Physics
carlyo | May 5, 2015This Nifty Fifty Podcast features, Dr. Tristan Hübsch, Physicist and Mathematician from Howard University, speaking to Immanuel Christian School about the “Theory of Everything” and how he got interested in Physics from a very early age. Read the full blog here.
drorzel | May 5, 2015I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes:
“HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!”
“Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard.
“But, those poodles..”
“We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?”
“Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.”
“What?”
“I would love to just lie in the sun, but…
drorzel | May 3, 2015So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure...
(There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...)
So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning:
(in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...)
Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and…
drorzel | May 2, 2015A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants:
Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…
esiegel | April 30, 2015“What a shot by Happy Gilmore! <aside> Who the hell is Happy Gilmore?” -Announcer, from Happy Gilmore
After some intense physics earlier this week, it's time to get on to the important stuff: the physics of taking a running start and trying to beat the daylights out of a golf ball.
Image credit: Harold “Doc” Edgerton, of golfer Denny Shute in 1938.
Sure, it's the fun stuff that slapstick hollywood movies are made for, but does it actually work? The physics will inform you, but the practical results will amaze you!
Image credit: Universal Pictures, Frank Coraci, and Adam Sandler et…
esiegel | April 28, 2015Over at Starts With A Bang, Jillian Scudder of Astroquizzical takes on a doozy of a question:
If a photon of light escapes from a star, when it hits another star, does it get absorbed and have to complete another cycle before it can escape again?
After all, it takes (on average) over 100,000 years for a photon created in a star's core to find its way to the surface and exit.
Image credit: NASA/Jenny Mottar.
But what about the photons -- much lower energy than the gamma rays the core generates -- that hit the surface? Will they simply be absorbed and re-emitted outward, the way the Earth's…
drorzel | April 28, 2015As mentioned over the weekend, I gave a talk last week for UCALL, part of a series on "The Radical Early 20th Century." I talked about how relativity is often perceived as revolutionary, but isn't really, while Einstein's really revolutionary 1905 paper is often overlooked. And, having put the time into thinking about the subject, I turned the basic theme into a new blog post over at Forbes:
Albert Einstein is easily one of the most recognizable people in history, and everybody thinks they know why. He’s the guy who, in 1905, completely revolutionized physics, overthrowing the prior order…
drorzel | April 25, 2015This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the "featured image" above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section meeting of the American Physical Society.
If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public…
esiegel | April 23, 2015“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
We thought -- back in the time after Maxwell -- that if we understood gravitation and electromagnetism, we'd understand all the forces in the Universe. But once we started to dive inside the atom, and once we discovered the atomic nucleus, a new puzzle arose.
Image credit: Derek Owens, 2009.
You see, every atom other than hydrogen had multiple protons (and neutrons) inside of it. Yet if the protons had a positive electric charge and the neutrons had no…
drorzel | April 22, 2015It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd's take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid.
Sadly, it's now grey and dreary, but that's spring in New England for you. But if you'd like a small amount of quantum-mechanical sunshine, head on over to Forbes and check it out.
esiegel | April 21, 2015The biggest, most surprising revolution that came along with the development of quantum theory, quantum mechanics and later, quantum field theory, was the overthrowing of the idea of a deterministic Universe, replacing it with a Universe where only a probability distribution of outcomes could be theoretically known, even if you knew all the initial conditions of a system.
Image credit: Institute of Physics (IOP), via http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/apr/16/alice-and-bob-comm….
But one of the most intriguing concepts to come along with this was borne out through Niels Bohr's…
drorzel | April 20, 2015Back when we went to London for Worldcon (and then I went to Sweden for a workshop), I bought a smartphone in Heathrow thinking I could sell it back when I left. That turned out not to work the way we thought, but it's served me well ever since as an e-reader. It can't connect to the local cell network, but I can download stuff via wi-fi, and it's small enough to hold in one hand, and back-lit, which makes it nice for reading in bed and on planes.
The lack of a cell connection, though, means it's just running on its onboard clock, so has gotten out of synch with my US phone. But even that is…
esiegel | April 17, 2015“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” -Terry Pratchett
If you want, you can imagine back in the Universe to a time before it looked anything like ours did. Before there was life, before there were planets, galaxies, stars, or even neutral atoms. Yet going back even to those times, there was still light, and there were still photons.
Image credit: the Cosmic Microwave Background of Penzias and Wilson, via http://astro.kizix.org/decouverte-du-17-mars-2014-sur-le-…
drorzel | April 17, 2015"Hey, Daddy, did you know that in five or six million years the Sun is going to explode."
"It's five or six billion years, with a 'b.'"
"Right, in five or six billion years, the Sun's going to explode."
"Well, a star like our Sun won't really explode. It'll swell up really big, probably swallow the Earth, and then kind of... go out."
"Right, and then it would be dark all the time. So we'd need to build a really big lamp."
"Well, in five or six billion years, maybe we'd just build a new star."
"How would we do that?"
"Well, you know, you just get a really big bunch of hydrogen together."
"Oh,…
esiegel | April 16, 2015“There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
‘I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.’” -Shel Silverstein
It's pretty obvious that the Universe exists in such a way that it admits the possibility of intelligent life arising. After all, we're here, we're intelligent life, and we're in this Universe. So at minimum, the Universe must exist in such a way that it's physically possible for us to have arisen.
Image credit: Chris Cook of http://www.abmedia.com/astro/.
But are there physically interesting things we can learn about the Universe from this line of…
esiegel | April 15, 2015“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.” -Philip K. Dick
When it comes to measuring the expansion history of the Universe, the concept is simple enough: take something you know about an object, like a mass, a size, or a brightness, then measure what the mass, size or brightness appears to be, and suddenly, you know how far away that object has to be.
Image credit: European Space Agency, NASA, Keren Sharon (Tel-Aviv University) and Eran Ofek (CalTech).
Add in a measurement of the object's redshift, and you can figure out not only what the expansion rate of the…
drorzel | April 15, 2015One of the things I struggle with a bit when it comes to writing about cool modern physics is how much to play up the weirdness. On the one hand, people just can't get enough of "spooky action at a distance," but on the other hand, talking too much about that sort of thing makes quantum physics seem like a completely bizarre theory with no applications.
Which is unfortunate, because quantum physics is essential for all manner of everyday technology. For example, as I try to explain in a new post at Forbes, quantum physics is essential to the cheap alarm clock that wakes me up in the morning.…
esiegel | April 14, 2015“I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” -Schrödinger
Ever think that if we just pitted enough intelligence at a particular problem, we'd be bound to solve it? That was certainly the approach that two of the greatest minds in history -- Einstein and Schrödinger -- took, when it came to the very nature of our Universe.
Image credit: Benjamin Couprie, Institut International de Physique de Solvay, of the 1927 Solvay Conference.
Yet no amount of intelligence will get you to the solution if you make an assumption about the Universe that isn't consistent with physical…
drorzel | April 13, 2015I continue to read way too much about the ongoing Hugo mess, and will most likely eventually lose my battle not to say anything more about it. In an attempt to redirect that impulse in a productive direction, I wrote a thing for Forbes about some of my favorite treatments of science in SF:
Of course, now that I’m a professional scientist, I end up finding a lot of stories about science to be lacking. Not just in the usual “the laws of physics don’t apply” sense, where science is bent to serve the purpose of the story– I’m generally pretty accepting of that, because sticking too strictly to…
drorzel | April 10, 2015We're into admitted student season, that muddy period when large numbers of anxious high-school seniors visit college campuses all over the nation, often with parents in tow, trying to decide where to spend the next four years. As a result, I'll be spending a good deal of time over the next few weeks talking to high-school students who are interested in physics, trying to convince them to come here.
So, since I'm putting time into that anyway, I typed out a version of the argument in favor of going to a small liberal arts college (Williams, or Union, or some lesser school) to major in science…