Physics
drorzel | April 15, 2014I'm not really a comic-book guy, but I've watched a bunch of comic-book movies recently. Kate was really fired up for the new Captain America movie, so I finally got around to watching the first one as background for that, then when I was sleep-deprived last week I watched the second Thor movie via on-demand cable, then Sunday evening Kate and I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the theater (her second time watching it-- she's really fired up).
Mostly, this has served to confirm that I'm not a comic-book guy. I'm just not invested enough in the idea of a movie about these…
drorzel | April 14, 2014
A diabolical psychologist brings a mathematician in for an experiment. The mathematician is seated in a chair on a track leading to a bed on which there is an extremely attractive person of the appropriate gender, completely naked. The psychologist explains "This person will do absolutely anything you want, subject to one condition: every five minutes, we will move your chair across one-half of the distance separating you."
The mathematician explodes in outrage. "What! It'll take an infinite time to get there. This is torture!" They storm out.
The next experimental subject is a physicist,…
catdynamics | April 12, 2014A frightening fraction of my open tabs are some of Bee's posts at Backreaction - so to save my browsers, I dump them here for further future perusal:
Are irreproducible scientific results okay and just business as usual?
Shut up and let me think
Should the Nobel Prize be given to collaborations and institution?
Women in Science, Again?
Science Martketing needs Consumer Feedback
Does Modern Science Discourage Creativity?
The comeback of massive gravity?
Can Planck Stars Exist?
Book review: “The Theoretical Minimum – Quantum Mechanics” By Susskind and Friedman
Do we live in a…
catdynamics | April 11, 2014In times past we have lovingly tracked the proposal frenzy as the near annual Hubble Space Telescope proposal deadline approaches.
As was noted by Julianne several years ago, and confirmed over the last half dozen cycles, the shape of the curve of number of submitted proposals as a function of time until the deadline is nearly invariant.
Interestingly, the total number of proposals also does not change much, some dips and spikes with the loss and availability of instruments, but the total is near stationary and some measure of the statistical saturation of the ability of astronomers to put…
drorzel | April 9, 2014No, this isn't another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it's a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing.
On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider "old school" (the name of this blog was influenced by his Unqualified Offerings, though he's mostly stepped back from that) had a long series of tweets about pop-music writing, responding to some arguments that music criticism has degenerated and hardly has anything to do with music any more. Jim…
drorzel | April 8, 2014We took a week off last week because Rhett was away on a Secret Mission, but we're back and better than ever this week. More uncertain! More dotty! Or something!
Topics for this week include oblique references to Rhett's mission, some discussion of the Geocentric Janeway debacle, good and bad places to have a conference, why you shouldn't eat conference center food, why more physicists aren't on Twitter, and blogger gatherings.
Here's a link to the Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis story I alluded to. It's from 2007, after the blogging dinosaurs but before the blogging armored sloths.
esiegel | April 8, 2014“The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the ‘evolution’ of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.” -William James
Summer is coming. No, not to Westeros, but to your night skies, and with it, views of the galactic plane and even the galactic center, which holds more than a few surprises inside. In particular, it contains the most famous nebula in the entire night sky: the Eagle Nebula.
Image credit: T.A.Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF…
drorzel | April 7, 2014Another Monday, another recap of a new episode of the Cosmos reboot. This one was all about optics, and much of it was excellent. This was in part due to the fact that its first couple of historical segments focused on non-Western figures, and I don't know as much about their background to be able to nitpick. First up was Mozi, a Chinese philosopher from circa 400BCE, who may have been the first to demonstrate the camera obscura technique of projecting images from a pinhole in the wall of a dark room. He was followed by ibn al-Haytham, circa 1000CE, who did the first fairly complete analysis…
esiegel | April 2, 2014“Physical reality does not require that we be pleased with its mechanism; we must see the implications of a theory for what they are and not for what we would like them to be.” -Kevin Michel
If you've been following along for a while -- particularly in light of the recent BICEP2 results -- you're well aware that not only do we understand the history of the Universe all the way back to a hot, dense expanding state, but we've gotten a window into what happened before that: there was a period of Cosmic Inflation!
Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration, modified by me for correctness.…
drorzel | April 2, 2014I've lost track of who on social media pointed me to this, but this blog post about testimony to the Michigan Legislature is a brilliant demonstration of what's so difficult about teaching even simple subjects. Deborah Ball, the Dean of the education school at the University of Michigan gives the legislators a simple grading exercise from elementary school math. The video here is worth a watch:
(This also includes one of the greatest failed SNL references ever. It flops badly enough that the guy responsible is nearly as embarrassed as he ought to be...)
The problem she's illustrating is one…
esiegel | April 1, 2014“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public.” -Giuseppe Piazzi
I know there are many of you out there who miss Pluto "officially" being a planet, and I know that there are a large fraction of you who still count it as one in your hearts. After all, our Solar System is an amazing place, and the discovery of other large objects beyond…
drorzel | April 1, 2014It's the time of year where colleges and grad schools are making admissions decisions, and faculty job search season is winding down (for tenure-track positions in physics, anyway-- our search for a visiting professor for next year is still underway). In the spirit of the season, then, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed asks about the writing of reference letters.
Given how much letters can count, I’m struck that we almost never talk about how to write them. They’re a genre of their own.
For example, I’ve been told -- and I don’t know how true this is -- that without a FERPA waiver, it’s illegal to…
drorzel | March 31, 2014The fourth episode of the Cosmos reboot aired last night, and as I said on Twitter it was a beautiful demonstration of why I'm finding this show intensely frustrating. There were flashes of brilliance, but also quite a few bits that left me shaking my head. Thus fitting the pattern of the previous episodes-- I didn't comment on last week's, because I was taking a break, but it had the same sorts of issues, too-- so I guess that's just what this show is.
Again, there was some very good stuff-- the opening framing device with William Herschel talking about ghosts was great, and Tyson's tour…
esiegel | March 29, 2014"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -Max Planck
It’s been a great week for learning a little more about our Universe, from fundamental particles to scales beyond our observable Universe. Our new articles at the main Starts With A Bang blog got quite a response over here, and I'm happy to share with you the Comments of the Week, and my responses to them! Let's start with last week's Ask Ethan.
Image credit: Albert Abraham…
esiegel | March 28, 2014“While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any emotion so utterly at the mercy of time.” -Robert Hugh Benson
If you were headed out into the Universe -- spaceship and sci-fi technology and all -- it simply wouldn't make sense to keep on counting time in Earth-days and Earth-years, would it? When you're no longer bound to our planet, and particularly if you're gone long enough, as our planet changes its orbit, it sure seems silly, doesn't it?
Image credit: American Physical Society, via http://www.physicscentral.com/…
drorzel | March 20, 2014So, there was this big story in cosmology the other day-- Tom Levenson's write-up is very nice-- which has been hailed as one of the greatest discoveries since the last greatest discovery, blah, blah, blah. And now that a few days have passed, we're starting to see the inevitable backlash, ranging from detailed technical analyses of possible other explanations to more general musings about the nature of peer review. I'm not qualified to evaluate the former, so I'm going to talk a bit about the latter.
The title of that Atlantic post is "'One of the Greatest Discoveries in the History of…
esiegel | March 19, 2014“I don’t think at this point we have any way of knowing where the laws of physics came from. We could hope that when we really understand the laws of physics that they will describe how the Universe came into existence.” -Alan Guth
So, since Monday's big story -- about the BICEP2 collaboration announcing the discovery of the signature of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background -- I realized that there are simply too many misconceptions and misunderstandings out there about cosmic inflation, the Big Bang, and how the whole story comes together.
Image credit: Bock et al. (2006,…
drorzel | March 19, 2014"Daddy? How do you make water?"
"You mean, what is it made of?"
"Yeah, what's water made of?"
"Hydrogen and oxygen."
"Oh. And what's hydrogen and oxygen?"
"They're chemical elements."
"So, when we drink water, we're drinking chemicals?"
"Well, yeah. In a sense, everything is chemicals. Water's a chemical, air is made of chemicals. "
"What about, like, wood?"
"Chemicals."
"What?!?! Is everything chemicals?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
"What about lights?"
"Light isn't a chemical, but the things that make light are made out of chemicals."
"Yeah, like, the Sun is fire, and it makes light, but is the…
drorzel | March 18, 2014In which Rhett and I chat about the hot new discovery of primordial gravitational waves (maybe) very briefly before segueing into talking about LIGO, and Cosmos, and why "theory" is a terrible word, and the memorization of constants, and standardized tests, and time-lapse videos. You know, as one does.
Miscellaneous items:
-- I'm a little pixellated, as if I'm concealing my identity. I forgot to shut Kate's computer down, so it may have been doing online backups that chewed up bandwidth.
-- The von Neumann quote I butcher at one point is "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even…
jhalper | March 18, 2014Today’s new articles involve flow: the flow of positrons through the Universe and the flow of particles around the tiny cilia of corals. They involve beauty and mystery, as well. The particle flow, imaged in brilliant colors, won first place in the photography category of the 2013 Science/National Science Foundation International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.
And positrons – the anti-matter opposites of electrons – have been found in large numbers flowing in near-Earth space. Weizmann Institute research points to an answer to one riddle: Why did a satellite monitoring…