Physics
esiegel | April 8, 2015“Let them see that their words can cut you and you’ll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it anymore.” -George R.R. Martin
Well, it's finally happened! After a two year upgrade, the LHC is back in business, running again, colliding protons and set to ramp up to a record-setting 13 TeV collision energy between the two beams!
Image credit: CERN / ATLAS Collaboration, via http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/collisions….
What will we find? How will we find it? And why do we have a…
drorzel | April 7, 2015The editor at Forbes suggested I should write something about the re-start of the Large Hadron Collider, so I did. But being me, I couldn't just do an "LHC, yay!" post, but talk about it in a larger context, as one of three major approaches to filling the gaps in the Standard Model:
The big physics story over the weekend was the re-start of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was initially started in 2008, but some key circuits failed shortly after it was switched on. A relatively quick patch job allowed it to operate at half its…
drorzel | April 6, 2015Last week, Steven Weinberg wrote a piece for the Guardian promoting his new book about the history of science (which seems sort of like an extended attempt to make Thony C. blow a gasket..). This included a list of recommended books for non-scientists which was, shall we say, a tiny bit problematic.
This is a topic on which I have Opinions, so I wrote a recommended reading list of my own over at Forbes. I'm more diplomatic about Weinberg than Phillip Ball was, but I have ego enough to say that I think my list is way better...
I won't pretend that it's a truly comprehensive list, though, so…
esiegel | April 4, 2015“It’s tempting to go to the throat of the volcano to get the data, because if you do you’re a hero … It’s a battle between your mind and your emotions. If your emotions win out, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble.” -Ken Wohletz
Back on Monday, I shared with you the incomparable story of volcanic lightning. Little did I know that the night before, Colima volcano in Mexico had just started to erupt.
Image credit: César Cantú.
And another thing I had no way of knowing: world-class astrophotographer César Cantú was there to capture it, taking numerous shots of a spectacular eruption,…
esiegel | April 2, 2015“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the Universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.” -Richard Feynman
There are many scientific facts that are simply remarkable when it comes to the Universe, including the stories of the stars, of galaxies, of matter, of life, of atoms and of subatomic particle. In short, every aspect of nature we can think of has its own unique, remarkable story.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
But…
esiegel | April 1, 2015When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics -- about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality -- it's one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there's some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what's visible that actually is deterministic.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
After all, a cat can't simultaneously be dead and alive until someone looks... can it? That's one of the problems that both Einstein and Schrödinger wrestled with during their lives, and an investigation of that story, their work on that front, and their…
drorzel | April 1, 2015A few years ago, I taught one of our "SRS" classes, which are supposed to introduce students to research at the college level-- I blogged about it while the course was in progress. I taught it again in the recently-concluded Winter term, but didn't blog much about it because I was mostly doing the same stuff as last time. I did re-adjust the content a little, as I've changed some things about the way I like to present stuff since 2012, but they were mostly cosmetic tweaks, with one big exception.
In the previous round, I went with the base course description, which just specifies that…
esiegel | March 31, 2015“Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” -Tom Freston
Yes, the Universe can be considered the ultimate innovator, taking the fundamental particles and forces of the Universe, and assembling them into the entirety of what we know, interact with and observe today.
Illustration credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.
But what is it all made out of, at a fundamental level? And how did we figure it all out? ATLAS physicist and University College London professor Jon Butterworth is all set to give a free public lecture (live-streamed, online) tomorrow,…
drorzel | March 30, 2015I hinted once or twice that I had news coming, and this is it: I've signed up to be a blog contributor at Forbes writing about, well, the sorts of things I usually write about. I'm pretty excited about the chance to connect with a new audience; the fact that they're paying me doesn't hurt, either...
The above link goes to my contributor page there, which will be your one-stop-shopping source for what I write at Forbes. There are two posts up this morning, a self-introduction, and an attempt to define physics and what makes it unique. The "Follow" button has an option for an RSS feed; this isn…
esiegel | March 30, 2015“If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.” -Lee Trevino
When it comes to lightning, you inevitably think of thunderstorms, rain, and the exchange of huge amounts of charge between the clouds above and the Earth. But there's another sight that's perhaps even more spectacular.
Image credit: Francisco Negroni / Associated Press, Agenci Uno / European Press Photo Agency.
During volcanic eruptions, the high temperatures, volatile atoms-and-molecules and disrupted airflow can create an incredible separation of…
drorzel | March 27, 2015That's the title of the talk I gave yesterday at Vanderbilt, and here are the slides:
Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science from Chad Orzel
The central idea is the same as in past versions of the talk-- stealing Robert Krulwich's joke contrasting the publication styles of Newton and Galileo to argue that scientists spend too much time writing technical articles aimed at an audience of other experts, and need to do more "Galileian" publication aimed at a broad audience. And that social media technologies offer powerful tools that can enable those who are…
esiegel | March 26, 2015“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” -Paul Ricoeur
What you see is what you get, except when it isn't. We're all familiar with Hubble's law, or the notion that the Universe is expanding, and that the farther away you look, the faster you'll see that distant galaxy moving away from you. This relation would be exact, if only the rest of the objects in the Universe didn't exert gravitational forces on one another.
Image credit: Cosmic Flows Project/University of Hawaii, via http://…
esiegel | March 25, 2015“But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days’ rain, and forty nights’. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood.” -Halldór Laxness
Once every 18 years, a French Abbey -- Mount St.-Michel -- becomes inaccessible, as the English Channel rises to such levels that the causeway that normally reaches it becomes engulfed by the surrounding waters.
Image credit: Associated Press.
You might think this is due to the tides, where the Earth, Moon and Sun…
drorzel | March 25, 2015I mentioned last week that I'm giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it:
It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone.
After all, two of his popular science books are How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Orzel, an associate professor of physics at Union College in New York and author of the ScienceBlog “Uncertain Principles,” is scheduled to speak on campus at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 26.
As…
esiegel | March 24, 2015“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”
“And yours… is wilfully to misunderstand them.” -Jane Austen
Every time we go to higher and higher energies in our particle accelerators, we've got a chance for new discoveries, a new understanding, and if we're lucky, some brand new (and unexpected) physics.
Image credit: CERN.
But -- on the downside -- the crazies all come out of the woodwork, and it's time to take on the most regularly-…
drorzel | March 24, 2015Yesterday's post about VPython simulation of the famous bicycle wheel demo showed that you can get the precession and nutation from a simulation that only includes forces. But this is still kind of mysterious, from the standpoint of basic physics intuition. Specifically, it's sort of hard to see how any of this produces a force up and to the left, as required for the precession to happen.
I spent a bunch of time last night drawing pictures and writing equations, and I think I have the start of an explanation. It all comes down to the picture of rigid objects as really stiff springs-- the grey…
drorzel | March 23, 2015The third of the great physics principles introduced in our introductory mechanics courses is the conservation of angular momentum, or the Angular Momentum Principle in the language of the Matter and Interactions curriculum we use. This tends to be one of the hardest topics to introduce, in no small part because it's the last thing introduced and we're usually really short on time, but also because it's really weird. Angular momentum is very different than linear momentum, and involves all sorts of vector products and things going off at right angles.
This leads to some of the coolest demos…
esiegel | March 19, 2015“The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
The sun’s not simply made out of gas
No, no, no
The sun is a quagmire
It’s not made of fire
Forget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants
It's such a simple fact -- that the Sun is made out of hydrogen that fuses into helium, releasing energy by E=mc^2 -- that it's easy to forget that a century ago, we knew none of these things.
Image credit: ESA and NASA,Acknowledgment: E. Olszewski (University of Arizona).
Not that nuclear fusion was a thing, not that the Sun got its energy from E=mc^2, and not even that the Sun was made out…
drorzel | March 19, 2015We'll be accepting applications for The Schrödinger Sessions workshop at JQI through tomorrow. We already have 80-plus applicants for fewer than 20 planned spots, including a couple of authors I really, really like and some folks who have won awards, etc., so we're going to have our work cut out for us picking the attendees...
We're also discussing the program for the workshop-- more details when we have something more final-- which has me thinking about good examples to use of storytelling involving quantum physics. I'd like to be able to give a few shout-outs to already-existing fiction…
oracknows | March 18, 2015The New York Times Styles Section giveth. The New York Times Styles Section taketh away.
Last week, The NYT Styles Section published an excellent deconstruction of the pseudoscientific activities of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, by Courtney Rubin. Although skeptics might think that it was a tad too "balanced" (as did I), by and large we understand that this was the NYT Style section, and seeing a full-throated skeptical deconstruction of The Food Babe's antics in such a venue is just not in the cards. That's what I'm there for (not to mention other skeptics like Steve Novella), such as…