Physics
esiegel | February 2, 2014The world’s first suspended traffic circle… for bicycles!
“I would like to propose slow cycling. Commute by bike. At a stroke, you remove the need for and absurd cost of public transport. Cycling is almost completely free. There is no longer any need for the gym as you get fit by cycling. And you can go at your own pace.” -Tom Hodgkinson
I’ve been living in Portland, OR for more than five years now, possibly the most cycling-friendly of all the major cities in the United States. But even Portland still has a ways to go before we solve all of our traffic-related problems, and make the…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…
drorzel | January 31, 2014Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of "Dirac Monopoles". This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don't fully understand, so writing it up isn't a simple matter.
The really short version, though, is that a team of AMO physicists have created particles that are analogous to magnetic monopoles-- that is, to a particle that was only a "north" or "south" pole of a magnet, not both together like a conventional bar magnet (leading to my favorite social-media…
drorzel | January 29, 2014Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video:
(The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…
jhalper | January 29, 2014Today's guest post is by Weizmann Institute physicist, Prof. Micha Berkooz. Berkooz, a string theorist, recently organized a conference at the Institute on "Black Holes and Quantum Information Theory." We asked him about Hawking's recent proposal, reported in Nature under the headline:"There are no black holes."
Celebrated theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has opened a can of worms in his 1976 paper on black holes. In a recent article, he is trying to put the worms back into the can. It may prove a little trickier than expected.
Black holes are solutions of Einstein's equations of…
drorzel | January 28, 2014The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I'm giving an exam on Thursday. So, I'm not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices:
1) A reminder (I think I posted this before) that the Union College Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a visitor, for up to three years (contingent on performance). If you're in the market for an academic job, albeit a temporary one, check out the ad. If you know anybody who might be interested, point it out to them.
2)…
esiegel | January 24, 2014"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -Robert Frost
Well, here we are, at the end of the week, and you know what that means: another Ask Ethan column! This week, I've been asked about the same thing by many different people, so I'll credit it to Patrick E. and Matt T., who want to know:
I'm curious to hear your take on this: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applied to the origin of life.
For those of you who haven't heard, this is what they're talking about.
Image credit: Richard A. Cunha, Thereza A. Soares, Victor H. Rusu, Frederico J.S. Pontes, Eduardo…
drorzel | January 23, 2014I realize people are getting sick of reading me talk about this charged-tape business, which has run to one, two, three, four posts at this point. Truth be told, I'm losing enthusiasm for it myself. So this will be the final post, at least for now...
As I mentioned on Twitter, as I type this stuff up for the blog, I've toyed with the idea of hanging onto it instead, and writing it up for The American Journal of Physics or The Physics Teacher, so I could get a little professional credit for it. There are two problems with that (other than that some stick-in-the-mud editor or reviewer might…
drorzel | January 23, 2014Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem-- he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a whole, and I don't disagree with his point that physics as a discipline has long been characterized by a reductionist sort of approach-- always trying to get to smaller numbers of fundamental principles.
Our real point of disagreement, I think,…
drorzel | January 22, 2014The very last section of the book-in-progress (at least the draft that's with my editor right now...) is titled "Science Is Never Over," and talks about how there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in the simplest of things. I mean, look at the thousands of words I've gotten out of talking about sticky tape...
This is why I sigh heavily whenever I see a title like Ashutosh Jogalekar's "Should Physicists Stop Looking for Fundamental Laws. This is, at…
drorzel | January 22, 2014In the previous post about simulating the attraction between sticky tapes using VPython, I ended with a teaser mentioning that there was a discrepancy between the simulation and the theoretical solution from directly solving the equations. The problem is kind of subtle, but clearly visible in this graph from that post:
Data for the toy model version of the system, showing the equilibrium position as a function of initial separation.
In this, we see the equilibrium position that the mass-on-a-spring settles into as a function of the initial separation between the charges in the toy model.…
drorzel | January 21, 2014What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I've been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term:
The video quality is kind of crap on my end, which is a recurring problem here when we Skype with the grandparents. I probably should've closed more programs and tabs, but I'm an idiot. Also, I fidget a lot. But this is meant to be fairly casual, and I really do talk with my hands like that.
Anyway,…
drorzel | January 21, 2014Having spent a lot of time solving equations related to sticky tape models, including trying to work solutions in my head while driving to Grandma and Grandpa's with the kids, and making some measurements of real tapes, there was only one thing left to do: try simulating this problem in VPython. Because I'm a physics nerd who knows just enough about programming to be dangerous...
Finding the full solution to the real sticky tape scenario is kind of a miserable process, because it involves a long continuous tape with charge all down its length, which is kind of complicated, and then there's a…
drorzel | January 17, 2014In addition to making a toy model to show the tipping-point behavior of charged pieces of sticky tape, I spent some time on Tuesday trying to do something quantitative with this. Of course, Tuesday is the one day of the week that I don't teach, and I didn't want to go to campus to do the experiment, so I put it together from the incredibly sophisticated materials I had available at home: Lego bricks and a tape measure belonging to SteelyKid and The Pip.
Having built this high-tech rig, I set up my new video camera on the tripod, and shot some videos of the key phenomena. First, there's the…
drorzel | January 15, 2014One of the labs we do in the introductory E&M class I'm teaching this term involves investigating charged particles with sticky tape. If you haven't seen it before, "invisible" tape picks up an electric charge when it's peeled off a surface quickly, and with a little care, you can create both positively and negatively charged tapes and investigate their interactions.
For Monday's class, I wanted to do a demonstration of one of the questions we were discussing, which involved the attraction between two objects with opposite charges and how that changes when you insert something between…
drorzel | January 14, 2014The other morning, I was lying in bed and for some reason, found myself wondering what the population of Niskayuna is. While this is easily Google-able, as I said, I was in bed, and didn't want to get up to get a device with Internet connectivity. So I tried to Fermi-problem my way to an answer using numbers I could come up with without opening my eyes.
The starting point for the estimate was the fact that SteelyKid's kindergarten class has 20-odd kids in it, and there are three kindergarten classes in her school. The school is one of five elementary schools that Niskayuna operates (Birchwood…
drorzel | January 13, 2014When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton's anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn't really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in the form of approving re-shares on my social media feeds, and in direct responses such as a rebuttal from Chris Anderson himself and most recently a long piece by Christiana Peppard at Medium, which are getting their own collection of approving re-shares. So I guess I ought to…
drorzel | January 10, 2014The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven't really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I'm going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post.
--A few people, mostly in places that aren't conducive to linking, raised versions of "You never know what will be useful" as a justification for having a list of boxes to check. And I don't entirely disagree with that. I'm not against the idea of forcing students to take a broader range of stuff than they otherwise might…
drorzel | January 8, 2014One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age.
What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal arts education. I had specifically chosen to go to williams in part because of the small size (having grown up in a small town, I found it more congenial), but also because I was never only interested in science. I always enjoyed reading books and discussing history and politics, so I didn't need a…
drorzel | January 8, 2014A couple of weeks ago, I got a cool picture of snow hanging off SteelyKid's playset, and posted a call for people to suggest physics-y ideas about that. I only got one response, probably because nobody really read the Internet over the holidays.
Anyway, the next time I'm likely to have the free time to write anything substantive is next Tuesday morning, so let me renew that call now, while people are trapped indoors by the POLAR VORTEX! with nothing to do but think about the physics of cold things. So, if you have physics-related ideas about the photo above (there's a view from a different…