Physics
drorzel | February 12, 2013I found myself writing about the social skills of scientists today for the book-in-progress (something I've done here before), and how they're portrayed in the media, so of course I had to drop in a reference to "The Big Bang Theory." Jim Parsons's portrayal of Sheldon Cooper pretty much nails down one of the extremes of the "socially inept scientist" axis, the borderline autistic genius who can't comprehend normal social interactions, but still won't shut up. The other extreme, of course, is occupied by Paul Dirac, who famously almost never spoke.
"The Big Bang Theory" is an endless source…
esiegel | February 8, 2013"Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
When you look out into the Universe, what is it that you typically think of? Do you think of reliable, fixed stars and constellations? The vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its memorable dust lanes and amorphous shapes?
Image credit: Wally Pacholka of http://www.astropics.com/.
The unchanging nature of the points of light in the sky?
Image credit: Roth Ritter (Dark Atmospheres), of the double cluster in…
cwhyte | February 7, 2013Particle collisions aren't the easiest thing in the world to explain, but one of our physicists took this challenge to the extreme. In another Ten Hundred Words of Science submission, Brookhaven Lab physicist Paul Sorenson explains his work studying quark-gluon plasma with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
Where I work, we slam together small things to break them into even smaller things until we have the smallest things possible. This is how we know what matter is made of. We gave names to the smallest things in matter like “up”, “down”, “strange”, “top”, and “bottom”. Each of those…
esiegel | February 6, 2013"According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity." -Stephen Hawking
You may have encountered objects that are the same size as one another, but have very different masses.
Image credit: Basic Science Supplies / © Accelerate Media.
This is because they're made out of different elements. The higher you go in the periodic table, the larger and more massive your individual atoms are, and so…
drorzel | February 6, 2013I ran across this recently while looking for something else, and was reminded of it by this discussion of jargon. It's an attempt to explain the general historical context of the whole Higgs Boson thing, and why it's important. I improvised this in response to somebody's question about how I would explain that, drawing mostly on my recollection of a couple of history-of-field-theory books. I kept it in case I needed to bust it out when they discovered the Higgs, but that fell during the time when I wasn't able to blog, so I never used it. I'm never going to use it for anything else, though,…
drorzel | February 4, 2013I ended up feeling that my most valuable contribution to the Science Online meeting (other than boosting the income of the Marriott's bartenders) was providing experienced commentary and advice from a slightly different angle than a lot of the other participants. A bunch of this got tweeted out by other people in the sessions, but the format (both at the conference and on Twitter) necessarily strips a lot of nuance out of what I was trying to say (and not always saying successfully). so I thought I'd revise and expand on my remarks a little bit. In particular, I want to post expanded versions…
esiegel | February 1, 2013“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious.” -Stephen Hawking
One of the most existential questions humanity has ever asked is the question of our origins: where do I come from? Inspired by Ben Kilminster's writings, here's the entire history of the Universe -- that's led up to the existence of you -- in just 10 sentences*.
Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://www.livingligo.org/.
1.) At some point in the distant past**, the…
esiegel | January 28, 2013"A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw the less he spoke
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?" -The Immortal Poet Bromley
To your naked eye, the night sky appears littered with thousands of individual points of light: the stars and planets so familiar to us. But through even a small telescope or a pair of binoculars, not only do the number of visible stars increase into the hundreds-of-thousands or even the millions, but a slew of deep-sky objects become visible to us as well. Each monday, we highlight one of the deep-sky objects from…
jhalper | January 28, 2013
What happens when a former physics-student-turned-documentary-director is invited to create a video clip for the first ever physics reunion? The answer is below.
You may not learn anything new about physics by watching it, but you will note that Weizmann President Prof. Daniel Zajfman and VP Prof. Israel Bar-Joseph are featured, along with others.
Touching Something No One Found
esiegel | January 25, 2013“I asked the Zebra,
are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Are you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with quiet times?
Or are you quiet with noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on and on and on he went.
I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.” -Shel Silverstein
When it comes to the classical world -- the world on a macroscopic scale -- we all feel comfortable…
drorzel | January 24, 2013While in the library looking for something else, I noticed a book called The Trouble with Science by Robin Dunbar, whose description made it sound very much on point for my current project:
In The Trouble with Science, Robin Dunbar asks whether science really is unique to Western culture, even to humankind. He suggests that our "trouble with science"--our inability to grasp how it works, our suspiciousness of its successes--may lie in the fact that evolution has left our minds better able to cope with day-to-day social interaction than with the complexities of the external world.
Somewhat…
esiegel | January 23, 2013“Hell must be isothermal; for otherwise the resident engineers and physical chemists (of which there must be some) could set up a heat engine to run a refrigerator to cool off a portion of their surroundings to any desired temperature.” -Henry Albert Ben
One of the most amazing ideas to come out of our observations of the Universe over the last century is that our vast, star-filled, mostly-empty Universe hasn't always been like this.
Image credit: Ricky Barnard / Fine Art America.
Today, the Universe is very cold, expanding, and the average distance between galaxies is increasing as time…
drorzel | January 22, 2013I have mentioned before that when I was a kid, I wrote a letter to Luis Alvarez, the 1968 Nobel laureate in Physics, asking some questions about his theory that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, which had been featured in a NOVA special. I got a very nice letter back from him, very graciously correcting the dumber questions I asked. This made a very favorable impression, which in turn played a role in getting me to include him in the work-in-progress.
Since I was thinking about Alvarez for the book, I asked my parents if they still had a copy of the letter, which for many years I had…
esiegel | January 18, 2013"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries." -Carl Sagan
If you looked out at the planets in the Solar System orbiting our Sun, you'd expect that if you know where they are right now and how quickly they're moving, you can figure out exactly where they're going to be at any time-and-date arbitrarily far into the future. That's the great power that comes…
drorzel | January 18, 2013As research for the work-in-progress, I recently read Luis Alvarez's autobiography, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist, which contains a passage that I was reminded of last night while reading another book, that seems like an amusing follow-up to yesterday's rant about theory and experiment. This is from the end of the chapter where he joined Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Lab at Berkeley, and found he needed to get up to speed on a lot of physics he'd missed learning at the University of Chicago:
The other important component to my self-help program was a detailed study of three articles that…
drorzel | January 17, 2013There's been a bunch of talk recently about a poll on quantum interpretations that showed physicists badly divided between the various interpretations-- Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.-- a result which isn't actually very surprising. Sean Carroll declares that the summary plot is "The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics, which I think is a bit of an overreaction, but not too much of one. I do strongly disagree with one thing he says in explaining this, though:
Not that we should be spending as much money trying to pinpoint a correct understanding of quantum mechanics as we do looking for…
esiegel | January 16, 2013“Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements— a quintessence— that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man’s spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that’s not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there’s a little starlight in each of us.” -Lisa Kleypas
Ah, but what if you did want the scientific view of starlight? After all, it's through the very stars themselves that we've unveiled some of the greatest secrets of the Universe.
Image (mosaic) credit: Nick Risinger.
But while the stars of the night…
milhayser | January 14, 2013Reports that researchers elicited a temperature "lower than absolute zero" might make one question the meaning of the word absolute. On Built on Facts, Matt Springer writes "temperature is a relationship between energy and entropy, and you can do some weird things to entropy and energy and get the formal definition of temperature to come out negative." Usually collisions between atoms ensure that less than 50% of atoms in a sample are excited, no matter how much heat you add. But Springer analogizes "What if I start with a huge pile of ground-state atoms, and one by one I whack them with a…
drorzel | January 14, 2013Last week's post talked about the general idea of negative temperature, with reference to this much-talked-about Science paper (which also comes in a free arxiv version from which the figures used here are taken). I didn't go into the details of how they made a negative temperature gas, though, and as it's both very clever and hard to follow, I figure that deserves a post of its own.
Right, so last time you said that negative temperature just means you're more likely to find fast-moving atoms than slow ones, so all they need to do is whack these atoms in the right way? Right? No, it's more…
esiegel | January 11, 2013"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." - Samuel Johnson
I have a six-sided die. I'm going to roll it ten times, and record each roll. And when I'm done, I'm going to have an incredibly rare, bet-you-can't-reproduce-it result!
Image credit: random.org's dice roller.
Look at that! Ten rolls of a six-sided die, and I got: 3, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 4, 1, 4, and 3! What a glorious, odds-defying sequence of events!
In fact, if you took a fair six-sided die and rolled it ten times, you'd have less than a 1-in-60,000,000 chance of…