Physics
esiegel | April 1, 2017"The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality." -Wolfgang Pauli
On the surface, it shouldn’t appear to make all that much difference to the Universe whether a particle has a spin in half-integer intervals (±1/2, ±3/2, ±5/2) or in integer intervals (0, ±1, ±2). The former is what defines fermions, while the latter defines bosons. This hardly seems like an important distinction, since intrinsic…
esiegel | March 30, 2017"I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses." -Johannes Kepler
There are a lot of myths we have in our society about how the greatest of all scientific advances happened. We think about a lone genius, working outside the constraints of mainstream academia or mainstream thinking, working on something no one else works on. That hasn’t ever really been true, and yet there are actual lessons – valuable ones – to be learned from observing the greatest of all scientists throughout history.
The gravitational behavior of the Earth…
esiegel | March 29, 2017"If something doesn’t reach you on a personal level, let it go. It’s hard enough dealing with everything that does." -Judi Culbertson
There are two types of electric charge: positive and negative. Like charges repel; opposite charges attract. In gravitation, though, there’s only one kind of gravitational charge, more commonly known as mass. And everything we know of has a positive mass. But since there’s a counterpart to matter -- antimatter -- isn’t it possible that antimatter would have negative gravitational charge, and fall “up” in a gravitational field?
If there were some type of matter…
esiegel | March 25, 2017"It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things." -Theodore Roosevelt
Energy is a fundamental property of nature, and yet it’s also one of the most purely understood phenomena from a conceptual point of view. Some objects have energy inherently, such as in the form of rest mass. Other types of energy include binding energy, which is negative, and kinetic energy, which is the energy of motion. Regardless of the form it appears in, energy cannot exist without being attached to some other physical phenomenon.
As two neutron…
drorzel | March 24, 2017I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I'm thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn't go into much detail. It's probably worth explaining at greater-than-Twitter length, though, and a little too inside-baseball for Forbes, so I'll write something about it here.
At its core, the "CERN invented WWW" argument is a "Basic research pays off in unexpected ways" argument, and in that sense, it's fine. The problem is, it's not…
esiegel | March 24, 2017"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." -Carl Jung
13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it came into existence. Today, the part we can observe is 46 billion light years in radius, having grown tremendously thanks to the expansion of the Universe. But if we extrapolate that backwards, we find that the Universe couldn’t have been infinitely small at the moment of its birth, but rather was a finite size at all finite times.
The size of the Universe (y-…
esiegel | March 16, 2017"Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you think of crystals, you likely think of an interlocked, repeating lattice of atoms or molecules. That’s exactly what a conventional crystal is. But recently, there’s been an exciting new idea, first proposed by Frank Wilczek in 2012: that it would be possible to create a time crystal, an entirely new class of system.
Phase diagram of the discrete time crystal as function of Ising interaction strength and spin-echo pulse…
esiegel | March 15, 2017"Greenhouse gases are the second most important factor for climate, after the Sun." -Syukuro Manabe
In 1967, a groundbreaking paper in climate science was published, detailing the inputs and feedbacks for the first accurate climate model. You don’t have to look far to find contentions that climate models are wrong, inaccurate and unreliable: 8 of the first 10 results on google state it. Yet if you look at the science, the original model, even at age 50, does a remarkable job of getting things right.
The increased emission of greenhouse gases, notably CO2, can have a massive impact on Earth's…
esiegel | March 14, 2017"As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree." -Hugh Everett
We only have the one Universe, despite all the quantum possibilities out there. We have to accept that, at a fundamental level, the Universe is indeterminate, and that the act of measuring -- or otherwise making a quantum decision -- selects which quantum path our Universe takes. But according to the many-worlds…
esiegel | March 11, 2017"The Universe is expanding the way your mind is expanding. It's not expanding into anything; you're just getting less dense." -Katie Mack
It's a thing of scientific beauty that we've not only been able to determine that the Universe is expanding, but that we've been able to measure the rate of expansion so incredibly well. To better than 90% uniformity, we've determined the expansion rate in all directions and going back billions of years, allowing us to determine what's in the Universe, how that's changed over time, and what its fate is. It's one of the most remarkable achievements of modern…
esiegel | March 10, 2017“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
For centuries, Newton’s theoretical predictions were as unassailable as physics got. His ideas about mechanics, gravitation and optics passed test after test after test. Yet around the dawn of the 19th century, one class of observations appeared to run counter to his assertions: light appeared to exhibit a wave-like nature. The phenomena of diffraction and interference could not be well-explained by a corpuscular theory of light.
The…
esiegel | March 7, 2017"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." -John Archibald Wheeler
Today, we take the existence of gravitational waves for granted. They were predicted by Einstein almost immediately following the first publication of general relativity, they were indirectly detected decades ago and they’ve been directly detected multiple times by the different LIGO observatories. Yet Einstein and his former student argued, back from the 1930s through the 1950s, that the waves were mere mathematical artifacts, and didn’t physically exist.
Richard Feynman, at…
drorzel | March 6, 2017Another month, another collection of physics posts from Forbes:
-- Quantum Loopholes And The Problem Of Free Will: In one of those odd bits of synchronicity, a previous post about whether dark matter and energy might affect atoms in a way that allowed for "free will" was followed shortly by a news release about an experiment looking at quantum entanglement with astronomical sources acting as "random number generators." This pushes the point when local interactions might've generated any correlation between measurements back in time a thousand-plus years, which in turn ties into the question…
esiegel | March 2, 2017"If we get rid of the moon, women, those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon, will not get PMS. They will stop bitching and whining." -Joe Scarborough, misattributing a quote to Arnold Schwarzenegger that was actually spoken by an impersonator
Our Moon is pretty unusual as far as the Solar System goes: of all the planets, our Moon has the largest mass and radius ratios when compared to its parent planet. It’s enough to not only illuminate our night sky quite fiercely -- the full Moon is 14,000 times brighter than the next brightest object in the night sky -- but it has some significant…
esiegel | February 28, 2017“In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.” -Niels Bohr
When it comes to galaxies, clusters of galaxies or the largest-scales on the Universe, dark matter is absolutely required. There’s no way to explain colliding galaxy clusters, correlations between different galaxies, the filamentary structure of the Universe or the fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background without it. But it isn’t just dark matter that hopes to solve these…
esiegel | February 27, 2017"When a star goes supernova, the explosion emits enough light to overshadow an entire solar system, even a galaxy. Such explosions can set off the creation of new stars." -Todd Nelsen
In February of 1987, the first light from a supernova some 168,000 light years away was observed on Earth. It became the closest supernova to be observed since the invention of the telescope. As a result, it’s taught us more about massive star death, ejecta and supernova remnant evolution than any other object in the Universe.
The two loop-like structures, identified in this Hubble image from five years ago,…
esiegel | February 23, 2017"When Benjamin Franklin inveted the lightning rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God." -Bertrand Russell
You’ll often hear charges that science has become too politicized, but it’s the other way around. Science is our best way of drawing conclusions about the natural world, including how natural and human-caused phenomena work and interact together. When politics, biases, agendas or predispositions get in the way, however, they can derail actual knowledge and cause us to live in an…
esiegel | February 18, 2017"I really didn't have to work, shall we say, with Star Trek. It was a natural. When I opened my mouth, there was Scotty. It's like I tell people what you see in Scotty is 99% James Doohan and 1% accent." -James Doohan
So, your friend on the USS Enterprise beamed you aboard, took you on a relativistic journey at impulse speeds around the Solar System, and brought you back to your starting point. You find that less time has passed for you than your family who remained on Earth, yet you’ve traveled a much greater distance. How does this all work?
Moving close to the speed of light results in…
esiegel | February 17, 2017"It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole." -Dmitri Mendeleev
When the Universe was first born, all we had was hydrogen and helium, with a trace amount of lithium and absolutely nothing else. 13.8 billion years later, hydrogen is still #1 in the Universe and helium is still #2, but lithium isn’t close to #3 anymore: more than two dozen elements have passed it. The key? Stars!…
esiegel | February 15, 2017"I've heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We'd see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman." ― Cherie Priest
Bullets are incredibly dangerous when fired from a gun, but that's true even when they're fired up in the air, not at a target directly. Falling, stray bullets can still reach very large speeds, large enough to break the skin and cause internal damage, potentially even killing someone.
A 0.50 caliber bullet wound of the face. The patient was injured while heating a 0.50 caliber incendiary machine gun bullet with a blowtorch in a World War II-era…