Physics
jdupuis | October 11, 2016The jazz of physics, the physics of jazz, the chemistry of jazz, the jazz of chemistry, the jazz of computer science, the computer science of jazz, the math of jazz, the jazz of math, the jazz of biology, the biology of jazz, the jazz of engineering, the engineering of jazz.
And why not the jazz of history and the history of jazz? The sociology of jazz and the jazz of sociology? The jazz of political science, the political science of jazz. The jazz of philosophy, the philosophy of jazz, the literature of jazz, the jazz of literature.
And why not the jazz of religion, the religion of jazz,…
esiegel | October 7, 2016“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.” -Jay Griffiths
At the earliest times, we can trace the history of our Universe back to an inflationary state, where the energy inherent to space itself caused a rapid, exponential expansion. At the latest (current) times, billions of years after inflation ended and the Big Bang occurred, dark energy has come to dominate the Universe’s expansion. These two states are very…
esiegel | October 6, 2016"You are both fools. You cannot see thoughts, or angels. One is an abstract, the other a fantasy. To compare the two would be silly. Of course, using inferential logic, we can detect the existence of thought by the evidence of its actions, just as I detected the existence of a new form of radiation! Seeing no evidence of God or angels, and applying Occam’s Razor we can effectively rule out God or angels with metaphysical certainty. By the way Mr. Astronaut, you have cancer." -Pavel Cherenkov (allegedly)
It’s true that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, but only if you’re in a…
esiegel | October 5, 2016“She didn’t even know what she’d do when she got back to New Orleans, but inside she felt a yearning to shove her hands in the dirt, to cling to the ground there, forever.” -Sarah Rae
Hurricanes are among the most destructive natural disasters to occur on Earth, with extensive flooding, property damage and loss of life commonly accompanying them. But they’re also inevitable consequences -- at least on our world -- of two simple factors: warm ocean waters and winds.
The formation of a hurricane relies on warm, humid air, winds, and pressure changes. Image credit: NASA's SciJinks, via http://…
esiegel | October 4, 2016"'Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time." -Neal Stephenson
If you want to understand the Universe, there are two big areas you need to know: Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which governs the gravitational force and the curvature of spacetime, and quantum physics, which governs all the particles, the states of matter and every non-gravitational interaction ever. While many were expecting the Nobel Prize to go to the LIGO collaboration for the groundbreaking first direct detection of gravitational waves, there are a slew of quantum discoveries that…
esiegel | September 30, 2016“Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight.” –Victor Hugo
Whether you’re at rest or in motion, you can be confident that — from your point of view — the laws of physics will behave exactly the same no matter how quickly you’re moving. You can move slowly, quickly or not at all, up to the limits that the Universe imposes on you: the speed of light.
Light, in a vacuum, always appears to move at the same speed -- the speed of…
esiegel | September 23, 2016“Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. …because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.” –David Goodstein
The dream of free, unlimited, clean energy depends only on our ability to find a…
esiegel | September 22, 2016“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” -Virginia Woolf
If you think about the Universe, what it is today, what it contains and what makes it up, it very much is “something” by any way you’ll attempt to define it. Yet every “something” we know of has an origin, and the only ultimate origin for the first “something” is that it must have come from nothing.
Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing…
esiegel | September 18, 2016“We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.” -Aristotle Onassis
Welcome back to the end of another big week at Starts With A Bang! There's been a lot of fantastic stories that have gone down, including:
Can stars escape from the galaxy, with planets intact? (for Ask Ethan),
Fossilized relic discovered by Hubble is a link to the Milky Way's past (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Is the cosmic distance ladder flawed?,
That's no comet; that's Pluto!,
How certain are we of the Universe's 'Big Freeze' fate, and
Was Earth born with life already on…
esiegel | September 17, 2016“When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.” -Michel Houellebecq
If you take anything in the Universe and want to know what its size is, you simply take something whose length is known and compare. On microscopic scales, it isn’t much different: take something of a known wavelength -- like light or another matter particle -- and compare. If your wavelength is too big, you’ll pass right through; if your…
esiegel | September 11, 2016“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” -Aaron Satie, Star Trek
It’s been a remarkable week at Starts With A Bang, and I'm especially proud of the stories we've run on Proxima b, Hubble's limits, the dream of Warp Drive and the Cosmic Neutrino background. If you missed any of them (or any of the others), here's what the past week has held:
When will the Sun make Earth uninhabitable? (for Ask Ethan),
What is the biggest black hole as seen from Earth? (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Ten…
esiegel | September 9, 2016“When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.” –Jenna Morasca
The hot Big Bang — proposed seventy years ago — is a tremendous success story. Predicated on the assumption that the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and expanding faster in the past, it’s allowed us to predict the rate of cosmic expansion over distance and time, the primeval abundances of the light elements, the formation and evolution of large-scale-structure, and the existence and properties of the cosmic microwave background: the leftover photon glow from the Big Bang.
An…
esiegel | September 8, 2016"We are what we are, and we're doing the best we can. It is not for you to set the standards by which we should be judged." -Captain Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, the first episode of the original Star Trek premiered. It introduced a vision of humanity’s future that included the ability to travel interstellar distances and investigate new, never-before-seen worlds at speeds far exceeding the speed of light. The technological advance that enabled it all? Warp drive, with the power to bend the fabric of space so severely that light years could be…
esiegel | September 4, 2016"We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions." -William Shatner
It’s been another big week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories covering the Universe near and far. Although the biggest announcements seemed to shatter our picture of how things are, this week was all about keeping it in perspective. There are lots of ideas -- good and bad -- floating around, but in the end, data and experiments will be the ultimate arbiter. Here’s what we've covered over the past week:
How do we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old…
esiegel | September 3, 2016"What, I sometimes wonder, would it be like if I lived in a country where winter is a matter of a few chilly days and a few weeks' rain; where the sun is never far away, and the flowers bloom all year long?" -Anna Neagle
At some point in the future, the Sun, the giver and sustainer of nearly life on Earth as we know it, will run out of fuel. Powered by nuclear fusion, it turns hydrogen into helium, producing energy in the process. Yet the Sun has a finite mass, a finite rate-of-fusion, and someday will run out of hydrogen. When it does, bright as it may be today, it will cease to someday…
esiegel | September 2, 2016"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." -Carl Sagan
For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. While Newton may not be the final word in mechanics anymore since the development of relativity and quantum physics, this law -- better known as the conservation of momentum -- has held up from the 17th century through the 21st in every interaction ever observed. Unless, that is, the EMdrive is everything it claims to be.
The surface magnetic field of an…
esiegel | September 1, 2016"A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement." -Fritjof Capra
For most living humans on the planet, the Standard Model and General Relativity, the theories that govern the four fundamental forces, have encompassed all of the known particles and their interactions for our entire lives. We know they can’t encompass all there is, but the search for the first particle beyond the…
drorzel | August 31, 2016It's been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it's the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I'll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material...
-- Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than Gravity?: I got pointed to a story about the 0-60mph time for a Tesla, and said "That seems fishy..." After climbing back out of the Google rabbit hole, I tried to explain why that seemed unlikely to me, and the funny timing thing that might explain the result.
-- The Hardest Thing To Grasp In Physics?…
gregladen | August 30, 2016Women and Physics by Laura McCulloch is a concise addition to the IOP Science Concise Physics series.
McCullough is an award winning Professor of Physics at UW Stout, and served for several years as the chair of that university’s Chemistry and Physics Department. Her research focuses on physics education, and gender and science. By both chance and design, I know a lot of people in this area, and I’m pretty sure IOP Science could not have had a better choice in authors for this important book.
How do you make a physicist? Well, you start with a child, and poke at it for 25 year or so until it…
esiegel | August 27, 2016"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." -H.P. Lovecraft
There’s a unique relationship between everything that exists in the Universe today -- the stars and galaxies, the large-scale structure, the leftover glow from the Big Bang, the expansion rate, etc. -- and the amount of time that’s passed since it all began. When it comes to our Universe, there really was a day without a yesterday, but how do we know exactly how much time has passed between then and now?
The Universe's expansion rate is determined by the…