Physics
esiegel | October 27, 2010"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together." -Alan Watts
We've talked, recently, about the scale of the Universe, and trust me, it's huge.
Filled with hundreds of billions of giant, Milky Way-sized galaxies,
each of which contains nearly a trillion stars,
the whole thing is really, really big. And, after nearly 14 billion years of expansion since the big bang, the…
drorzel | October 27, 2010It's late October, which means that the thoughts of small children and adults who have never quite grown up turn to selecting appropriate costumes for Halloween. In the spirit of these literary suggestions and these abstract concept suggestions, I thought it would be useful to offer some suggestions for physics-themed costumes, for those who want to dress as something from the greatest science.
Of course, there are some really obvious choices for physics-themed costumes (Einstein: rumpled clothes, white hair, distracted manner, German accent; Feynman: black pants, white shirt, brushed-back…
drorzel | October 27, 2010I'm spending a good chunk of the morning grading the exam that I gave yesterday, so here's a poll on what you might call exam philosophy. Our classes are small, so the bulk of our exams are free-response problems, and we tend to break those problems into sub-parts (1a, 1b, 1c, etc.). There are two approaches to writing these questions that I have seen: one is to use the sub-parts to break a single problem into steps, thus leading students through the question; the other is to write questions where the sub-parts are independent, so that a student who has no clue how to answer part a can still…
drorzel | October 24, 2010Between my long-ago high-school French and Google Translate, I can tell that this is a good review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It does note, though, that reading the book requires knowledge of English to understand it, which is a problem. And, as far as I know, French translation rights haven't been sold yet... French publishers, je vous regarde.
In other foreign-edition news, we've sold German and Turkish rights, so there will be editions in those languages eventually. Emmy was very happy to hear that the book will be published in Turkey, though that was mostly a case of preposition…
drorzel | October 23, 2010Some time back, I took issue with an article about "masculine" and "feminine" approaches to science that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic that she pointed out in comments to my original post.
I have two major problems with this article. One of them is a problem I have with the whole genre (as it were), and I'll save that for another time, because it will be difficult to write. The bigger and more immediate problem that I have, though, is that I don't recognize Jellicoe's description of science. She writes:
The…
esiegel | October 23, 2010
"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
It's been almost three years since I started science writing, and almost two years since I moved over here, to ScienceBlogs. And together, you and I have been through over five hundred posts, nearly ten thousand comments, and more than two million pageviews. No one can take that away from us, just like Billie Holiday sings:
They…
drorzel | October 22, 2010As promised, an answer to a question from a donor to this year's DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. Sarah asks:
Chad, can I get a post about how you (or scientists in general) come up with ideas for experiments? You've covered some of the gory detail with the lab info posts, but I think it would be useful for your readers to see where the ideas come from.
The answer is obvious: Ideas come from Schenectady. Which, not coincidentally, is where I live...
More seriously, in my area of experimental physics, I think there are two main ways people come up with ideas for new experiments:…
drorzel | October 21, 2010Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level has a nice post on the tension between faculty research and teaching:
Malachowski writes, "We all know that working with undergraduates is time consuming and in some cases it slows down our research output, but work with undergraduates should be supported, celebrated, and compensated at a high level. For most of us, the process involved in research with students is as important as the product." If colleges adopt a narrow definition of scholarly productivity measured only by publications, they may unintentionally provide incentives for faculty not to…
kcollins | October 21, 2010Engineering.com has a Great Science Teacher Video Contest happening right now! Watch and rate teachers in action as they explain projectile motion, Newton's 3rd Law and many more science concepts.
This is a competition with $3500 in prize money and prestige on the line, so please be sure to rate the videos by clicking on the star symbols at the top. Go here and vote for your favorite video!
drorzel | October 18, 2010As you may or may not be aware, we are once again in the middle of a DonorsChoose fundraiser to support public school students and teachers. The good news is, the Uncertain Principles entry for the 2010 Challenge is in second place among ScienceBlogs blogs with $373 in donations thus far; the bad news it that more than half of that money is from the initial contribution I made when I set the challenge up.
We've done much better than this in the past, but I realize these are tough economic times, and people may not have as much disposable cash to give to charity. I was thinking, though, about…
drorzel | October 15, 2010A big and important argument about religion and science has flared up again on Twittter. It occurs to me, though, that nobody has taken the obvious step of polling people about their actual beliefs, so let's see if we can't settle this question with (social) SCIENCE!:
I would prefer to be a member of:Market Research
What? It's not like this is any more pointless than the actual science-and-religion argument that's going on in blogdom.
drorzel | October 15, 2010Standing around in the cold for a few hours yesterday, then driving for almost five hours has given the cold SteelyKid had a week or so ago the opening it needed to infect me, so I'm all hoarse and achy this morning. Which means you get silly blogging, such as this poll inspired by some edits I had to make to this week's lab in the intro E&M class I'm teaching:
The code for those little colored bars on electrical resistors is:online survey
I know you'd like to be able to click more than one answer. Life's tough. Get a helmet.
ksnyder | October 15, 2010This guest post is written by Brookhaven physicist Thomas Roser, Chair of the Collider-Accelerator Department. Roser, who earned his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, worked at the University of Michigan before joining Brookhaven in 1991.
Thomas Roser
The chain of accelerators that leads into two of Brookhaven's major research facilities - the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) - will soon have a new starting point.
A new ion generator, called the Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS), will produce and accelerate beams…
drorzel | October 14, 2010Emmy and I are in Buffalo today, after a long drive last night, made longer by the NY Thruway authorities decidin to randomly sprinkle lane closures along the westbound portion of I-90. They also made the sadistic move of putting on the "tune to this radio station for information" flashers before the big back-up, and then playing only a recording saying that they were updating the messages on the information network. For at least an hour. Nice work, Thruway idiots. That was positively Pennsylvanian.
Anyway, we're here in scenic Buffalo, where it isn't snowing yet, so don't ask. Which means I…
drorzel | October 13, 2010Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level offers some thoughts on the relative status of experimental vs. theoretical science, spinning off a comprehensive discussion of the issues at Academic Jungle. I flagged this to comment on over the weekend, but then was too busy with SteelyKid and football to get to it. since I'm late to the party, I'll offer some slightly flippant arguments in favor of experiment or theory:
Argument 1: Experimentalists are better homeowners. At least in my world of low-energy experimental physics, many of the skills you are expected to have as an experimental physicist…
drorzel | October 12, 2010SteelyKid is a big fan of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon, which, if you haven't spent the last sixty-odd years in a cave, you probably know features a bunny saying goodnight to a variety of objects in a great, green room. The attentive toddler will find a lot to look at in the pictures-- there's a mouse in every one that SteelyKid delights in pointing out-- but an inquiring adult might well ask "Just how long does it take this bunny to say goodnight to all this stuff, anyway?"
Well, we can answer this question with SCIENCE! You see, there are six pictures in the book showing the…
esiegel | October 11, 2010"I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." -Isaac Newton
"Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean." -Christopher Reeve
Today is Columbus Day here in the United States. And unlike pretty much everyone else I know, I've been looking forward to Columbus Day for weeks, now.
Why's that?
After all, it's not like I get off from work, or that I think Columbus was some idealized version of a human…
drorzel | October 11, 2010SteelyKid, like most toddlers, knows a few songs, and likes to sing them over and over. Her repertoire is limited to "ABCDEFG" (the alphabet song, but that's how she requests it), "Twinkle, Twinkle," "Some man" ("This Old Man," which I only figured out this weekend), and "Round and Round" ("The Wheels on the Bus"). I get a little bored with the repetition, and so tend to make up my own verses, which get sideways looks from her, followed by telling Kate "Daddy's silly!"
I've been posting a lot of these on Twitter over the past several days (@orzelc), but for posterity, a few physics-related…
drorzel | October 11, 2010Via Tom, a site giving problem-solving advice for physics. While the general advice is good, and the friendly, Don't-Panic tone is great, I do have a problem with one of their steps, Step 7: Consider Your Formulas:
Some professors will require that you memorize relevant formulas, while others will give you a "cheat sheet." Either way, you have what you need. Memorization might sound horrible, but most physics subjects don't have that many equations to memorize. I remember taking an advanced electromagnetism course where I had to memorize about 20 different formulas. At first it seemed…
esiegel | October 8, 2010"You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in." -Arlo Guthrie
You know the story. Every galaxy we look out at, with hardly any exceptions, appears to be moving away from us. Not only that, but the farther away a galaxy appears to be, the faster it appears to move away from us!
What do we observe that leads us to believe this? Well, thanks to Edwin Hubble, who looked at the spectra of distant galaxies, we discovered that, compared to Earth, where we make atoms emit and absorb light at very specific wavelengths (or frequencies):
for distant galaxies, these emission/absorption lines…