Physics
drorzel | February 2, 2012It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already:
If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this shameless publicity stunt: The second-ever Dog Physics Photo Contest!
Last time around, we did a LOLEmmy contest for a bound galley proof of the first book. This time, I'm giving away a signed copy of the finished book, so we'll go for something a little trickier: I've picked three pictures from my…
drorzel | February 2, 2012As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett at Dot Physics. We've been trying to do this literally for months, but the weather wouldn't cooperate. Until this past weekend, when we finally managed to make measurements that allow us to do some cutting-edge science. For 200 BC, anyway...
So, what…
esiegel | January 30, 2012"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." -Stephen Jay Gould
Those of you who follow me on either google+, facebook or twitter know that I sometimes post interesting articles about science from around the world, including this very good article about myths about outer space, from the often-entertaining cracked.com. So, as you can imagine, I was (at first) very excited when I saw this article…
drorzel | January 30, 2012There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in favor of this, but Aram says one thing that bugs me a bit:
Just like the walled gardens of Compuserve and AOL would never grow into the Internet, no commercial publisher will ever be able to match the scope and ease of access of arxiv.org. Nor can they match the price. In 2010, there were about…
oracknows | January 29, 2012It's rare that I have much in the way of reluctance to leap into writing about a topic. Any regular reader of this blog should know this to be true, given the topics I regularly take on and how often my writing draws flak my way from various proponents of quackery and pseudoscience, in particular the antivaccine crowd. Still, sometimes a topic gives me pause, although, I must admit, the reason is that blogging about it will bring embarrassment to me. Usually, I can overcome this reluctance, as I have done in discussing, for example, how my alma mater, the university from which I obtained both…
drorzel | January 27, 2012I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:
That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and everything... You can see it above, next to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and various clutter on my desk, for scale.
There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.
esiegel | January 26, 2012"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler
So said the man who, in 1604, discovered the supernova that was the last to be seen, visually, within our own galaxy. Although it's likely that two others occurred subsequently, they were not visible to human eyes, and only with powerful telescopes were their remnants discovered.
But earlier this week, the first supernova of the year was discovered, in a galaxy 25 million light years away,…
drorzel | January 25, 2012The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would've banged out very quickly. I'm not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly works:
The graph at the bottom of that window is the entropy versus "time" for a lattice of 20 sites with a 25% hopping probability (either left or right). The window with the colored balls at the upper left is a graphical representation-- red dots are "occupied" sites, white "…
drorzel | January 24, 2012So, back when How to Teach Physics to Your Dog was coming out, I did a few "dramatic readings" of bits of the book, such as this one on the Quantum Zeno Effect:
This was made with Windows Movie Maker, because it was free (came with the computer) and dead simple. However, Movie Maker on my new computers is hopelessly broken-- I've made a couple of attempts to do the same sort of thing with my laptop, but I've never managed to get more than a couple of steps in before it crashes. (To be fair, this is one of only two things that are worse under Windows 7 than Vista, and the only one that's…
drorzel | January 23, 2012I'm fairly certain somebody has already done this, because it's such an obvious idea. It's a little beyond my cargo-cult VPython skills right at the moment, though (I can probably learn to do it, but not right now), and I none of the applets I Googled up seemed to be doing this, so I'm posting this sketchy description because I've spent some time thinking about it, and might as well get a blog post out of the deal.
So, as we said back in the holiday season, one of the most fundamental concepts in the modern understanding of thermodynamics and statistical physics is the notion of entropy. You…
drorzel | January 20, 2012While clearing the cars of frost Thursday morning, I was reminded of a difference of opinion Kate and I have about the best approach to a cold car. I tend to start the car up, and immediately turn the defrost on full blast; she prefers to let the car warm up for a while first, because it just blows cold air for a while. My feeling is that while the air from the defrost is not warm in an absolute sense, it's still passed over the engine on the way in, and thus is warmer than the outside air. Which means that it's going to increase the temperature inside the car somewhat, and thus will heat the…
drorzel | January 19, 2012In the same basic vein as last week's How to Read a Scientific Paper, here's a kind of online draft of the class I'm going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. "Present" here meaning the more general "display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or just a graph taped into a lab notebook," not specifically standing up and doing a PowerPoint talk (which I've posted about before).
So, you've made some measurements of a natural phenomenon. Congratulations, you've done Science! Now, you need to tell the world all about it, in a compact form that allows the…
esiegel | January 18, 2012"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known Universe." -Edwin Hubble
While large parts of the internet are blacked out today, in protest of SOPA and PIPA, I could think of no better way to highlight the importance of free exchange of information on the internet than by showcasing one of the most interesting, varied and intricate objects in the entire galaxy: Messier 16, better known…
jdupuis | January 17, 2012Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the previous 2011 lists are here.
This post includes the following: Discovery News: A Little Light Reading: 2011 in Physics Books.
The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe by Frank Close
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the…
esiegel | January 16, 2012
"This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian: [See drawing, above.] Only technical details are missing." -Wolfgang Pauli
First theorized by Pauli all the way back in 1930, neutrinos are some of the most mysterious and puzzling particles ever discovered in nature. For starters, they weren't even first detected until 1956 (by Reines and Cowan), 26 years after they were predicted to exist! Coming in three flavors -- electron, muon and tau -- and in both particle and anti-particle type, these neutrinos have the smallest but non-zero masses of any particle ever discovered.
Image…
drorzel | January 13, 2012I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time and timekeeping. How well do you think students learn the big ideas about how science works from these classes, as apposed to a more traditional general physics class? How much transfer do you see in students' understanding of the content of this course to understanding of science in general?
The…
esiegel | January 11, 2012"I soon became convinced... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the Universe really consists of." -Fritz Zwicky
Making the entire Universe isn't easy. Even with 13.7 billion years of time, general relativity and all the known particles in the Universe, we still can't reproduce all the observations we see today.
Image credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope LenS team.
What does it take to get galaxies to form and cluster together the way they do in the Universe?
The large-scale structure in the…
drorzel | January 10, 2012My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general "research methods" class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there's a lot more specialization by subfield), but I'm going to try to give as general an overview of how to approach scientific research as possible in a course with no prerequisites. The following is sort of a rough sketch of a lecture for next week, on how to approach the scientific literature, so comments and suggestions are welcome. This is…
oracknows | January 9, 2012I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at cranks, examining crank science (i.e., pseudoscience), and trying to figure out how to inoculate people against crankery. Because I'm a physician, I tend to do it mostly in the realm of medicine by critically examining "alternative" medical claims and discussing the scientific basis of medicine, both with respect to those "alternative" claims and to more conventional medical claims. However, I don't limit my skepticism and critical thinking just to medicine, although lately I think that I've been "specializing" too much, almost totally…
esiegel | January 9, 2012"If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance." -Jack Handey
The most common type of question I get asked by people genuinely wanting to know more about the Universe goes something like, "Hey, I saw such-and-such-a-story about some fanciful-sounding-theory, and that could be the explanation for this-weird-thing-that-we-see. What do you think about that?"
Well, here's the thing.
Image credit: Contemporary Physics Education Project.
We've got a set of laws…