Physics
drorzel | November 12, 2010There's a new physics Q&A site from the folks at Stack Exchange, this one on physics. If you're not familiar with the format, it's a bulletin-board style site where you can post questions to be answered by other users, and people vote the answers up and down, so you can get a decent feel for which answers are good, and which are less useful.
There's a pretty wide range of questions, covering everything from really basic concepts to fairly technical questions about current research. My own feeling about this is that if you're going to have it on the public web, you ought to expect and be…
catdynamics | November 11, 2010
Something went wrong with the GRE test in october.
Again.
Here is the official word from ETS
The GRE test administered in China, on Oct 23rd, was an old test.
GRE is offering free retakes next week or reimbursment.
This will seriously mess up grad school applicants from China, and not at a good time, with a lot of universities worried about funding and overcommittment on grad students recruitment (although I should note that some universities are taking opportunity and ramping up recruitment, for now, or deciding to gamble and plan on the funding situation improving).
So... is this a minor…
drorzel | November 11, 2010One of the many physics stories I haven't had time to blog about recently is the demonstration of relativistic time effects using atomic clocks. I did mention a DAMOP talk about the experiment, but the actual paper was published in Science (and is freely available from the NIST Time and Frequency Division (PDF file), because you can't copyright work done at government labs) a month and a half ago, and generated a bit of buzz at the time.
Given the delay between publication of the article and me blogging about it, I feel obliged to provide a little more detail than you'll get from the news…
esiegel | November 10, 2010"Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life." -Hal Lewis
The most valuable natural resources we have at our disposal during our brief lives are the following.
That's right, the Earth and the Sun. And if we want life on Earth to continue as we know it, we have to avoid destroying our own natural environment. The big questions are whether we're actually damaging it to the point of devastating destruction, and if so, what we need to do to fix it.
One of the things we've measured reasonably well -- at, for instance, weather stations all…
drorzel | November 10, 2010We've just recently completed pre-registration for Winter term classes, so I've been thinking a bit about why students do and do not sign up for things. Thus, a poll:
You are a college student considering an elective class in your major, and you see it has a lab. Your reaction is:survey software
Feel free to replace "English" with the non-lab-science major of your choice when answering.
drorzel | November 9, 2010I haven't been doing these as regularly as I was earlier in the year, but here are a few interesting bits of news about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
LA FISICA SPIEGATA AL MIO CANE, is now available. That's the Italian edition, which Google translates to something like "Explaining Physics to My Dog." Emmy is disappointed in that translation-- she was hoping it had something to do with spaghetti, preferably with meat.
This appears to be a review of the Chinese edition, though I can't read a word of it, and Google Translate isn't really up to the task, rendering one whole paragraph as "…
esiegel | November 8, 2010"I suppose I'll open a bottle of something if they find it." -Peter Higgs
Alright, all you quarks and leptons in the house. I'm looking at you in particular, up quark, down quark, and the electron. The up and down quarks combine to make up the proton and neutron, while the electron combines with nuclei to make up atoms.
We learned a little bit about how the Higgs will complete the standard model. And one of the things we mentioned is that the Higgs mechanism gives rest masses to all of the particles in the standard model.
This includes all the quarks (including the constituents of the…
drorzel | November 8, 2010The American Institute of Physics has a statistics division that produces lots of interesting analyses of issues relevant to the discipline. A couple of them were released just recently, including one on the job status of new Ph.D.'s (PDF). The key graph from the report is this one:
The text of the report talks up the recent decrease in the number of post-doc jobs and increase in potentially permanent positions, but the long term trend looks pretty flat to me-- averaged over the thirty years of data, it looks like a bit more than half of new Ph.D.'s have always taken post-doc positions, and…
drorzel | November 8, 2010Last week's guess-the-number contest for my spare copy of Massive by Ian Sample generated over 150 comments. So, who won? Well, I said at the time:
I am thinking of an integer between 0 and 1000 (inclusive). The person who comes closest to guessing the number by midnight Eastern time Friday, November 5 wins a copy of Massive.
The number I was thinking of when I typed that was 137. Which, interestingly, was guess by two nearly simultaneous comments, numbers 10 and 11, by Nathan and Derek R. Clearly, these two know their physicist psychology-- 137 is a weirdly important number in physics, as…
drorzel | November 6, 2010Having written in defense of analogies in physics yesterday, I should note that not all of the analogies that are brought out in an attempt to clarify physics concepts are good. For example, there's this incredibly strained opening to a Science News article on entanglement:
If the Manning brothers were quantum physicists as well as NFL quarterbacks, one of them could win his game's opening coin toss every time. The night before they played, the brothers would take two coins from a special quantum box to use the next day. If Peyton's game came first, after learning the outcome of his coin toss…
drorzel | November 5, 2010Regular commenter onymous left a comment to my review of Warped Passages that struck me as a little odd:
The extended analogy between the renormalization group and a bureaucracy convinced me that she was trying way too hard to make sophisticated concepts comprehensible. Also, I'm not really sure that analogies are the best way to explain concepts to people without using mathematics.
I'm not talking about the implication that making sophisticated concepts comprehensible is not worth doing, but rather the negativity toward analogies. It's odd because, if you think about it, a huge chunk of…
esiegel | November 4, 2010"We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!" -Gollum, from the Hobbit
Don't get me wrong. The Higgs is an absolutely wonderful mechanism, and I've very optimistic that the last particle of the standard model -- the Higgs Boson -- will be found over the next few years, either at the Large Hadron Collider or, if experimenters get very lucky, at Fermilab!
As far as particle physics goes, the Higgs would be unlike any other fundamental particle we know of. While all the other particles have a spin, or an intrinsic angular momentum, the Higgs is predicted to be spin-0, or spinless.
While all…
drorzel | November 4, 2010I can't resist interrupting the relatively productive day I'm having working on the new book to point you to Conversación de fÃsica con mi perro, the Spanish-language edtion of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which sports this spiffy cover:
I haven't seen a physical copy of this yet, but the vanity search turned up this blog post, which just reproduces the cover copy, but does offer a sample chapter as a PDF. So, you know, if you want to try it before you buy it, there you go...
This also explains the phone call I got yesterday from a journalist in Spain, who wanted to ask me about…
drorzel | November 4, 2010I'm spending the day trying to get some work done on the book-in-progress, so I'm avoiding both work- and blog-related stuff. I don't want to leave the site completely quiet, though, so here's a question to ponder, relating to SteelyKid's continuing fascination with Goodnight Moon:
How does a cow jump over the moon?
The father of one of SteelyKid's classmates, who is not originally from the US, asked why there's a cow jumping over the moon in that (or, as SteelyKid puts it: "Cow jumping MOON!!"), and I don't have a good answer. I'm aware of the nursery rhyme and the Tolkien joke, but why…
drorzel | November 3, 2010In a case of poor communication between publicists, I have ended up with not one but two advance copies of Massive by Ian Sample, a forthcoming book about the Higgs Boson. As I barely have time to read one, I don't remotely need two; thus, I will dispose of one with a really simple contest:
I am thinking of an integer between 0 and 1000 (inclusive). The person who comes closest to guessing the number by midnight Eastern time Friday, November 5 wins a copy of Massive.
Leave your guess in the comments. One entry per commenter, please. In the event that two or more people choose the same…
drorzel | November 3, 2010I have nothing useful or interesting to say about electoral politics, but I suspect that's all people will want to read about today. So here's a book post that's been backlogged for quite a while.
Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions dates from 2005, and was, I think, part of the huge spate of string-theory-related books at that time (just before the String Theory Backlash books of 2006). It includes the usual survey of the Standard Model and the problems thereof, with an emphasis on the sort of extra-dimension theories that Randall and…
drorzel | November 2, 2010Today's a lab day in my main class for the term, with a fairly involved experiment to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. This is going to be all kinds of fun, because 1) I can't get into the room to set anything up until an hour before the start of class, and 2) SteelyKid is home sick, which means I can't go in to pull stuff together until about an hour before the start of class. Whee!
Today's a day to (attempt to) accentuate the positive, though, so let's use this as a jumping-off point for a more upbeat topic, namely:
What's the best lab you ever did in a lab science class?…
esiegel | October 29, 2010"People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend." -Jim Morrison
Yes, Jim Morrison, some people are quite strange, too.
People Are StrangeBut that's not what I'm talking about. You see, one of the "doomsday" scenarios people are talking about over at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- in addition to black holes -- are out-of-control strangelets.
Let's talk about what these things are, what people are afraid of, and whether there really is anything worth fearing.…
drorzel | October 28, 2010The Times Higher Education magazine in the UK, that is. They ran a review of my book a couple of weeks ago, which I've only just noticed:
The approach is quite entertaining. The tone of the book is chatty and contains some truly awful puns involving dogs, which, if you can stand them, make it an attractive and lively read. However, don't be fooled - Emmy is no ordinary dog. She can reason with the informed leaps one may expect from a physics undergraduate, despite peppering her conversation with "squirrel", "bunny" and "chase".
If you're in the UK, the edition the review refers to is on sale…
drorzel | October 28, 2010I finished Jennifer Ouellette's new book a few weeks ago, shortly after my trip to Alabama, but it's taken me a long time to get around to reviewing it due to a combination of too much work and being a Bad Person. There's finally a tiny break in the storm of work, though, so here's a slightly belated review.
The Calculus Diaries is not a book that will teach you how to do math. There aren't worked examples, detailed derivations, or homework problems in the main text. It might, however, teach you not to fear math, as it provides a witty and accessible explanation of the key concepts behind…