Physics
esiegel | August 19, 2015“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” -Gene Roddenberry
Today would have been the 95th birthday of Gene Roddenberry, the mind that brought us the Universe of Star Trek. In addition to a utopia where maladies like hunger, disease and poverty were eradicated, Star Trek promised a future where technology was widely available and sufficiently advanced to the benefit of all of humanity.
Image credit: ©2015 KGO-TV, of the “Scanadu” medical tricorder.
While many of these…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
drorzel | August 7, 2015There's a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent-- with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the background would be helpful. Since I ended up doing a back-of-the-envelope estimate for that, though, I thought I would reproduce some of the reasoning here.
The basic proposal idea here is to do an atom interferometer inside a Ramsey interferometer for making an atomic clock. That is, before sending the…
esiegel | August 6, 2015“The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.” –Stephen Hawking
Imagine you traveled out into empty space. Away from any and all planets, stars, galaxies, and matter in general: normal or dark. Would you simply find yourself immersed in an empty, energy-free abyss? Not so! You'd still be bathed in radiation: not just from distant starlight, but from the afterglow of the Big Bang itself.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck…
drorzel | August 6, 2015Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one poet. The goal was to provide a basic grounding in quantum physics and a look at current research in hopes of informing and inspiring new stories that will, in turn, inspire the audience for those stories to look more deeply into the…
esiegel | July 31, 2015“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” -Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
You've heard it said many times here: the Universe, since the Big Bang, is 13.8 billion years old. But how do we know this to be true?
Image credit: Bock et al. (2006, astro-ph/0604101); modifications by me.
Moreover, how many different lines of evidence do we have that leads us to this conclusion? Is it like it is for dark matter, where we have a whole slew of them? Or are there only one or two different things we can look at in order to know?
Image credit: Joel D. Hartman, Princeton University, viahttp://www.…
jhalper | July 31, 2015It is a mystery no more: A physical model can explain how a bunch of ants are able, with no visible leader (or highly-developed brains, for that matter) to drag that oversized cake crumb or leaf all the way across your floor to their nest. It turns out that there are, indeed, leaders, of a sort. Those ants you see surrounding the prize being hauled are switching places with other ants that have been scouting out the directions to the nest. The new ants then direct the collective movement, at least for a moment or so until they begin to lose their sense of direction and newer ants take over.…
esiegel | July 28, 2015When it comes to dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the vast majority of the mass in the Universe, there's a whole lot we don't understand or know about it. You might think that there are so many unknowns that are so huge that -- quite reasonably -- perhaps it doesn't exist at all, and there's some other explanation for the behavior of masses on galactic scales and up?
Image credit: NASA/ESA/Richard Massey (California Institute of Technology).
And yet, you can't make that leap unless you've honestly (and scientifically) considered the full suite of evidence and facts that…
esiegel | July 24, 2015“As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.” -Sylvia Ashton-Warner
While the night sky is littered with thousands of points of light -- the stars visible to the naked eye -- we know that beyond what human perception can see, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable Universe. Yet every star that ever has shone or will shine will someday run out of fuel and die.
Image credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI), via https://www.spacetelescope.…
esiegel | July 22, 2015“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” -Ernest Rutherford
Over 100 years ago, Ernest Rutherford fired a stream of alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold foil, watching in amazement as some of the particles recoiled, backwards, opposite to the original direction they started off in. With one fell swoop, he had discovered the atomic nucleus.
Image credit: Teach Astronomy / Chris Impey, via http://m.teachastronomy.com/astropedia/article…
drorzel | July 22, 2015Having mentioned in yesterday's post that I'll be on sabbatical for the next academic year, this would probably be a good time to point out that this means I'm somewhat more flexible than usual in terms of going places and giving talks. And I enjoy going places and giving talks. About lots of different things.
So, if you're at a place that might be interested in a science-y speaker on quantum physics, relativity, science communication, science in general, or something related to those, drop me a line. I'd be happy to talk about the possibility of visiting new places and talking to people…
esiegel | July 18, 2015“Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we first knew.” -Alan Stern
The last week here at Starts With A Bang saw some great articles that went from Pluto to stars to nebulae to the theoretical limits of our understanding of everything. When we put it all together, here's what we've covered:
Is the multiverse science? (for Ask Ethan),
The best discoveries from the High Sierra Music Festival (for our Weekend Diversion),
The beauty of…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…
esiegel | July 16, 2015“Man loves company — even if it is only that of a small burning candle.” -Georg C. Lichtenberg
The Sun, like all stars initially, burns hydrogen fuel into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. But as the Sun ages, as do all stars over a certain mass, it starts burning those heavier elements in its core, going through different phases of its life cycle and eventually ending in a planetary nebula/white dwarf combination.
Image credit: NASA, W. Sparks (STScI) and R. Sahai (JPL).
But are these transitions sharp or gradual, and what of even more massive stars that start burning carbon,…
esiegel | July 15, 2015When it comes to the fabric of our Universe, we live in four dimensions: three space and one time. At least, that's what it seems like. But it's possible that at very high energy scales -- or at very small distance scales -- not only might even more forces unify, but we might discover that the interactions between particles spill over into even more spatial dimensions.
Image credit: TU Wien.
Is there anything we can use about these higher-dimensional ideas to learn something more about our Universe?
Or, conversely, is there anything we can use from our Universe to learn about the potential…
esiegel | July 10, 2015“It’s hard to build models of inflation that don’t lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.” -Alan Guth
You've heard the question asked before about controversial or new-style pieces of work, "But is it art?" Well, what about the scientific counterpart of that?
Image credit: Moonrunner Design, via http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140318-multiverse…
drorzel | July 10, 2015The big development of the week is that I bought a new car, as seen in the featured image. This ate up most of Tuesday, but I still got some quality physics blogging in over at Forbes:
-- The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors: A look at two quantum-mechanical phenomena and one quirk of biology that can be used to make people see colors.
-- Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics: An update of an old post here, Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics. You can see from the titles that, in the intervening five-and-a-half years, I've managed to simplify quantum mechanics by…
jdupuis | July 7, 2015Science! What's it good for? Working towards better knowledge about the natural world!
Under review today are two books that approach what science is and what it's good for from very different angles. Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics and in his book To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science he uses the example of the development of physics and astronomy in modern times to show how the scientific method has been developed and evolved over time. Harry Collins is a sociologist who was instrumental in developing the fields of science studies and the sociology of…
oracknows | July 6, 2015Aside from deconstructing the misinformation and pseudoscience of the antivaccine movement, another of the top three or so topics I routinely discuss here is the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. In particular, I've found and discussed more examples than I can possibly remember of what I like to call quackademic medicine, defined as the infiltration of quackery into academic medicine. This quackery mainly insinuates its way into medical schools and academic medical centers through the emerging specialty known as "integrative medicine," which used to be called "complementary and…