Physics
drorzel | June 20, 2013One of the oddities of writing the book-in-progress is that it involves a lot more history-of-science than I'm used to. which means I'm doing things like checking out 800-page scientific biographies from the college library so I can use them to inform 500 word sections of 4000 word chapters. One of these is Cavendish: The Experimental Life by Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, a biography of Henry Cavendish (and his father), whose most famous experiment is one of the things I plan to describe in the book. Henry himself turns out to be quite a character, though, thus the 800-page…
esiegel | June 19, 2013"Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history." -John Polkinghorne
Out there in space, whether we look with our eyes or with a telescope -- a far more powerful version of our eyes -- we find that the Universe is full of stars, galaxies, clusters, and luminous objects everywhere we look.
Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of http://www.deepskycolors.com/.
But if we look in different wavelengths of light than what our eyes…
drorzel | June 18, 2013I've got a ton of stuff that needs to get done this week, but I don't want the blog to be completely devoid of new content, so here's a quasi-poll question for my wise and worldly readers:
What scientist is most in need of a good popular biography?
By "popular biography," I mean things like Norton's Great Discoveries books, several of which Ive reviewed here, including Krauss on Feynman and Reeves on Rutherford, two books that I keep coming back to for useful tidbits. These aren't deep works of historical scholarship, and don't necessarily attempt to be definitive, but focus on being…
esiegel | June 14, 2013"One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds." -Frank Zappa
One of the most difficult things to talk about, for any self-respecting scientist, is politics. Like all of you, I have my preferences, my opinions, and my vision for what a better world would look like. I'm also well aware that if I talked about all of them, there probably wouldn't be a single one of you out there who agreed with everything I had to say.
Image credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP.
And it would be completely…
drorzel | June 13, 2013A few months back, I got a call from a writer at a physics magazine, asking for comments on a controversy within AMO physics. I read a bunch of papers, and really didn't quite understand the problem; not so much the issue at stake, but why it was so heated. When I spoke to the writer (I'm going to avoid naming names as much as possible in this post, for obvious reasons; anyone I spoke to who reads this is welcome to self-identify in the comments), he didn't really get it, either, and after kicking it around for a while, it failed to resolve into a story for either of us-- in his case, because…
esiegel | June 12, 2013"Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star
Biggest puzzle from afar
How unlike the other ones
Brighter than a billion suns
Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star
How I wonder what you are." -George Gamow
The Big Bang is one of the greatest, revolutionary ideas in all of modern science, but it's also one of the most successful ideas as far as making predictions that have aligned with our observations of the Universe. Despite all of that, there are a whole bunch of people who'll read this (and more who won't) who aren't sure that the Big Bang is correct. Some people, in fact, don't even understand the definition of…
drorzel | June 12, 2013Hey, dude? Yeah, what's up?
I'm not normally the one who initiates this, but I was wondering: When you were at DAMOP last week, did you see any really neat physics? Oh, sure, tons of stuff. It was a little thinner than some past meetings-- a lot of the Usual Suspects didn't make the trip-- but there were some really good reports from a lot of groups.
Anything really surprising? Well, there was one talk that I really liked a lot, that I went to on a lark, because I didn't understand what the session title could possibly mean, and there was no abstract for the talk: Experimental Studies of…
jeure | June 11, 2013Big science is a massively collaborative endeavor. From the initial theoretical puzzles to the brilliant engineers that build on-of-a-kind machinery, experts come together to make discoveries happen. Case in point: We’re moving this 50-foot-wide physics experiment over 3,200 miles of land, sea, and river, starting on Long Island, NY and ending in Batavia, IL. Sometimes understanding the fabric of the universe requires a very technical and very long journey.
The 50-foot-wide muon ring assembled at Brookhaven Lab.
The experiment is called Muon g-2 (pronounced gee-minus-two), and will study…
drorzel | June 11, 2013As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said "I bet this guy hasn't given a lot of these before." What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never said "Um."
To the dismay of many students entering science majors, public speaking is a very significant part of being a professional scientist. Scientists are expected to give talks of a variety of different lengths-- 10-15 minute "contributed" talks at big meetings, 25-30 minute "invited" conference talks, 45-60 minute…
jeure | June 4, 2013Magnets are neverendingly awesome, and superconductors may be the ultimate in cool—they are, after all, literally extremely cold. And not just anyone has the tools to weave superconducting magnets with compressed metallic thread. It's a more essential skill than you might think.
Ultra-cold superconducting magnets steer high-speed particles inside colliders, keeping the beams tight and guiding them smoothly through the curves of circular racetracks. But those magnets generally rely on iron, an intrinsically magnetic metal, for key structures. That works beautifully for the particle …
drorzel | June 4, 2013A little while back, I posted about the pro-theorist bias in popular physics, and Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a long and detailed response, which of course was posted on a day when I spent six hours driving to Quebec City for a conference. Sigh.
Happily, ZapperZ and Tom at Swans On Tea offer more or less the response I would've if I'd had time and Internet connectivity. Tom in particular gives a very thorough exploration of some of the reasons why experiment gets downplayed in popular physics. I particularly liked this bit:
I’m going to put forth a possibility: maybe we have a harder job, in…
drorzel | June 3, 2013Rhett at Dot Physics departed ScienceBlogs before NAtional Geographic fully took over, but still managed to connect with their book division for a physics text. This is part of a series they're doing tied in with the folks from Rovio, makers of the world's most popular smart-phone time-waster, and, as the title suggests, it uses Angry Birds as a jumping-off point to talk about physics. Rhett was, of course, an obvious choice for this, given the amount of time he's spent doing video analysis of Angry Birds to extract the underlying physics.
This is a book that can't really be reviewed just as…
esiegel | May 31, 2013"There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case." -Albert Einstein
Imagine: you've worked hard all your life, through your primary and secondary school education, where you worked hard to get into a good college, through your undergraduate degree, where you found something you were passionate enough about that you wanted to study it even further, and then through graduate school, where you spent half-a-decade or more immersing yourself, non-stop, in an area of research in a field…
esiegel | May 29, 2013"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal." -Aleister Crowley
But the Universe itself experiences continual growth, constant change, and new experiences all the time, and it does so spontaneously.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
And yet, the better we understand our Universe -- what the laws are that govern it, what particles inhabit it, and what it looked/behaved like farther and farther…
drorzel | May 28, 2013While we're revisiting blog topics of the recent past, another item from this weekend's visit to the Ithaca Sciencenter, in the form of the picture above. For those with images off, or who read via RSS and won't see the picture, it's a photo of one of the inspirational plaques they have lining the walls of their community room, honoring famous scientists. This particular one is for Richard Feynman, and what struck me about it was that the photo isn't his Nobel Prize portrait, or him playing the bongos, but a somewhat grainy picture of him standing next to a telescope in the desert, pushing a…
drorzel | May 28, 2013Last week's post about communications between scientists and journalists sparked a bit of discussion, and prompted the folks at the IoP's Physics Focus blog to ask me for a guest post advising journalists on how to talk to scientists. The post is now live, with the self-explanatory headline How Journalists Can Help the Scientists They Interview:
The temptation for each party in this situation is to try to push as much of the work to the other as possible, and that’s where most advice from journalists to scientists (or vice versa) fails. Each side treats the conventions of their particular…
pharyngula | May 26, 2013We may have the answer to all of the big problems in physics! Or not.
My money is on "not".
Marcus du Sautoy, a very smart mathematician and the fellow who occupies the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford formerly held by Richard Dawkins, made a stunning announcement.
Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I've known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he'd been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see…
drorzel | May 23, 2013Last week, I spent a bunch of time using VPython to simulate a simple pendulum, which was a fun way to fritter away several hours (yes, I'm a great big nerd), and led to some fun physics. I had a little more time to kill, so I did one of the things I mentioned as a possible follow-on, which turned out to be kind of baffling, in a good way.
Last week's post was written very quickly, and thus ended up a little more jargon-y than I usually shoot for, so let me try to set the stage a little better for this one. the physical system I'm talking about is just a simple pendulum, a mass on the end of…
esiegel | May 21, 2013"Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, I guess it's that season again. The charlatan who claims to have invented a cold fusion device -- the same device whose flaws were exposed here two years ago -- has just held an "independent test" of his device, and there's now a physics paper out claiming that this device works, and must be powered by some type of nuclear reaction!
Image credit: G. Levi et al.; get the whole paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.3913v2.pdf.
Well.
Look, let's get a few things…
drorzel | May 21, 2013At Scientific American's blog network, Ashutosh Jogalekar muses about the "greatest American physicist", eventually voting for Josiah Willard Gibbs, one of the pioneers of statistical mechanics. As both times I took StatMech (as an undergrad and in grad school), it was at 8:30 in the morning, I retain almost no memory of the subject, and will bow to greater experience in assessing Gibbs's importance.
I do, however, want to take issue with one thing in the post. When assessing the historical place of American physics, he writes:
Here’s my personal list for the title of greatest American…