Physics
drorzel | September 10, 2014Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has a post about the issue of academic conference travel, which is expensive and often the first thing cut out of college budgets. Which leaves faculty either disconnected from their field, or paying out-of-pocket to attend meetings that they need to demonstrate their scholarly productivity. This, in turn, tends to skew research meetings even more toward those at elite schools with big budgets.
This is a hard problem to crack, because the issue isn't just money but time. Reed suggests dropping "the charade of the last half day" because it requires an extra night in a…
drorzel | September 8, 2014The new academic year starts this week-- first day of classes is Wednesday-- and I'm dealing with the usual chaos associated with the influx of a new class of students. Who now look to me only a tiny bit older than SteelyKid and the Pip in the above picture (and if you think that sharing that extremely cute photo is part of the motivation for this post, well, you're not wrong...).
This year, the madness of the new term is complicated by having been away for essentially all of August, and by the fact that I'm teaching an entirely new class this term: Astronomy 052: Relativity, Black Holes, and…
drorzel | September 3, 2014I've posted this before, but a reminder can't hurt: We're hiring two tenure-track faculty this fall. The targeted research fields:
We invite applications for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions starting in September 2015, one in any area of theoretical physics or astrophysics, the other with a strong preference for biophysics or soft condensed matter (either experimental or theoretical). We encourage applications from interdisciplinary scientists and those who could make use of the college’s shared instrumentation resources (including AFM, SEM, micro-Raman and micro-FTIR…
drorzel | September 3, 2014Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff-- more images, less text, don't read your slides, and for God's sake, rehearse the talk before you give it-- and it's generally very good. Given the two very different types of presentation I gave over the last few weeks, though, I think it's important to add one note about the design of the visuals, which is this: when you're putting a talk together, keep the final…
jhalper | September 2, 2014Here are some more unsung heroes of research: scanners (the human kind). In the 1950s, Donald Glaser invented the bubble chamber – a way to track infinitesimally small quantum particles as they winked in and out of existence. The idea – which may or may not have been tested in beer – was to create a large chamber of liquid under pressure next to a particle accelerator. As the beams hit their target, producing sprays of new types of short-lived particles, these energetic particles would leave tracks of bubbles in the liquid (usually hydrogen). Everything was caught on arrays of special high-…
drorzel | September 2, 2014If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the word "Quantum" to the title.
I've made allusions on Twitter a few times to having exciting news I wasn't ready to share-- this is one of those things. The original edition sold reasonably well and…
drorzel | September 2, 2014I didn't write a summary of the third day of "Quantum Boot Camp" to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would've needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than the other two days, because my talk was the middle of three, and thus I spent most of the first talk fiddling with my slides and fretting, and most of the third fighting off the post-talk adrenaline crash.
Happily, Sedeer at Inspiring Science offers a summary of the first two talks, namely Larus Thorlacius from Nordita…
drorzel | August 28, 2014The second day of the "Quantum Boot Camp" was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers (following up a discussion from Wednesday), he mostly focused on ways to use quantum physics to improve sensors of technological interest.
So, for example, he talked about how efforts to develop techniques for error-correcting codes in liquid state NMR quantum computing led to the…
drorzel | August 27, 2014Since this part of the trip is actually work-like, I might as well dust off the blog and post some actual physics content. Not coincidentally, this also provides a way to put off fretting about my talk tomorrow...
I'm at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers on quantum theory, which a couple of the attending writers have referred to online as boot camp, though in an affectionate way. The idea is to provide a short crash course on cool quantum physics, so as to give writers a bit more background in subjects they might need to cover.
The first talk was from Rainer Kaltenbaek (whose name I…
esiegel | August 26, 2014If you've ever heard someone dismiss evolution, the Big Bang or climate change as "just a theory" and wanted to pull your hair out, you're not alone. In science, after all, theories are the most powerful ideas we have to explain the mechanism behind the most intricate observable phenomena in the Universe.
Mercury’s orbit shifts over time due to a deviation from Newtonian gravity.Credit: Wikimedia.
But it's where our theories fail, or at the fringes, where observations-or-experiments might disagree with the best theoretical predictions, that progress is made. This tantalizing border between…
drorzel | August 21, 2014OK, the photo above is a recent picture of me-- yesterday, in fact. But the spiral-carved rock I'm standing next to was carved that way a bit more than five thousand years ago, so that ought to count as a throwback...
We've been in Dublin the last few days, and on Thursday we took a bus tour out to Newgrange. this is one of the things I wanted to make sure to see while we were here, as I make reference to it in the forthcoming book, and at least two classes that I teach. And it is, indeed, spectacular; the reconstructed white wall might be historically dubious, but the interior passage and…
esiegel | August 20, 2014“You suddenly realize that you and your colleagues know something that no one else does… and that it is important. You’re lucky if it happens once in a lifetime. I’ve been super-lucky.” -Leon Lederman
It's the holy grail of modern particle physics: discovering the first smoking-gun, direct evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model.
Image credit: Harrison Prosper at Florida State University.
Sure, there are unanswered questions and unsolved puzzles, ranging from dark matter to the hierarchy problem to the strong-CP problem, but there's no experimental result clubbing us over the head…
drorzel | August 13, 2014Kate and I had a very nice time doing touristy things in Bath yesterday during the day-- old church, very old hot spring, Georgian architecture-- then went on to Bristol where I gave a talk on the forthcoming book, as you can see in the picture above. I would ordinarily include a SlideShare link to the slides I used for the talk, but the talk is so image-heavy and the hotel wi-fi so grindingly slow that I'm not even going to attempt uploading it.
The first bit, as you might guess from the photo above, was basically the same as my TED@NYC talk last fall, making an analogy between the…
esiegel | August 13, 2014“To be loyal to myself is to allow myself to grow and change, and challenge who I am and what I think. The only thing I am for sure is unsure, and this means I’m growing, and not stagnant or shrinking.” ‐Jarod Kintz
But for the Universe, although it's constantly changing, growing in a gravitational sense is a thing of its past. Sure, we continue to form new stars, galaxies continue to merge, and the structure we see on the largest scales continues to evolve.
Image credit: Bob Franke, via http://bf-astro.com/.
But there once was a time when there were no stars, no galaxies, and no groups or…
esiegel | August 12, 2014There are a few questions that have perplexed humans for all of recorded history, ranging from the nature of matter to the origin of the Universe to whether there are limits to what is knowable in principle about all there is. One of the great questions that people have wondered about since ancient times -- that we still wonder about today -- is whether there's a fundamental smallest scale to the Universe or not.
Image credit: The Mona Lisa, by Sanghyuk Moon.
From the ancient paradoxa posed by Zeno to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, it might seem like there either could or couldn't be…
jdupuis | August 8, 2014Only rarely in my life as a reviewer do I get books that seem to be absolutely perfectly suited for me. This is certainly the case with Charles L. Adler's Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction, a book that combines my love for science and my love for science fiction.
The premise is an ingenious one, one that's probably not anywhere near exploited enough in the popular science literature: use science fiction and fantasy stories as a way of elucidating science. Sure, it's been done to death in all those "The Science of X" books where X is some movie or…
drorzel | August 7, 2014Our little hangout thing is now old enough to drink, in episode-years anyway, and to celebrate, we finally figured out how to get live audience feedback during the hangout. Which takes the first couple of minutes of the video, because we're highly trained professional scientists.
Once we got that sorted, we talked about a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to crazy space drives, the history of major concepts in physics, space probes and asteroids, and "native advertising" and how it relates to blog history. Some links:
-- My post on the impossible space drive, which has links to…
drorzel | August 5, 2014Over at FiveThirtyEight, they have a number-crunching analysis of the number of papers (co)authored by women in the arxiv preprint server, including a breakdown of first-author and last-author papers by women, which are perhaps better indicators of prestige. The key time series graph is here:
Fraction of women authors on the arxiv preprint server over time, from FivethirtyEight.
This shows a steady increase (save for a brief drop in the first couple of years, which probably ought to be discounted as the arxiv was just getting started) from a bit over 5% women in the early 90's to a bit…
esiegel | August 5, 2014Every once in a while, a scientist comes along who leaves an impression on the field so strong that all of the subsequent work on uses their results as a starting point, as a foundation. Einstein did that with relativity; Dirac did that with relativistic quantum mechanics; even Newton did that with mechanics.
Image credit: Claude Lovelace with Parakeet (courtesy of Rutgers), via http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/people/images/Lovelace_H.jpg.
But what about when the person who does that is someone you've never heard of? Thanks to our new writer Paul Halpern, that story is about to come to…
drorzel | August 4, 2014I've gotten a few queries about this "Impossible space drive" thing that has space enthusiasts all a-twitter. This supposedly generates thrust through the interaction of an RF cavity with a "quantum vacuum virtual plasma," which is certainly a collection of four words that turn up in physics papers. An experiment at a NASA lab has apparently tested a couple of these gadgets, and claimed to see thrust being produced. Which has a lot of people booking tickets on the Mars mission that this supposedly enables.
Most physicists I know have reacted to this with some linear combination of "heavy sigh…