Physics
esiegel | July 3, 2012"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden
All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of landing on tails (ignoring the side, of course).
Image credit: C. Nolan, A. Eckhart and Warner Bros. Pictures, retrieved from http://explow.com/Two-Face.
So let's imagine that you flip the coin ten times, and you get seven heads and three tails. Are you worried? You shouldn't be; in order to tell…
esiegel | June 27, 2012"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -- things I had no words for." -Georgia O'Keeffe
When it comes to the Universe, it isn't just the stuff that's in it that's important.
Image credit: 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC).
It's also how all that stuff interacts with itself and everything else. To the best of our knowledge, there are four fundamental forces in the Universe, and they're all essential to our existence.
Image credit: Stichting Maharishi University of Management, the Netherlands.
Some of them are familiar, like gravitation. On the…
jeure | June 25, 2012The positive and sometimes unexpected impact of particle physics is well documented, from physicists inventing the World Wide Web to engineering the technology underlying life-saving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. But sometimes the raw power of huge experiments and scientific ambition draw the recognition of those seeking only the most extreme and impractical achievements on Earth.
Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes particles together to recreate the incredible conditions that only existed at the dawn of time. The 2.4-mile underground…
drorzel | June 21, 2012In which celebrity culture comes to particle physics.
------------
It's been about six months since we had a big flurry of Higgs Boson stories, and as enjoyable as the relative quiet has been, it means we're due for another run. And, predictably enough, the usual suspects are stoking speculation about what, exactly, will be officially revealed in a few weeks at the summer particle physics meetings. This spilled over into the rest of the social media universe, with the joke hashtag #HiggsRumors becoming a trending topic on Twitter for a little while last night.
As is also sadly predictable,…
drorzel | June 19, 2012In which we look at a slightly crazy-sounding proposal from my former boss, the experimental realization of which is getting close to completion.
------------
I spent more or less the entire first day of DAMOP a couple of weeks ago going to precision measurement talks. Most of these were relatively sedate (at least by the standards of a sub-field that routinely involves people proposing incredibly difficult experiments), but my boss when I was at Yale, Mark Kasevich, provided the bold proposals I usually expect, in this case suggesting an experiment using an atom interferometer to measure…
drorzel | June 14, 2012Last night, as I was flying in to San Francisco, Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history. Now, a casual observer might think these events were unrelated, but to ancient alien theorists, the connection between them could not be more obvious. Thus, you should come to Kepler's Books in Menlo Park this evening at 7pm, to see what amazing events will happen next.
Well, OK, the most that will probably happen is that I might read a bit from the How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in a silly voice. But you don't know that I won't use my awesome ancient alien magic to transmute lead…
kmcwalsh | June 14, 2012RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab, found it first: a “perfect” liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons – a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) – produced by slamming heavy ions together at close to the speed of light. The fact that the QGP produced in these particle smashups was a liquid and not the expected gas, and that it flowed like a nearly frictionless fluid, took the physics world by surprise. These findings, now confirmed by heavy-ion experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, have raised compelling new questions about the nature of matter and…
drorzel | June 12, 2012In which we look again at the question of why, despite the image of physicists as arrogant bastards, biologists turn out to be much less collegial than physicists.
------------
While I was away from the blog, there was a spate of discussion of science outreach and demands on faculty time, my feelings about which are a little too complicated to boil down to a blog post in the time I have available. I did notice one thing in Jeanne Garb's guest blog post at Nature Networks:
Yet, given the current system, most scientists are choosing to keep a closed-notebook policy because they fear getting…
drorzel | June 11, 2012Two How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog items:
First and foremost, I'll be appearing at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, CA, this Thursday, June 14 at 7:00pm. I'll probably read a bit of the book, so if you've ever wanted to hear me do the silly dog voice live, here's your chance. Provided, of course, that you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be this Thursday night.
This will be my second trip to California in as many weeks, because all last week I was at DAMOP in Anaheim (the Chain-Restaurant-est Place on Earth). I spent a fair bit of time there explaining the whole talking-to-the-dog…
esiegel | June 6, 2012"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." -Randall of xkcd
In January of 2008, I began writing this blog, Starts With A Bang, both for myself and for all of you, because we all have something in common.
Image credit: © Stéphane Guisard, "Los Cielos de Chile", via astrosurf.com.
The same planet, the same heavens, the same laws of nature and the same Universe are something that we all have in common. And all of us, no matter how intrinsically smart, talented, or brilliant our instincts are, come into this world knowing absolutely nothing about it.
But…
esiegel | June 4, 2012"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties." -James Jeans
Here on Earth, every living thing is based around four fundamental, elemental building blocks of life: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and, perhaps most importantly, carbon.
Image Credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania.
From diamonds to nanotubes to DNA, carbon is indispensable for constructing practically all of the most intricate structures we know of. Most of the carbon in our world comes from long-dead stars, in the form of Carbon-12: carbon atoms containing six…
drorzel | June 4, 2012In which we do a little ResearchBlogging, taking a look at a slightly confusing paper putting a new twist on the double-slit experiment.
------------
I'm off to California this afternoon, spending the rest of the week at DAMOP in Pasadena (not presenting this year, just hanging out to see the coolest new stuff in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics). I don't want to leave the blog with just a cute-kid video for the whole week, though, so here's some had-core physics: a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (freely available online), looking at a new sort of…
drorzel | May 31, 2012In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement.
------------
Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!":
he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…
drorzel | May 29, 2012In which I talk about why it is that particle physics and cosmology are so over-represented in popular physics, and why my own books contribute to that.
[The too-short excerpts on the new front page are beyond my ability to change, so I'll be doing Victorian-style "In which..." summaries at the start of posts as a work-around, so a casual visitor has some idea what a psot is about before clicking through.]
One of the maddening things about the recent upgrade of the ScienceBlogs back end has been that a lot of things have been posted during that time that I wanted to respond to. Near the top…
esiegel | May 28, 2012"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…
esiegel | May 26, 2012"This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time." -Frances Willard
As spring gives way to summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the most beloved sights of the night sky becomes ever more prominent: the Big Dipper.
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay (STScI) and A. Fujii.)
These seven bright stars shine high above the horizon after sunset, and will continue to do so over the rest of the Spring and all Summer…
drorzel | May 25, 2012The blog is recovering from the transition to WordPress, but I'm still not fully confident in it. So We'll turn to another corner of the social media universe for my procrastinatory needs this morning: Having Emmy answer physics questions on Twitter.
The same deal as when we've done this before: If you've got a physics question you'd like my dog to answer, post it to Twitter with the hashtag #dogphysics (or leave it in a comment, or email it to me), and Emmy will answer via Twitter, where she's @queen_emmy.
esiegel | May 24, 2012"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." -D.H. Lawrence
Here in our Solar System, the planet closest to our Sun is Mercury, speeding around in a complete orbit once every 88 days, with daytime temperatures reaching a sweltering 400° C, or around 800° F.
(Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University / Carnegie Institute of Washington.)
With its size, temperatures, and distance from the Sun, Mercury has had its entire atmosphere stripped away by the Sun. And while these temperatures might seem hot, in comparison with…
drorzel | May 21, 2012I was going to post something noting that the great WordPress transition will begin at 7pm tonight, and comments after that time will be lost like Roy Batty's tears. However, I have much happier news: tomorrow's Science Times (available on the Web already) will include a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog!
I considered reading this book aloud to my dog, even though I doubted he would understand relativity, even as explained by the witty and clear-thinking Chad Orzel. Maxwell does seem to show some interest in Newton's first law: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in…
esiegel | May 19, 2012"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved." -Wittgenstein
One of the most fundamental questions about the Universe that anyone can ask is, "Why is there anything here at all?"
Image credit: Patrick at vignetted.com.
Out beyond Earth, of course,…