Physics
drorzel | December 20, 2014We're going to depart from the chronological ordering again, because it's the weekend and I have to do a bunch of stuff with the kids. Which means I'm in search of a story I can outsource...
In this case, I'm outsourcing to myself-- this is a genuine out-take from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, specifically Chapter 2, which tells two stories from the career of Luis Alvarez, who I've talked about before in the context of his experiment to x-ray one of the pyramids at Giza, and the time I wrote him a letter when I was nine about his theory that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs…
drorzel | December 19, 2014As I endlessly repeat, I'm an experimentalist by training an inclination, so I especially appreciate stories about experimental science. There's something particularly wonderful about the moment when an experiment clicks together, usually after weeks or months of hard, frustrating work, when things just keep breaking.
Of course, sometimes, breaking stuff can be a Good Thing.
Possibly my favorite story from the development of quantum physics involves just such an occasion, around 1924, when Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer at Bell Labs were trying to characterize a nickel surface by bouncing…
drorzel | December 19, 2014Given that I am relentlessly flogging a book about the universality of the scientific process (Available wherever books are sold! They make excellent winter solstice holiday gifts!), I feel like I ought to try to say something about the latest kerfuffle about the scientific method. This takes the form of an editorial in Nature complaining that Richard Dawid and Sean Carroll among others are calling for discarding traditional ideas about how to test theories. Which is cast as an attempt to overthrow The Scientific Method.
Which, you know, on the one hand is a kind of impossible claim. There…
drorzel | December 18, 2014The winter solstice holidays are a time for family and togetherness, so building off yesterday's post about the great Marie Skłodowska Curie, we'll stay together with her family. Specifically her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric. The Joliot-Curies are possible answers to a number of Nobel Prize trivia questions-- only mother and daughter to win, one of a handful of married couples, etc.-- but the scientific story about them that I find most fascinating is that their Nobel was for the third thing they did that could've earned them the prize, after they just missed out on…
esiegel | December 17, 2014They say that a cat has nine lives, mostly because of their uncanny ability to find themselves in -- and escape from -- frequently perilous situations. Perhaps, of all the animals that he could have chosen, that's why Schrödinger made his famous thought experiment about the most diminutive of felines.
Image credit: retrieved from Øystein Elgarøy at http://fritanke.no/index.php?page=vis_nyhet&NyhetID=8513.
But there's an incredible outcome that one interpretation -- the Many-Worlds Interpretation -- of quantum mechanics allow for: that any time there's a situation where you have the…
esiegel | December 17, 2014We all have our own interpretation of what "the scientific method" is, but there's always at least one thing that they all have in common: the ultimate arbiter of whether a theory or idea is valid depends on the evidence that comes back from physically observable phenomena.
Image credit: abstruse goose, via http://abstrusegoose.com/275
But not everyone necessarily agrees with this in the way we commonly understand it. Sabine Hossenfelder has some fantastic thoughts analyzing and synthesizing a variety of viewpoints, laying the hammer down with a sweeping statement:
You can thus never…
drorzel | December 17, 2014There's no way I could possibly go through a long history-of-science blog series without mentioning the great Marie Skłodowska Curie, one of the very few people in history to win not one but two Nobel Prizes for her scientific work-- if nothing else, Polish pride would demand it. She made a monumental contribution to physics through her work on radioactivity (and through being nearly impossible to kill-- while her work on isolating radium made her ill for many years, she outlived an amazing number of her assistants...), and there are a lot of great stories about her.
This series is partly…
drorzel | December 17, 2014I visited SteelyKid's first-grade class yesterday with several liters of liquid nitrogen. Earlier in the fall, they did a science unit on states of matter-- solid, liquid, gas-- and talked about it in terms of molecules being more spread out, etc. Looking at her homeworks, I said "Oh, damn, if it wasn't the middle of the term, this would be a perfect excuse for liquid nitrogen demos..." I mentioned it to the teacher, though, and she loved the idea of having it in December, as a call-back to earlier science lessons.
It turned out to be weirdly difficult to find assorted round latex balloons…
drorzel | December 16, 2014
"You wanted to see me, Herr Professor?"
"Hans! Yes, come in, come in. Just going over the account books. Frightful amount of money going out of this place."
"Well, radium is expensive..."
"Ha! Oh, and speaking of which-- here's one of the sources. Absent-mindedly dropped the fool thing in my pocket last night when I locked up. Terrible habit, I really must work on that. Had a drawer full of the things in Montreal..."
"Thank you. And you wanted to see me about...?"
"Oh, yes. We have a new student, Hans, and I'd like you to put him to work on the gold foil project."
"Shouldn't he have his own…
drorzel | December 15, 2014Over at Medium, they've published a long excerpt from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, that gives a good flavor of what the book's really like. It's about how the process for solving hidden-object games like the classic Where's Waldo books is comparable to the process used by Henrietta Leavitt to revolutionize our understanding of the universe:
There are multiple web sites and academic papers devoted to computer algorithms for locating Waldo within Handford’s drawings, using a variety of software packages, and these are impressively complex, running to hundreds of lines of code and…
drorzel | December 15, 2014
"...and take care that all the signatures go in the right way round, eh, James? I was able to soothe Mr. Dance last time, but if another copy comes back to be rebound, M. de la Roche will put you out."
"Yessir."
"A little more care, there's a good lad. Run home, now, we'll see you in the morning." The apprentice scurried off.
The journeyman bookbinder checked again that the shop door was securely closed, pulled his coat tighter against the March chill, and turned to make the short walk to his own meagre rooms. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he felt the folded pamphlet advertising tonight…
drorzel | December 14, 2014Scientific controversies aren't always settled by a single dramatic experiment, but it's a lot of fun when they are. It's even more fun when they can be carried out with, as the author put it, "without any other apparatus than is at hand to every one."
I'm speaking in this case of the famous "double slit" experiment of Thomas Young, though if you want to be really picky about it, he didn't originally do it with a double slit, but a single "slip of card" that divided a beam of sunlight. Some distance away from the card, the overlapping light from either side of the card combined to produce a…
drorzel | December 13, 2014Speaking of the timing of astronomical phenomena, as we were yesterday, the timing of celestial bodies was the key to the first demonstration of one of the pillars of modern physics, the fact that light travels at a finite speed. This actually pre-dates yesterday's longitude discoveries, which I always forget, because it seems like it should've been a later development.
The first really convincing demonstration that light doesn't cover arbitrary distances instantaneously dates from 1676, and was the work of the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer. Under the direction of Giovanni Cassini at the Paris…
drorzel | December 12, 2014Returning to our mostly-chronological ordering after yesterday's brief excursion, we come to one of the great problems of the 1700's, namely determining the longitude at sea. Latitude is easy to find, based on the height of the Sun at noon-- we told that story last week-- but longitude is much trickier. Thanks to the rotation of the Earth, the best way to measure longitude is by measuring time-- if you know what time it is where you are, and what time it is at some reference point (now established as Greenwich, UK), the difference between those times tells you the difference in longitude.…
drorzel | December 11, 2014I've been trying to keep to a roughly chronological ordering of these stories, but this slow-motion snow storm that was waiting to greet us on our return from Florida made the schools open on a two-hour delay today, which eats the time I usually use for blogging and books stuff. So I'm going to jump forward three hundred years, to a story that I can outsource.
To set the stage, in the aftermath of WWII, Richard Feynman took up a faculty job at Cornell, but between working on the Manhattan Project and the death of his beloved wife, he found that he was completely burned out, and not able to do…
drorzel | December 11, 2014Yesterday, I drove through the slush to Albany to do an appearance on KERA radio's "Think" from a studio there. The audio is at that link.
It was a bit of a strange experience, because I drove to a place to do the interview in a radio studio, but I was the only one in the room, taking questions from a disembodied voice. I enjoyed it, though, and the audio quality is a lot better than you would've gotten from even a land-line phone. This was a live show, including some call-in questions, and that always has a working-without-a-net quality that is kind of exciting. I got in a bunch of stories…
esiegel | December 10, 2014“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” -Rabindranath Tagore
And you can't answer a hypothetical question for certain, at least in science, without doing the experiment for yourself. Here on Earth, liquid water is plentiful; our planet has the stable temperatures and pressures that water needs to exist in its liquid state.
Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli, Terra Satellite / MODIS instrument.
But what happens if you take that water to space? In the vacuum of space, the temperatures are much too low for liquid water;…
drorzel | December 10, 2014The final step of the scientific process is to share your results with others, and that's the step where things are most prone to breaking down. Countless great discoveries have been delayed or temporarily lost because the people who made them were more concerned with protecting "their" secrets than with sharing new knowledge with the world. A classic example of this, that I first heard from Michael Nielsen, is Robert Hooke in 1676 first reporting the relationship for elastic forces as "ceiiinossssttuv," which unscrambles to "ut tensio, sic vis," indicating that the force is proportional to…
drorzel | December 9, 2014
I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles r, s, t, &c. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye [with the] point of [the] bodkine, but if I held my eye & [the] bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet [the] circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or [the] bodkin.
If [the…
dr. dolittle | December 5, 2014 Image from Scientific American (Credit: S Gart, J Socha, Vlachos, Jung)
I have to be honest. I have always wondered whether my dog actually got any water in his mouth. It always seemed to me that the majority of water ends up on my floor. High speed video collected and analyzed by a team of researchers from Virginia Tech (Sean Gart, Jake Socha and Sunghwan Jung) and Purdue University (Pavlos Vlachos) has shown exactly how a dog is able to drink water...and also explains why they are so messy doing it. Their research was presented at the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Physics Society…