Physics
catdynamics | October 10, 2013 When it is darkest, men see the stars.
This afternoon I needed to check something urgently, and as is my habit in this day and age, I jumped to a website where I knew the information was available.
A few seconds later, with some irritation I went to hit "refresh" as the request failed to go through, and then realized that it was a *.nasa.gov address, at Ames, as it happens, and I was not going to be getting that bit of data this afternoon, not without some old fashioned legwork.
A bit later I realized with increasing dismay that a signficant fraction of the illustrations for my class…
drorzel | October 10, 2013On Monday afternoon, I walked into the TED offices in lower Manhattan just as Zak Ebrahim was starting his practice talk, a powerful story about being raised by a father who subscribed to an extreme form of Islam and eventually assassinated a rabbi and took part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And I said "What the hell am I doing here?" My science-is-awesome shtick seemed pretty weak tea compared to that.
I managed to get past that pretty quickly, without anyone noticing, but the first hour or so I was there was another Impostor Syndrome: Activate! moment. It was a pretty amazing…
drorzel | October 9, 2013The following is the approximate text of the talk I gave at TED@NYC last night. Approximate, because I'm somewhat prone to ad-libbing when speaking, and may have changed a few things here and there. I don't really know, because I'm scheduling this post on Tuesday morning, before the actual event, using the draft text I've been rehearsing with. But this will give you something to read while I drive back home from The City, and I can provide a more detailed recap later.
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I’m going to tell you the most amazing thing I know, which is this: everything in the universe, from light, to electrons…
esiegel | October 7, 2013"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave." -Patrick Henry
It's not a good idea to showcase a galaxy for you every Messier Monday, considering that even a crescent Moon can render most of them completely unobservable. Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, however, a very special spiral will be visible after sunset for the next six months or so in a relatively nondescript part of the night sky. Out of the 110 deep-sky objects that comprise the Messier catalogue, a full forty of them are galaxies, although today's object wasn't recognized as…
drorzel | October 7, 2013I'm off to The City for TED@NYC on Tuesday, and while I might schedule something with the approximate text of my talk for Wednesday morning, more substantial blogging won't resume until Thursday. But I don't want to leave political post as the top thing on the blog, so here, have a cute kid picture.
This is SteelyKid at the Schenectady Curling Club, which had an open house this past weekend. Plan A was to go to the women's soccer game at Union instead, but I made the mistake of mentioning curling as a fallback in case of rain, and after half an hour of soccer, SteelyKid demanded "People…
drorzel | October 6, 2013There was a great big New York Times article on women in science this week, which prompted no end of discussion. (I also highly recommend Bee's response at Backreaction.) It's built around the personal story of the author, Eileen Pollack, a physics major at Yale who decided not to go to grad school, and her story is compellingly told, providing a nice frame to her investigation of the question of why there continue to be so few women in the sciences.
Pollack comes out very much in favor of the notion that many women choose not to go to graduate school in the sciences because they don't…
esiegel | October 5, 2013“Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk.” -Jack Handy
The diversity of the world's animals is one of the most fantastic natural marvels that life on Earth has delivered. From the sea to land to the air, there's no shortage of wonders to explore. Today, though, I want to talk to you about one of the most bizarre sights of nature, as the 1989 supergroup Strength in Numbers once played…
esiegel | October 4, 2013"Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away." -Marcus Aurelius
Every one of us does our best to come up with an accurate picture of reality, and that includes the Universe, from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest scales fathomable. But given how bizarre and counterintuitive some of our physical laws are -- even at a fundamental level -- this can be a daunting task for even those of us who are professional theoretical physicists.
Image…
drorzel | October 3, 2013We cleared a bunch of space in our deep storage area over the summer, and one of the things we found was a box full of old student theses from the 1950's and 1960's. The library already had copies of them, but I thought it was sort of cool to have a look into the past of the department, so we put them up on a shelf in the office. Yesterday, I was glancing over this, and spotted a thin volume, pictured in the "featured image" above, which was a Master's thesis from 1960 (when we used to give MS degrees in physics...) titled "A Monte Carlo Study of Neutron Scintillation Detection with a…
esiegel | October 2, 2013"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -Charles Darwin
There are problems with science today, no doubt. With all the knowledge we've accumulated about the Universe, from the smallest subatomic scales to the farthest recesses of deep space, there are still realms and regimes where our best theories fail, where the predictions and the data don't match, and where no known explanation is sufficient for the phenomena that shows up…
drorzel | October 2, 2013We had a faculty meeting yesterday, at which one colleague suggested that in addition to our "Writing Across the Curriculum" requirement, we should have a "Speaking Across the Curriculum" requirement to teach students oral presentation skills. This provoked a bit of tittering about the possible acronym, but it's not an obviously awful idea. The basic problem is the same as with the WAC requirement: there isn't actually all that much that really crosses the curriculum. Presentation standards and styles are dramatically different between disciplines, whether you're talking about oral or written…
jdupuis | October 2, 2013I have a son who's starting his second year as a physics undergrad. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog.
By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media for…
drorzel | October 1, 2013Last week, before we headed out for the weekend, I had a brief exchange with Ben Lillie on Twitter, prompted by the following set of tweets:
OK, here's a thing. I'll often hear people complain that Hollywood gets science wrong because there's *1* scientist who does everything 1/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013
But in reality, science is massively collaborative. So why can't storytellers get that right? 2/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013
*BUT* at the same time we have, and wildly celebrate, the Nobel, which embodies exactly that myth. 3/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie…
drorzel | September 30, 2013After a nice, relaxing weekend in Ithaca without the kids, I've returned to a crazy hectic Monday, with no free time to blog, despite a couple of things that I vaguely need to post. Lacking time, though, I'll just give you this image of Condescending Louis de Broglie, an idea that sprang to mind when I ran across the original image and wouldn't go away. This is, obviously, an analogy to the condescending Wonka meme, and derives primarily from the faintly amused look on de Broglie's face in this obviously posed publicity photo from sometime in the 1930's.
A theory of everything? How…
drorzel | September 27, 2013Another year, another fall, another disbursement of dynamite money from our friends in Scandawegia. The 2013 Nobel Prize announcements are almost upon us. Which means it's time for the game everyone loves to tolerate: the Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Betting Pool. As always, the core rules are simple:
Leave a comment to this post predicting at least one of the winners of one of this year’s Nobel Prizes. If one of your guesses turns out to be correct, you win the highly coveted right to choose the topic of a future blog post.
There's one small modification this year, though, regarding the…
esiegel | September 25, 2013Farnsworth: "There is it. The edge of the Universe!"
Fry: "Far out. So there's an infinite number of parallel Universes?"
Farnsworth: "No, just the two."
Fry: "Oh, well, I'm sure that's enough."
Bender: "I'm sick of parallel Bender lording his cowboy hat over me!" -Futurama
Our existence here in this Universe is something that we know is rare, special, beautiful, and full of wonder.
Image credit: Kelly Montgomery.
Some things happen with amazing regularity and predictability: the occurrence of days-and-nights, the tides, the seasons, the motion of the heavenly bodies, and so much more. The…
drorzel | September 25, 2013I'm putting together slides for a TED audition talk in a couple of weeks, about how the history of quantum mechanics is like a crossword puzzle. This involves talking about black-body radiation, which is the problem that kicked off QM-- to explain the spectrum of light emitted by hot objects, Max Planck had to resort to a mathematical trick: he assumed that the objects were composed of "oscillators" that emitted light in discrete amounts, with the energy of the emitted light proportional to the frequency of the light. This was a desperation move, and made him a little crazy:
Max Planck…
drorzel | September 24, 2013In a comment to yesterday's post about the liberal arts, Eric Lund makes a good point:
The best argument I have ever heard for doing scholarship in literature and other such fields is that some people find it fun.
I single this out as a good point not because I want to sneer at the literary disciplines, but because with a little re-wording, this could apply to just about anything. The best reason for studying any academic subject is because it's fun.
This is, as I alluded to in a later comment of my own, a significant source of tension for Delbanco's book and a lot of other arguments about…
drorzel | September 21, 2013It's gradually becoming clear to me that this blogging thing is old hat. It's a Web 4.0 world now, and we're all just Tmblng through it. So, I need to get with modernity, and start posting the listicles that are the bread and butter of the new social media order. Thus, I give you a web-friendly list of The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons.
The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons
1) The Photon
CGI photon from Physics World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/aug/10/photon-shape-could… )
(Image source: This Physics World article)
The photon is the carrier of the…
drorzel | September 20, 2013The JCC day care is closed today for one of the fall cluster of Jewish holidays, which means I'm spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift so I can teach my class. Thus, this is more of a tab clearance sort of exercise than a thoughtful examination of the underlying issues. But having spent a bunch of time in the recent past on gender gaps of various sorts, these are some recent links that struck me as interesting enough to pass along.
-- Via Crooked Timber, Anca Gheaus offers cheers for being the "token" woman at academic conferences. This is mostly…