries of evolutionary theory, with follow-up posts here and here. Because I'm completely shameless about this sort of thing, I'm going to swipe the idea, and apply it to physics.
Of course, physics as a discipline covers a bit more conceptual territory than "evolutionary theory," so it's probably impossible to boil down to a single statement of ten or fewer words, but Razib had to cop out as well, settling on ten ten-word statements. So let's take that as a goal, and ask, following the original phrasing: If you had 10 words or less,…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne is soliciting ideas for graphics to explain the Higgs Mechanism and Supersymmetry. If you understand these processes, and have a flair for graphic design, go over there and help her out. She's going to take the best ideas to a workshop on this topic at SLAC, so this might be a path to fame, of a sort...
I'll offer some miscellaneous thoughts about the example graphics she provided, below the fold.
Here are the existing Higgs boson graphics:
(This is a collage of four different graphics from different sources-- JoAnne's post has the original links.)
As stand-…
drorzel | August 16, 2006True Lab stories are everywhere, as Arcance Gazebo today features a story of new and interesting liquid nitrogen experiments:
Condensed matter labs such as ours receive frequent deliveries of liquid nitrogen in one- or two-hundred liter dewars. Unfortunately, most of the Berkeley cond-mat labs are in Birge Hall, which has no loading dock, so that the LN2 dewars arrive on the first floor of neighboring LeConte where they must be wheeled over to their destination by some low-seniority student. Since the Berkeley campus is on a hill, the loading dock at the back of the building is one floor…
drorzel | August 15, 2006Yesterday, I spent $52 (plus shipping) buying sand. Not a gret big sack of sand, either-- just 200 grams of it. I count it as a bargain, too, because I was prepared to spend twice the amount for half as much.
Now, granted, the $1000/kg sand is extremely high purity silicon dioxide, designed to be used in putting high-quality coatings on optical elements, and I would've bought that if it hadn't been back-ordered. The cheaper stuff is slightly lower purity-- 99.9% instead of 99.95%-- but it ought to work. And they had it in stock at Aldrich, so I decided to take a chance, and save $50 in the…
drorzel | August 15, 2006I'm in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I've been saying this for weeks. It's a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I'll post a few of the things I'm writing, when it's reasonable to do so.
A major part of the tenure process is finding external reviewers for the research material. As most institutions don't really have enough people in a given sub-field to assess research in-house (especially at a small college), and as trusting such an assessment would be a little dodgy, the research review is traditionally…
drorzel | August 15, 2006You might think that, being a sciene blogger and all, I would have sources of science news that aren't available to the average person on the street. You would be right, though they're not as useful as you might think... The source for today's news teaser is actually a thank-you email from a prospective student I talked to on Friday.
So, anyway, those little scamps at NASA are playing all coy with some sort of announcement regarding dark matter:
Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal…
drorzel | August 11, 2006As noted in a previous post, I'm teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I'll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that's one of the options, whether people think it's a good idea or not.
These days, it seems like everybody has their own college rankings (the Washington Monthly just came out with a new version of theirs, for example), but very few people provide what's really important: realistic ratings of physics graduate programs. So let's see what…
drorzel | August 10, 2006The discussion surrounding the recent post about jobs continues to bubble along nicely, both in the original post, and the follow-up. I love it when a plan comes together.
There's been a lot of discussion of following the advice in the Katz letter and seeking non-academic careers, but Jeff F. (who I know from my post-doc days) puts his finger on a major problem with this plan: The faculty who advise students on career choices don't know, well, much of anything:
Unfortunately, I was mostly on my own in making the jump from academics to industry. I chose to do a postdoc on a project with my…
drorzel | August 10, 2006As noted by several people, most recently JoAnne Hewett, one of the players at the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event is a Ph.D. physicist: Michael Binger, recently of SLAC. So, I guess we need to expand the list of non-academic physics careers to include "professional poker player." I'm not sure how Prof. Katz left it off his list.
JoAnne quotes from his bio:
Michael Binger hopes to continue doing research in physics without having to run the rat-race of getting a job and impressing all the right people as he puts it. A win here at the World Series of Poker Main Event would…
drorzel | August 9, 2006The latest jobs in science post has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there's Nicholas Condon in comments:
When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in "science," it seems like it frequently comes from people with two characteristics: they seem to believe that the only viable destination for a Ph.D. scientist is a professorship, and they who work in subfields that are oversupplied (biology) or have very limited non-academic employment opportunitites (HEP) and they mistake…
drorzel | August 9, 2006I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.
Of course, there's been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that's not what I'm talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.
First, via His Holiness, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics. It's not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it's well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works…
drorzel | August 8, 2006Jonathan Katz's "Don't Become a Scientist" has bubbled to the surface again, turning up at P.P. Cook's Tangent Space a few days ago. I can't recall what, if anything, I said about this that last time it came around, but I'll make a few comments here, in light of the recent discussions about jobs in science.
As you can guess from the title, the piece is a long rant aimed at getting students not to go to graduate school in science. It's an unremitting tale of anecdotal woe:
American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut…
drorzel | August 7, 2006Via Making Light, Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has some sharp words in response to the alleged Deep Thoughts on his Starbucks cup:
When Einstein explained his theory of relativity, he couldn't express it in the precise, scientific writing of physics. He had to use poetry. Poetry: the connection of words, images, and the relationships that gives [sic] them meaning. Quantum physics changed the world. No longer can we view the world in separate, mechanical ways, but we must accept the reality of interconnection, unity, and togetherness. Life is poetry.
This pearl of wisdom is attributed…
drorzel | August 4, 2006Friday's a good day for lightweight blogging, so here's something fun, via Roberto Alamino: A big collection of physics flash animations from the University of Toronto. It includes everything from three-body graviational motion to the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to how to use an oscilloscope.
Our DSL has been a little slow this morning, so I haven't been able to watch that many of them, but the ones I looked at are pretty cool. I'll probably be adding this link to my class webpages in the future, because you can never have too many physics-based videogames...
drorzel | August 3, 2006The Dave Bacon post linked earlier today is actually the beginning of a plug for Doug Natelson's list of hot topics and controversies in condensed matter and nanoscale science.
As was suggested in a recent comment, now that a nonzero number of condensed matter and nano people are (apparently) reading this blog (at least occasionally), this could be a fun opportunity to have a series of discussions about the hot topics and controversies out there in the world of condensed matter and nanoscale science. The idea would be to take maybe one topic a week, give a relatively gentle introduction to…
drorzel | August 2, 2006Temperatures in Schenectady hit the mid-90's yesterday (do your own metric conversions), so I took the opportunity to do a little experimental thermodynamics: I played pick-up soccer after work with some of the students who are here for the summer. On the field-turf football field, which was a good ten degrees hotter than the ambient temperature elsewhere. It was an excellent opportunity to run down Jim's checklist of heat stress symptoms ("Hmmm... I'm not sweating as much as I was a little while ago. Perhaps this would be a good time to go sit in the shade and drink water...").
(Let this be…
drorzel | July 31, 2006Via Victor Revelles (among other sources), news of a proposed experiment to follow up an earlier experiment that reportedpolarization shifts of photons in vacuum in a strong magnetic field. There's a similar news story about the new experiment.
The idea here is to try to nail down the cause of that earlier rotation, which isn't the sort of thing you normally expect to happen. Photons passing through vacuum are supposed to, well, pass through the vacuum. They're not supposed to change their polarization, even if there is a big magnetic field present. In order for the earlier experiment to have…