Physics
esiegel | October 9, 2014“In physics, you don’t have to go around making trouble for yourself — nature does it for you.” -Frank Wilczek
Freedom is an easy thing for almost all the particles we think of. Want a free photon? Just let it go in a place where there's nothing that's going to absorb it. A free electron? Just keep it from binding to a proton and you're good. Even a free star or planet is possible, so long as you're willing to get far enough away from a gravitational source it might fall into.
Image credit: The browser-crashing http://hortenseardalan.com/blackholes.html.
But a free quark? Impossible! In…
esiegel | October 7, 2014“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies… Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die… It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.” -Ray Bradbury
Well, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced, and by now you've probably heard: it's gone to three solid-state physicists for the development of the blue LED, or light-emitting diode.
Image credit: Fun Flashing LEDs, via http://www.funflashingleds.com/clear-light-up-…
drorzel | October 7, 2014The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for the development of blue LED's. As always, this is kind of fascinating to watch evolve in the social media sphere, because as a genuinely unexpected big science story, journalists don't have pre-written articles based on an early copy of a embargoed paper. Which means absolutely everybody starts out using almost the exact words of the official Nobel press release, because that fills space while they frantically research the subject. Later in the day, you'll get some different framing, once…
drorzel | October 6, 2014With this morning's announcement of the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, the annual Nobel season is upon us. I didn't do a betting pool post this year, because when I announced last year's winner, I was reminded that I had never paid off the prize to the previous year's winner. So I think I just don't have the time to manage that contest right now...
Anyway, the Physics prize will be announced tomorrow, and while I'm not going to host a contest, I did want to offer some space for speculation about what might win. Unlike last year, when the suspense was mostly about which subset of…
drorzel | October 2, 2014In a weird coincidence, shortly after I wrote a post about "quantum leap" as a metaphor, I was looking up some stuff about John Bell and ran into mentions of a paper he wrote called "Are There Quantum Jumps?" Bell is borrowing a title from Schrödinger, who wrote a pair of articles (really, one article in two pieces) for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1952 expressing his discontent with the entire idea of "quantum jumps" between states. Bell even opens his paper with a quote from Schrödinger: "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever…
drorzel | October 1, 2014Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has officially been sent to the printers, so we're at the phase of things where I don't have anything to do but think about publicity. There are some reviews forthcoming, at least one of which I'm very happy about, but I'll share more about that when it becomes public. I've also picked up some nice blurbs from very smart folks:
"I know, I know, you think you're just not smart enough to be a scientist. Chad Orzel might convince you otherwise with Eureka. Drawing on basketball, stamp collecting, Angry Birds, Iron Chef, and Antiques Roadshow among his…
esiegel | September 30, 2014When you think about it, it wasn't all that long ago -- just 50 years -- that we didn't know where our Universe came from. A hot, dense early state? A cyclical, swirling past? Or perhaps a time-independent one, where the Universe back then was not so different from our own today? All that changed in 1964, quite by accident.
“Horn Antenna-in Holmdel, New Jersey” by NASA — Great Images in NASA Description. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
With the first detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and its identification as the leftover glow from the Big Bang, we entered a…
drorzel | September 30, 2014Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom's commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing.
All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and Crease and Goldhaber, I'm actually just fine with the popular usage of "quantum leap" for a particularly dramatic change. Yes, I realize that the canonical "quantum jump" is the smallest possible change, but I think that's putting too much emphasis on only one aspect…
jhalper | September 30, 2014In this weeks’ news, Weizmann Institute scientists and researchers in Australia have invented a sort of tractor beam. In essence, a tractor beam is a wave that propagates outwards but pulls objects toward its point of origin, rather than pushing them out. Like the science fiction versions, such “beams” might be designed in the future to manipulate solid objects in their wake. The waves the researchers created, rather than moving through the interstellar ether, propagate on the surface of water. Instead of latching on to Klingon spaceships, the scientists think the wave-induced surface flows…
drorzel | September 29, 2014On Twitter Sunday morning, the National Society of Black Physicsts account retweeted this:
Using Lasers to Lock Down #Exoplanet Hunting #Space
http://t.co/0TN4DDo7LF
— ✨The Solar System✨ (@The_SolarSystem) September 28, 2014
I recognized the title as a likely reference to the use of optical frequency combs as calibration sources for spectrometry, which is awesome stuff. Unfortunately, the story at that link is less awesome than awful. It goes on at some length about the astronomy, then dispenses with the physics in two short paragraphs of joking references to scare-quoted jargon from the…
esiegel | September 25, 2014“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” -Darth Vader
Supervillains always disappoint me. With ambitions like murdering a single human, destroying a city, or endangering all life on the planet, they're always thinking small. Where are the great, ambitious evildoers -- real or mythological -- seeking to destroy everything in all of existence?
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Dana Berry.
Recently, Stephen Hawking came out and proposed the following scenario: that the Higgs field exists in a…
drorzel | September 25, 2014My Gen Ed relativity course has mostly been me lecturing about stuff to this point, so on Wednesday I decided to shake things up a bit and convert a chapter of David Mermin's It's About Time. The idea was to get students up and moving around a bit, and actually making some measurements of stuff.
Mermin's scenario as adapted for class is this: you have two trains of six cars passing in opposite directions. Each car contains a narrow window through which the other train can be seen, a clock facing the window, and an observer with nothing better to do than note the readings of the clocks in the…
drorzel | September 23, 2014Modern media being what it is, I should get out in front of this, so: I am guilty of putting words in Einstein's mouth. I mean, go watch my TED-Ed video on particles and waves, or just look at the image up top-- that very clearly shows Einstein saying words that he probably never said. And it's my fault.
Well, OK, I didn't actually put those words in his mouth-- the animator did that. What I wrote is "Einstein himself described [the photoelectric effect] as the only truly revolutionary thing he did." Which isn't really a quote, but a paraphrase. And it's really a paraphrase of something…
drorzel | September 22, 2014I get a fair number of books to review, but I'm often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I've managed to turn around Roberto Trotta's The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is in the course of a weekend.
As you can probably get from the title, this is a book about astronomy written in Up Goer Five style, using only the thousand most common English words (which are helpfully listed near the start of the book, in case you want to check whether he cheated...), plus proper names. And there'…
drorzel | September 19, 2014After a long absence due to travel (some of which is discussed), Uncertain dots returns!
Rhett and I talk about recent travels, how people going into internet-based physics outreach these days would probably do better to make videos than blog, physics in science fiction, celestial navigation, and as always, our current courses.
Some links:
-- Our Eratosthenes measurement from 2012.
-- Divided by Infinity, the best Many-Worlds story ever.
-- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" isn't legitimately available online, but there's a spoilery Wikipedia page about it.
-- An old post where I talk about…
esiegel | September 18, 2014“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” -Carl Sagan
That might be true: all the heavy elements -- in theory -- were created after at least one generation of stars lived-and-died. But if we want to know what the Universe started off with, we have to find what the Universe was like before any stars formed.
Image credit: NASA, WMAP Science Team and Gary Steigman.
This is a seemingly paradoxical task: how can you find a signature of what the Universe was…
esiegel | September 17, 2014“What’s that star?
It’s the Death Star.
What does it do?
It does Death. It does Death, buddy. Get out of my way!” -Eddie Izzard
It's said -- at least by Darth Vader -- that the power to destroy a planet is nothing compared to the power of the force. But how much energy is that, really?
Image credit: Lucasfilm / Star Wars: Episode IV, a New Hope. (Motion Picture).
While it is, objectively a lot of energy, that kind of destruction really isn't so unfathomable, not if you're willing to consider the ultimate tool of destruction for physically practical purposes: antimatter.
Image credit:…
drorzel | September 16, 2014The second one of the TED-Ed lessons I wrote about quantum physics has now been published: What Is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is, again, very similar to stuff I've written before, specifically this old blog post and the relevant chapter of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog.
As usual, I tried but probably failed to do justice to other interpretations in the "Dig Deeper" references I sent; outraged Bohmians should feel free to comment either here or there with better explanations.
Again, it's really fun to see the images the animators found to put to my words. I love…
drorzel | September 15, 2014My TED@NYC adventure last fall didn't turn into an invite to the big TED meeting, but it did lead to a cool opportunity that is another of the very cool developments I've been teasing for a while now: I've written some scripts for lessons to be posted with TED-Ed. The first of these, on particle-wave duality just went live today.
The content here is very similar to my talk last fall, which is, in turn, very similar to Chapter 8 of Eureka: a historical survey of the development of quantum physics. I did the script for this, which was then turned over to professional animators, who did a great…
esiegel | September 11, 2014“It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.” -Carl Sagan
Although I often hear people utter sentiments that knowledge somehow undermines the beauty of the natural world -- quoting some farcical poem about bad teachers like When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer -- I never quite understood it. How could there possibly be a more engaging, romantic experience than perceiving and knowing at the same time?
Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi.
So it is with not only the sunset, but with one of the most elusive and inimitable phenomena that sometimes…