Physics
esiegel | April 17, 2013“We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.” -Robert Zubrin
Of all the planets in the Solar System beyond our own, none has captured our imagination quite like Mars has.
Image credit: NASA, via http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA02570.jpg.
From science-fiction fans to scientists and everyone in between, our understanding of the red planet is presently greater than it ever has been in the past. With multiple…
drorzel | April 16, 2013Nobody's ever going to mistake me for an elite basketball player. I'm taller than average (about 6'6", a hair under 2m in SI units), but I'm not especially quick, or agile, or all that good a jumper. And I'm carrying at least 40lbs of extra weight above what a really good player my size would (in terms of mass, I'm closer to the dimensions of a really good (American) football player, though not nearly enough of it is muscle).
This doesn't stop me from playing basketball, though. I love the game, and I play a good deal, at least for a guy in his forties with a full-time job. I can hold my own…
esiegel | April 15, 2013"Upon one occasion, while engaged upon a seven-foot mirror, he did not remove his hands from it for 16 hours together." -from Caroline Herschel's obituary
Welcome to another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we highlight a different one of the 110 deep-sky objects that Messier catalogued so that comet-hunters wouldn't confuse these permanent fixtures with transient comets. But each object has a unique, remarkable story in its own right.
Image credit: The Messier Objects by Alistair Symon, from 2005-2009.
Out of the 110 objects, a full forty of them are galaxies…
drorzel | April 15, 2013I was re-reading bits of James Gleick's Feynman biography, and ran across a bit near the end (page 397 of my hardcover from 1992) talking about his relationship with his children, talking about how ordinary he seemed at home.I particularly liked the sentence "Belatedly it dawned on them that not all their friends could look up their fathers in the encyclopedia." It occurred to me that that would be a good line for an obituary.
This is not due to any particularly morbid cast of mind on my part, but lingering blowback from the kerfuffle over the New York Times obituary for Yvonne Brill a couple…
esiegel | April 12, 2013"Orbiting Earth in spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase beauty, not destroy it!" -Yuri Gagarin
Fifty-two years ago today, the first human being left Earth, and we began our journey into outer space. But back in 1961, we didn't really know how far outer space stretched, or where all the matter and energy in the Universe came from.
Image credit: NASA, 1962.
That all changed with the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (by Penzias and Wilson, with the Horn Antenna, above), and subsequent measurements that led us to the Big Bang picture of…
drorzel | April 12, 2013One of the reasons I held off on commenting on the whole E. O. Wilson math op-ed thing, other than not having time to blog, was that his comments were based on his own experiences. And, you know, who am I to gainsay the personal experiences of a justly famous scientist?
At the same time, though, this is one of the big things that makes the original piece so frustrating. He's speaking from his personal experience, but it feels like he's chosen to draw exactly the wrong lessons from it. The relevant anecdotes are:
During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright…
drorzel | April 12, 2013One of the hot topics of the moment is the E. O. Wilson op-ed lamenting the way math scares students off from science, and downplaying the need for mathematical skill (this is not news, really-- he said more or less the same thing a few years ago, but the Wall Street Journal published it to promote his upcoming book). This has raised a lot of hackles in the more math-y side of the science blogosphere, while some in less math-y fields (mostly closer to Wilson's home field of evolutionary biology) either applaud him or don't see what the fuss is about.
The split, I think, comes from the fact…
esiegel | April 10, 2013"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Three classic observations -- the Hubble expansion of the Universe, the leftover cosmic microwave background radiation, and the observed abundance of the light elements -- lead us inevitably to modeling our Universe as having begun in a hot, dense state from which it expanded and cooled. There is no other explanation that agrees…
drorzel | April 10, 2013For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler's classic essay "The Simple Art of Murder" last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950:
In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn’t get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read…
esiegel | April 8, 2013"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." -Henry David Thoreau
Welcome to another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each week, we take a look at the 110 deep-sky objects that comprise the Messier catalogue, the first comprehensive catalogue of fixed, deep-sky objects that could possibly be confused for potential brightening comets.
Image credit: Giacomo Bongiorno of Le Meraviglie del Cielo.
Today, to mark our hitting the quarter-century mark in looking at these nebulae…
drorzel | April 3, 2013The last week or so of silence on the blog has been due to my trip to Ohio (which was very enjoyable), and a lack of child care for the early part of this week. A day and a half home with both kids was just exhausting, but the trip was useful in that it provided me time to read Gravity's Engines by Caleb Scharf, on the plane to and from Columbus (I got the paper edition at Science Online, and figured as long as I had a printed book I wanted to read, I might as well dodge the stupid argument about whether my Nook is likely to interfere with the plane's navigation systems).
This book comes with…
esiegel | April 3, 2013"On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays?" -Victor Francis Hess
We've come a tremendously long way in our understanding of the Universe, but there are plenty of mysteries still to be revealed. Way back in the late 1800s, we noticed that there was an unaccounted-for excess in the amount of ionization in the upper atmosphere, something that our Sun and Earth, by themselves, couldn't explain.
Victor Francis Hess -- the originator of the quote atop -- decided to go see for himself, and conducted a series of…
carlyo | March 27, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another STEM Role Model! In today’s blog we feature Nanomaterials Physicist Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky.
We are excited to announce that Dr. Leslie-Pelecky will be serving as a Nifty Fifty Speaker for the Festival!
She has appeared on television for ESPN, H2 and VOOM channels, and in print for publications such as TIME and Sporting News magazines, and professional society publications such as C&EN and the Materials Research Society Bulletin. She appears periodically on the SiriusXM Speedway satellite radio program where she uses science to dispel…
esiegel | March 27, 2013"The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it." -Stephen Hawking
One of the most powerful predictions of the Big Bang -- the fact that our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly-expanding Universe came from a hot, dense, much more homogeneous state -- was the existence of a bath of leftover radiation that should be detectable, even today.
Image credit: Pearson / Addison Wesley, retrieved from Jill Bechtold.
Back when the…
drorzel | March 26, 2013It's been a while since I've done a post over-analyzing some everyday situation, because I've been too busy to do any silly experiments. We're on break this week, though, so I took a little time Monday to bring excessive technology to bear on the critically important scientific question: how good is my insulated Starbucks cup?
To back up a little bit, because it's always important to provide background and motivation when writing a lab report, I spend a lot of time working at Starbucks these days, because when I try to get work done in my office, people keep showing up wanting me to do stuff…
drorzel | March 25, 2013Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a bit of a rant about what students perceive as grading on a "curve":
Moreover, many students have only the foggiest idea of what a curve is. Many (though probably not all) of their high schools had fixed grading scales with fixed percentages for each letter grade. The A/A- range is 90% or above, or 85% or above, or whatever. The B+/B/B- range is whatever percentage range below that. And so forth. If we set the grade markers anywhere below the ranges they saw in high school, that constitutes “a curve” in their eyes. We could base those ranges…
drorzel | March 25, 2013Kind of short notice, but if you're in the appropriate bits of Ohio, you might be interested to know that I'm giving two talks at Wright State this Thursday. At 11am, I'm doing the Physics Department Colloquium in 202 Oelman Hall, "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Social Media Can Help":
Budget cuts and funding instability are a constant source of anxiety for professional scientists, and public uncertainty about science threatens to derail critical policy actions in areas like climate change and public health. I will argue that these…
drorzel | March 21, 2013Yesterday's big post on why I think people should embrace scientific thinking in a more conscious way than they do already (because my claim is that most people already use scientific thinking, they're just not aware that they're doing it) is clearly a kind of explanation of the reason behind my next book, but what about the previous two? How does teaching people about modern physics through imaginary conversations with my dog serve the general goal of getting people to think more scientifically?
The following is a bit of a retcon-- after all, the proximate cause of my writing those books was…
esiegel | March 20, 2013"Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view." -Max Planck
Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite -- the most powerful satellite ever to measure the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- will finally unveil its results about the origin and composition of the Universe.
Image credit: ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia.
They've figured out how to subtract the…
drorzel | March 20, 2013As you may or may not know, I'm currently at work on a book called How to Think Like a Scientist. This raises the fairly obvious question in the post title, namely, why should people think like scientists? What's the point?
In a sense, this is (as Ethan Zuckerman pointed out at lunch the other day) the underlying question at the heart of the whole endeavor of science communication. I mean, I've written two books about modern physics for a general audience, and when I have time, I write this blog aimed at non-scientists. What's the point of doing all that, anyway? What is it I hope to achieve…