Physics
drorzel | February 3, 2015It didn't make the news, because skittish media types are mostly based in New York City and thus don't care about anything north of Westchester County, but we had a big snow storm yesterday. It started snowing Sunday night, though, and kept up through pretty much dinnertime Monday. Both the local schools and the snow-day day-care program we signed the kids up for were shut down, with good reason- I had to go to campus for my 10:30 am class, and that two-mile drive was pretty nerve-wracking.
Since the kids were home for the day, we did a bit of playing outside, even though the temperatures…
drorzel | February 3, 2015Over at Scientific American's Frontiers for Young Minds blog, they have a great post on what happens when you ask scientists to explain key elements of a different research field. It's pretty funny, and rings very true, as SteelyKid asks me tons of science questions, very few of which have anything to do with atomic, molecular, or optical physics. so I spend a lot of time faking my way through really basic explanations of other fields.
Of course, even pitching stuff from my own field at the right level for small kids is a challenge. Which reminds me, I never did explain my presentation for…
catdynamics | February 3, 2015Bee at Backreaction has been busy over the last few months, here is my backlog reading list:
A Thousand Words
Do we live in a computer simulation?
Consciousness and Physics from Scratch
10 things I wish I had known 20 years ago
Science changed my life and yours too
Do we write too many papers?
Frequently Asked Questions
No, the long sought-after link between the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity has not been found
Does the scientific method need revision?
It is a good starting point, if you're not reading Backreaction already.
drorzel | February 2, 2015(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...)
One of the things I was reacting against in writing Eureka is the popular idea of scientists as a sort of unworldly elite, off doing their ivory-tower idealized thing without worrying about…
esiegel | January 30, 2015“Go then, there are other worlds than these.” -Stephen King, The Dark Tower
Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how -- in many ways -- what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in our Universe.
Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Christian Schirm.
Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws…
drorzel | January 30, 2015I wrote up another piece about football for the Conversation, this time drawing on material from Eureka, explaining how great football players are using scientific thinking:
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL (and Seattle fans tend to agree). Sportswriters and some other players call him a loudmouth and a showboater. Fans of other teams call him a lot of things that shouldn’t see print (even on the internet). One thing you’re not likely to hear anyone on ESPN call Sherman, though, is “scientist.”
And…
drorzel | January 29, 2015Math with Bad Drawings has a post about "word problems" that will sound very familiar to anyone who's taught introductory physics. As he notes, the problem with "word problems" for math-phobic students is that it requires translating words into symbols, and then using the symbols to select a procedure. It adds a step to what at a lower level is a simple turn-the-crank algorithm: given this set of symbols, do these abstract operations, and write down the answers.
This is a very familiar problem in intro physics, where I regularly have struggling students tell me "I can do the math just fine, I…
drorzel | January 28, 2015Over at Curious Wavefunction, Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a list of great surprising results in physics. This is fairly comprehensive, but leaves out one of my favorites, which is the discovery of the muon. Muons are particles like electrons, but a couple hundred times heavier. When they were first detected in cosmic ray traces in 1936, physicists briefly thought they were the mesons that Hideki Yukawa had predicted as the carriers of the strong nuclear force. It quickly became clear, though, that while the mass was about right to be Yukawa's particle, the muon didn't have anything to do with…
esiegel | January 28, 2015If you want to map the entire sky -- whether you're looking in the visible, ultraviolet, infrared or microwave, your best bet is to go to space. Only high above the Earth's atmosphere can you map out the entire sky, with your vision unobscured by anything terrestrial.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
But that costs hundreds of millions of dollars for the launch alone! What if you've got new technology you want to test? What if you still want to defeat most of the atmosphere? (Which you need to do, for most wavelengths of light.) And what if you want to make observations on…
drorzel | January 27, 2015I know I said I was done with this story, but this was actually recorded last week: The Daily Planet show on Discovery Channel in Canada contacted me last week when all this deflated-football silliness was exploding, and got a cameraman to come over and record me talking about it. The episode aired Monday night, January 26th, and you can stream it from their archives at the link above (I think it should be episode 216, but when I looked just now, it was just "Episode 16," but the date is correct. My bit is toward the end, starting around the 35:00 mark, but you should totally watch the whole…
esiegel | January 25, 2015“If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.” -Stephen Hawking
But did you ever stop to imagine that one of those things that Superman would be is the greatest home run hitter of all time? Have a listen to Iron & Wine's song,
Waitin' For A Superman,
while you pause to consider what would happen if Superman played baseball?
Image credit: DC Comics.
Or rather, that he played baseball optimally, by the rules, using standard equipment, but was still constrained by the laws of physics. How far, then, could Superman hit a baseball, and how does…
drorzel | January 25, 2015The low-level cold I've been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would've been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top of clearing comments from moderation.
Anyway, a few things deserve more prominent responses than a comment at the end of a long post, so:
-- I was in bed during the great Bill Belichick press conference, though I saw some mockery of it come across Twitter. While it may not have played well with the…
drorzel | January 23, 2015So, as mentioned yesterday, I got an email asking me about the weird scandal involving the Patriots and underinflated footballs, so I wrote a piece for the Conversation on the subject. since a few people had beaten me to citations of the Ideal Gas Law, though, I decided to bring my own particular set of skills into this, and did an experiment.
[UPDATE: I've added some follow-up/concluding remarks in a separate post from Sunday 1/25. So, if you care about my reaction to Belichick's big press conference, go over there.]
You can see the basic set-up at the link-- I got a couple of footballs from…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of the cool things about working at Union is that the Communications office gets media requests looking for people to comment on current events, which sometimes get forwarded to me. Yesterday was one of those days, with a request for a scientist to comment on the bizarre sports scandal surrounding the deflated footballs used in the AFC Championship game this past weekend. Which led to me doing an experiment, and writing a short article for The Conversation:
News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a Seek Thermal camera to use with my Android phone. This allows for a lot of idle physics-y fun, taking pictures of things in thermal mode.
One idea I had was to do a sort of follow-up to the test of my insulated mug that I did a couple of years ago with a PASCO thermocouple probe. That showed a really dramatic difference between my metal IQC water bottle and the insulated mug, in terms of the rate at which hot water placed in each cooled. So, how do these look in thermal imaging?
Well, I took my insulated mug (actually a different one than…
drorzel | January 21, 2015Having made several mentions here of the two tenure-track faculty positions we were trying to fill, I feel like I ought to at least note the completion of the search. As of last Friday, all the papers have been signed with properly dotted i's and crossed t's, and we have two new tenure-track assistant professors on board to start next fall.
It feels a little weird and possibly inappropriate to go into much detail about the folks we hired, though, given that this isn't an officially official sort of blog, and it would definitely be wrong to go into details of the process. I will say that it…
drorzel | January 20, 2015(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...)
One of the tricky things about writing this book was that I didn't just need stories from the history of science, but stories that fit a particular pattern. The point of the book, after all, is…
drorzel | January 20, 2015(That title doesn't quite scan as is, but if you stick an "a" in there, you can sing it to the tune of a song from "Fiddler on the Roof"... You're welcome.)
The last time I taught my "Brief History of Timekeeping" seminar was in 2012, so I spent a bunch of time on the Mayan calendar. This time around, we've lost the obvious pop-culture hook, but it's still so weird and fascinating that I spent a class on it last week. One of the things we talked about was what this system (what we know of it) says about the Maya concept of time. There's a very obvious contrast between the interlocking…
drorzel | January 16, 2015I'm teaching my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class again this term, and as always, I'm tweaking things a bit. This is one of our "Sophomore Research Seminar" courses, intended to introduce students to academic research, so it's not specifically a physics class, but I'm choosing to take the statements about research outside the student's field at face value, and thus will be requiring them to do final projects involving some empirical measurement of the natural world, that being the essence of scientific research. (Last time, I included that as an option, but nobody took it, so I ended up…
drorzel | January 15, 2015SteelyKid missed the bus this morning-- she was dressed and ready, but I was talking to Kate, and if there isn't a person at the end of the driveway when the bus comes around the corner, they won't stop. So I drove her over to school myself (which is faster, anyway). The GE research lab complex is behind her school, so there's a nice view from the parking lot to the eastern horizon, where the sun was just poking over a big band of clouds.
"Hey, look at that cool sunset!" she said as we were walking from the car to the building.
"That's not a sunset, honey, it's a sunrise. It's morning."
"Oh,…