Physics
drorzel | July 1, 2014I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox on the basis of shoddy and unjustified assumptions. And then proceeds to offer a different solution for the Fermi paradox based on shoddy and unjustified assumptions. Whee!
I mean, there is an element of this that's useful, namely the reminder that "We…
drorzel | July 1, 2014The physics vs. philosophy slow-motion blogfight continues, the latest major contribution being Sean Carroll's "Physicists Should Stop Saying silly Things About Philosophy. I've been mostly trying to stay out of this, but when I read through the comments at Sean's post to see if anybody offered any specific examples of problems that could've been avoided by talking to philosophers, I was kind of surprised to find a lot of people talking up Niels Bohr. (Likewise Ashutosh Jogalekar's Philosophy Begins Where Physics Ends....) If you're trying to talk up the virtues of philosophy over "pure"…
drorzel | June 30, 2014For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find "A rock as big as the solar system." We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system.
"OK, how about a rock as big as Jupiter?" That's a much harder question to answer, and required a trip to the Internet. Not during dinner, of course-- it's hard enough to get her to eat when we're all sitting at the table-- but a day or so later, which led to this blog post.
So, there are a couple of…
drorzel | June 26, 2014After a bit of a hiatus because of scheduling issues, Rhett and I are back to talk about... stuff. Mostly summer classes, World Cup soccer, and Twitter. Also, how we've each gotten a blog comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Miscellaneous links:
-- My long-ago book review and Rhett's more recent complaint about Cosmos, where we each had a brush with scientific celebrity.
-- My silly cat tweet that's generated a huge amount of traffic:
Busy day at Schroedinger Industries... RT @EmrgencyKittens: How to organize your cats. pic.twitter.com/z3QS0fnSdL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) June 24, 2014
-- Rhett's…
esiegel | June 26, 2014“Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.” -James Jeans
When you think of carbon, you very likely think of materials from diamonds to nanotubes to graphite to all organic matter, which -- as far as we know -- requires carbon as a central building block.
Image credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania.
But 98.9% of all that carbon is Carbon-12, with six protons and six neutrons, with the vast majority of the remaining 1.1% composed of Carbon-13, with one extra neutron in there. Yet these isotopes of carbon were formed in…
drorzel | June 24, 2014A few weeks back, a Union alumnus who works at Troy Prep contacted the college to arrange a visit for a bunch of second-graders, and asked if faculty would be willing to arrange talks and demos for the kids. I said something like "Sure, we could probably make liquid nitrogen ice cream for them," and then basically forgot about it until last week, when I said "Oh, crap, I have to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for 60 seven-year-olds on Monday!"
Fortunately, our students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are awesome, and I was able to round up a handful of helpers from the summer…
drorzel | June 19, 2014As noted earlier, I was a guest on the Read Science! hangout on G+ earlier today. If you weren't able to watch it live, the video is available at that link, and I'll embed it here:
There were some feedback problems with the audio for a little while-- annoyingly, it only got bad once the hangout went live-- there was a tiny echo when we were talking about logistics beforehand, but not enough to justify screwing around with earbuds. then when we started the actual event, it suddenly got completely awful for a while. It does get better, though-- I have no idea why, but later on, the echo is…
drorzel | June 19, 2014Rhett and I haven't done Uncertain Dots for a couple of weeks due to scheduling issues, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting the multimedia side of things. In fact, I'll be doing a hangout today, as a guest on the Read Science! hangout hosted by Joanne Manaster and Jeff Shaumeyer. The event page is here.
I've also got four summer research students to supervise this year, who quite reasonably expect a fair bit of my time (thus the blog silence this week), and thus I'll be doing this from my office on campus, which means Emmy isn't going to be joining in. Alas. Odds are good that I'll have to…
esiegel | June 18, 2014“Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.” -P. J. O’Rourke
Well, my World Cup fanatics, the time is upon us. The 2014 World Cup is here and off to a spectacular start! No doubt, some of you have incredibly fond memories of previous soccer/fútbol matches; for me, it's the most incredible set shots that stand out the most. No doubt, many among you (especially the Brits) will remember this gem from 2006.
But how do you bend the ball like David Beckham? The secret lies in the physical phenomenon of the Magnus Force,…
catdynamics | June 18, 2014Day two of the New Frontiers wrap-up conference. This is a slow liveblog with more cosmology and life in the universe. Yesterday's summary is here
A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science.
This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe
Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found.
This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012.
We start the…
catdynamics | June 17, 2014A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science.
This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe
Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found.
This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012.
The New Frontiers conference to report the hint of the beginning of the draft of the answers is under way... most of the investigators and about half of the…
drorzel | June 16, 2014The latest in a long series of articles making me glad I don't work in psychology was this piece about replication in the Guardian. This spins off some harsh criticism of replication studies and a call for an official policy requiring consultation with the original authors of a study that you're attempting to replicate. The reason given is that psychology is so complicated that there's no way to capture all the relevant details in a published methods section, so failed replications are likely to happen because some crucial detail was omitted in the follow-up study.
Predictably enough, this…
esiegel | June 12, 2014“I see miracles all around me
Stop and look, it’s all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?” -Insane Clown Posse
Oh, Insane Clown Posse, is there any amount of education that could ever change you? On the one hand, magnetism is a lot more counterintuitive than simple mechanics, I certainly won't deny it. But on the other hand, it certainly makes a lot of amazing things possible, things we might never have even tried had we not understood the physics and predicted them!
Like the phenomena we're seeing in the video, above, for example, which showcases quantum…
drorzel | June 12, 2014A bunch of people were talking about this Nature Jobs article on the GRE this morning while I was proctoring the final for my intro E&M class, which provided a nice distraction. I posted a bunch of comments about it to Twitter, but as that's awfully ephemeral, I figured I might as well collect them here. Which, purely coincidentally, also provides a nice way to put off grading this big stack of exam papers...
Anyway, the thrust of the article is that the GRE is a bad thing to be using as an admissions criterion for graduate school in science and engineering, because it has large…
drorzel | June 10, 2014I had a couple of conversations at DAMOP last week about career issues, and I just want to note that I will never get used to the idea that I'm a respected elder anything, whose advice would be valued. I basically feel like I lucked into my whole career, so I hesitate to advise others as to what they should do. But then, there's a huge element of luck in any tenure-track career, given the tiny ratio of jobs to candidates.
One thing that came up was, of course, the question of how it is I run a blog, which connects to the larger question of work-life balance. One of the people I spoke to…
drorzel | June 9, 2014The Cosmos reboot season finale (or possibly series finale; not sure if they're trying for a second set of episodes) was last night, but I wasn't able to take part in the live-tweeting of it thanks to a super-restless Pip who didn't drop off until 9:30 EDT. I suppose I could've waited to start the DVR until I would synch up with the West Coast showing, but then, I also need sleep. and I greatly enjoyed being able to fast-forward through the innumerable commercials.
And, really, if you want the story of the Cosmos reboot in a nutshell, there's no better capsule summary than the treatment of…
drorzel | June 4, 2014I'm working on some short pop-quantum explainers for reasons that I'll be a little cagey about. In casting around for a novel way to introduce Schrödinger's cat states, I hit on something that probably works, but illustrates the problems inherent in being both a professional physicist and a pop-science writer.
The hook, as I mentioned on Twitter a little while back (early on a weekend morning, so nobody read it) is that you have Schrödinger's cat to thank for the computer you're reading this on. The core idea of the infamous cat paradox is that it's both alive and dead at the same time,…
drorzel | June 2, 2014I don't have anything all that new to say about last night's Cosmos reboot, and I'm leaving for scenic Madison, WI today to attend DAMOP, so I don't have a great deal of time. Kate did mention something over dinner last night, though, that's a good topic for a quick blog post.
Kate's a big listener of audiobooks and podcasts, including The Naked Scientists podcast, and she mentioned something they said in responding to a question about charging phones and the cost of electricity:
I think my favourite one is a microwave oven. So, the clock on a microwave oven uses more electricity over the…
drorzel | May 28, 2014For the sixteenth episode of Uncertain Dots, we decided to bring in some guests, Andy Rundquist and Kelly O'Shea for a conversation about standards-based grading. This came up because I'm playing around with this using the same tiered scheme I talked about back in January.
This was a fun conversation, and some interesting ideas came up. I remain kind of boggled by the amount of oral exam time Andy puts in, and I find the notion of goal-less problems intriguing, but I'm not sure I could implement it here.
Some links:
Kelly on goal-less problems
Direct Measurement Video
So, anyway, that was…
catdynamics | May 28, 2014tab clearing:
A collection of maths GIFs posted purely for aesthetic reasons.
Simple Fractals
Minimalist Posters of MathematicalObjects...