Physics
esiegel | September 29, 2015When young galaxies are first formed, they're accompanied by tremendous bursts of star formation, giving rise to billions of new stars within just a few million years. Yet how these galaxies first form in the initial stages is very much an open question. In addition, pretty much every large galaxy we find -- even in the extremely young Universe -- has a supermassive black hole at its center.
Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
Is it conceivable that these black holes are the engines of newly formed galaxies? Is it even possible that these black holes preceded the…
drorzel | September 26, 2015The image here of a pancake cooking isn't particularly interesting in its own right, other than as documentation of our weekend ritual at Chateau Steelypips. Saturday and sunday mornings, Kate sleeps in while the kids watch cartoons and I cook pancakes for them. SteelyKid absolutely drowns hers in maple syrup, then refuses to eat them, while The Pip regularly wolfs down two plain pancakes, eating with his hands:
A pancake cooking at Chateau Steelypips.
As I said, this image isn't especially interesting, but it's here mostly as a teaser for a different thing, namely this thermal-imaging…
drorzel | September 25, 2015I spent a while today shooting video of myself on the back porch. Which technically qualifies for the photo-a-day project, because I used the video feature of my new camera. So, here's a still frame.
Still frame from video shot for a physics thing.
What am I doing here, and why? You'll have to wait until I finish the analysis and write it up for the blog. Right now, I have errands to run before I go get the kids from day care.
esiegel | September 24, 2015“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
There's an attitude that's very, very common in America: the notion of the rugged individualist. Part of that ethos is the idea that, "if I use my brain to its fullest extent, I can figure out any problem as well as any expert." It's the idea that logic, reason, and the power of your own mind to solve literally anything.
Image credit: Science Photo Library/Corbis.
But one of the most important lessons that science teaches us is that…
esiegel | September 23, 2015“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” -Carl Sagan
So, Ben Carson made a speech in 2011 that's making the rounds, for some pretty scary reasons. I'm particularly concerned with what he has…
esiegel | September 22, 2015“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding — yet beautiful — Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.” -Buzz Aldrin
If you look at Earth from space, you'll find that we're a blue planet. You might chalk that up to the fact that our sky is blue, the sky is the outermost layer of our planet, and hence the planet appears blue. But then why do the continents and clouds appear to be such different colors, and why is the "blue" of the ocean such a…
drorzel | September 20, 2015I got a little bit of time today to play with the new lens, which included a couple of nice shots of the kids. I'm trying not to have this be "photo of the kids of the day," though, so here's a different shot making use of the limited depth of field of the f/2.8 lens:
Scratch paper with calculations for a football physics post at Forbes.
That's the half-sheet (it's the back of a draft of a book proposal, if you must know) of projectile motion calculations that I scribbled down while writing this Forbes post about the dumb football commentary "he caught the ball at its highest point". Which…
drorzel | September 16, 2015I've been doing a lot of opining on my blogs of late, and much less science-ing that I would like. So I thought I'd try bringing a little science to the photo-a-day project, by playing around with f-numbers.
I put the camera on the tripod, with my fastest lens (a 50mm f/1.8 prime) and set up an array of SteelyKid's Lego minifigs to be targets. Then I shot pictures of the scene at different aperture settings spanning the full range I could select. The two extremes are shown here:
Lego minifigs shot with the two extremes of my fastest lens. Top is f/22, bottom f/1.8.
I had to put it on…
esiegel | September 15, 2015When we think of our origin story -- the origin of everything in the Universe -- many of us think of, "let there be light!" This is true whether you consider the Big Bang origins of our Universe or the biblical stories we've told for thousands of years, yet few of us pause to consider what the phenomenon of light actually is.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Lookang.
We take for granted, today, that it's an electromagnetic wave, yet this was only determined by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865: exactly 150 years ago. A few decades later, the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission took place…
drorzel | September 14, 2015I have once again fallen down on the job, or at least the part of it that involves letting ScienceBlogs readers know what I've been posting at Forbes. I blame the Labor Day holiday and the start of school.
Anyway, it's been a bit over two weeks since the last round-up, so a bunch of new posts:
--Physics: Complicating Everything Since The 1600's: A look at the subtle and picky issues that need to be addressed before you can claim to have definitively tested something in physics.
--A Qualified Defense Of "Science Literacy": A bunch of people on blogs and Twitter were hating on the science…
esiegel | September 13, 2015“Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.” -Vik Muniz
If you've ever wired something up yourself and successfully hit that switch for the first time, you know what that sense of magic feels like. Have a listen to Forest City Lovers as they sing about that same feeling in a different context,
Light You Up,
while you consider how maddening circuit…
esiegel | September 12, 2015"I am quite surprised that it happened during my lifetime. It is nice to be right about something sometimes." -Peter Higgs
The LHC at CERN proved its value, for sure, but there are lots of other opinions floating around. On this and all topics at Starts With A Bang, you're free to have your say! Here's the ground we've covered, in case you missed anything:
What if we grew a fourth spatial dimension? (for Ask Ethan),
Obsession, for cats? (for our Weekend Diversion),
A runaway blue giant (for Mostly Mute Monday),
"Why do I have to learn this?", (a back-to-school special),
Will the LHC be the…
esiegel | September 10, 2015“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” -Lord Kelvin
When Kelvin said that over 100 years ago, he was talking about how Newtonian gravity and Maxwell's electromagnetism seemed to account for all the known phenomena in the Universe. Of course, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and more made that prediction look silly in hindsight.
Image credit: E. Siegel.
But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only…
esiegel | September 4, 2015“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.” -Rod Serling
Of course, despite our best theoretical hopes, we know only of four dimensions -- three space and one time -- that exist in our Universe. But what if there not only were a fourth spatial dimension, but it presented itself to us by growing from a microscopic, undetectable state, and then shrank back into one on an annual basis?
Image credit: Paul Falstad’s 3-D Vector…
esiegel | September 3, 2015“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” –Joan of Arc
In 2012, I had the honor and the privilege to learn about Mariam Sultana, the first woman in Pakistan to be awarded a Ph.D. degree in astrophysics. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to contact her and obtain permission for an exclusive interview, for which I solicited questions for her from all over the globe.
Image credit: The Express Tribune with the International Herald Tribune, http://tribune.…
jhalper | August 31, 2015
One day in the future, we may be treating our ailments with microbiotic combinations designed specifically to correct imbalances in our personal microbiomes. We’ll bring our prescriptions on rewritable paper and pay using shimmery optical chips embedded in our cell phone cases or maybe our jewelry. Or we’ll be waiting in our doctor’s office for a simple test of our microbiogenome to see if a light-based nanoparticle delivery treatment is working, while watching iridescent optical displays that change as we move...
These future scenarios (and many more) are all imaginary, but they are…
esiegel | August 31, 2015When it comes to the Universe, physicists say things like: it originated in a Big Bang, it's isotropic (or the same in all directions), and it's homogeneous (the same everywhere), save for the effects of cosmic evolution. In every direction we look, we see galaxies expanding away from us, with the expansion rate increasing the farther away we look.
Image credit: NASA / WMAP science team, via http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_exp.html.
But an expansion inherent to the fabric of space itself isn't the only explanation; it's conceivable that we see what we see because everything else…
esiegel | August 27, 2015“When I say, ‘I love you,’ it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are.” –Joss Whedon
When you first venture out into the world, you're armed, as a human being, with an incredible intelligence, but with no experience. All sorts of basic things must be learned, often the hard way: hot things will burn you, hot things that don't look hot will also burn you, and that…
esiegel | August 22, 2015"Once you accept that we're all imperfect, it's the most liberating thing in the world. Then you can go around making mistakes and saying the wrong thing and tripping over on the street and all that and not feel worried." -Paloma Faith
Yet it's the imperfections in the Universe that truly enable the most interesting things within it to exist at all. We covered just a smattering of them here at Starts With A Bang this past week, including:
Did the Universe need to be born "lumpy" (for Ask Ethan),
Work out to the Maxx (for our Weekend Diversion),
Inside the Carina Nebula (for Mostly Mute …
esiegel | August 20, 2015“Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.” –Alan Guth
If we trace the evolution of our Universe back in time, we can arrive at a time before there were organic molecules, rocky planets, heavy elements, galaxies, stars, or even neutral atoms. The farther back we go, the hotter the Universe gets, the higher in density and temperature, and more uniform. But at some point, this hot, dense, expanding state ceases to describe our Universe.
Image credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Because…