Physical Sciences
drorzel | October 3, 2007The new issue of Physics World is out, and features a bunch of Sputnik-anniversary stories. Among them is a long piece on science on the International Space Station:
Exponentially over budget, plagued by technical glitches and some seven years behind schedule, critics have always found the International Space Station (ISS) to be an easy target. Since NASA first began discussing the station's forerunner some 25 years ago, many astrophysicists and planetary scientists have viewed the ISS as an orbiting "white elephant" siphoning funds from more scientifically adventurous space missions.
But…
drorzel | October 2, 2007I've got a bunch of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS subscriptions, that I use to keep up with recent developments, because I need blog fodder. One of the really striking things about these is how extremely variable the quality of the releases is.
Take, for example, the release headlined New particles get a mass boost, describing results from extremely precise measurements at Jefferson Lab:
A sophisticated, new analysis has revealed that the next frontier in particle physics is farther away than once thought. New forms of matter not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics are most…
denialism | October 2, 2007I realize it's fundamental to being a crank, but the persecution complex of the IDers is getting really old. The latest is Bruce Chapman at Evolution News and Views, who no longer satisfied with grasping at the mantle of Galileo, is now groping for Semmelweis and Lister as well. The idea being, as usual, if science has been slow to accept the theories of people in the past, surely the same flaws must be preventing ID from being accepted. Never mind that these other scientists actually had things like data or evidence, or did rather fantastic things like reduce the death rates in maternity…
hrynyshyn | October 1, 2007Freeman Dyson is one of those important scientists it's impossible to ignore, even when he's dead wrong. In an interview with Salon, he says lots of silly things -- don't worry about the polar bear, religion and science are compatible, and "we have no reason to think that climate change is harmful." But you gotta love the guy anyway...
You gotta love him for two reasons. First, because he came up with the very cool idea of the Dyson sphere, a mammoth shell surrounding a star that supplies the inhabitants of the interior with the maximum amount of solar energy. Second, because he's humble…
oracknows | September 25, 2007Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed up at Columbia University yesterday to give a speech. Given my interest in Holocaust history and Holocaust denial I had debated whether to comment on it before it happened. Given my contempt for him, his anti-Semitism, and his Holocaust denial, I was rather torn by the whole affair. On the one hand, I am very much in favor of free speech, and having this loon speak can in one way be argued to be evidence of what is great about this country (although it would have been more convincing if Columbia had a better record on this…
cortex | September 18, 2007Rachel Donadio, over at the Times Book Review, had an interesting little essay on the canon wars, Allan Bloom and the fate of the humanities. But what caught my eye was this melancholy paragraph:
All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2007
Recently, that is since 1975 or so, the view has arisen that a living thing is something that satisfies several conditions.
In 1966 George C. Williams introduced the notion of an "evolutionary gene" in his Adaptation and Natural Selection, which was, he said, a "cybernetic abstraction". This idea was taken up by Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins posited that evolution had some necessary and sufficient criteria:
There had to be replicators with the following properties:
Longevity (over evolutionary time)
Fecundity (more made than can survive)
Fidelity (nearly perfect…
jstemwedel | September 12, 2007Perhaps you've already seen the new(ish) AAUP report Freedom in the Classroom, or Michael Bérubé's commentary on it at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. The report is such a clear statement of what a professor's freedom in the classroom amounts to and, more importantly, why that freedom is essential if we are to accomplish the task of educating college students, that everyone who cares at all about higher education ought to read it.
Some of the highlights, with my commentary:
On concerns that professors "indoctrinate" rather than educate:
It is not indoctrination for professors to expect…
goodmath | September 9, 2007
If you remember, a while back, I wrote about a British computer scientist named James Anderson, who
claimed to have solved the "problem" of "0/0" by creating a new number that he called nullity. The
creation of nullity was actually part of a larger project of his - he claims to have designed a computing
machine called the Perspex machine which is strictly more powerful that the Turing machine. If
this was true, it would mean that the Church-Turing thesis is false, overturning a huge part of the theory
of computer science.
Of course, just overturning the theory of computer science isn't…
tlambert | September 8, 2007Schulte has published a reply to Oreskes' response. While Schulte claims not to be a contrarian, Kevin Grandia has been looking at his links with Christopher Monckton. Meanwhile, John Lynch posts on Shulte's reply and commenter "Chris" (who is, I suspect, Christopher Monckton) threatens lawsuits against Oreskes and Lynch:
By making the allegations his own and endorsing them with such lamentably unscientific enthusiasm, however, he has exposed himself to the legal action which may well follow if Oreskes does not come forward quickly with an unreserved apology to Schulte.
Also posting is…
oracknows | September 7, 2007
I debated about whether to do Your Friday Dose of Woo this week.
I really wasn't sure if I was up to it. As regular readers know, I was on vacation in London during the last week in August. Unfortunately, I returned to the news of a death in the family on my wife's side, making the last few days a seriously saddening time. I even tried to keep blogging through it as a release to take my mind off of things, but, as the last two days showed, I reached the point where that didn't work anymore. I guess it's a good thing there's still quite a bit of stuff to be mined from the old blog archives…
clock | September 5, 2007
Nicotine In Breast Milk Disrupts Infants' Sleep Patterns:
A study from the Monell Chemical Senses Center reports that nicotine in the breast milk of lactating mothers who smoke cigarettes disrupts their infants' sleep patterns.
River Blindness Parasite Becoming Resistant To Standard Treatment:
Ivermectin, the standard drug for treating river blindness (onchocerciasis), is causing genetic changes in the parasite that causes the disease, according to a new study by Roger Prichard (McGill University, Canada) and colleagues, published on August 30, 2007 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected…
neurophilosophy | September 3, 2007
The question of how birds migrate long distances has long baffled researchers, and there are various hypotheses about which navigational cues birds use when migrating. Over the years, it has been suggested that migrating birds use smell, visual cues such as the position of the sun, the geomagnetic field, or a combination of these. It is, for example, known that induced magnetic fields and electrical storms disrupt the navigational abilities of homing pigeons, but exactly how the birds detect, perceive and interpret a magnetic field remains a mystery.
A recent study led by Todd Dennis, of…
petnoyer | August 27, 2007Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to more dissolved CO2 in the world's oceans. In turn this will increase the hydrogen ion concentration in seawater, and lower pH from pre-industrial levels (8.179) to present day levels (8.104) in a process known as "ocean acidification". Note that even projected pH levels of 7.824 in 2050 are still above neutral. Regardless, many scientists are concerned that calcifying marine organisms like corals, mollusks, echinoderms and coccolithophores will be vulnerable to dissolution under the projected 'less alkaline' regime.
A new study…
thusspakezuska | August 20, 2007Sooooo beautiful. You must read what Pat has to say about APS's CSWP compiling a list of female-friendly physics departments. And follow the links therein. Here's how my various alma maters responded to this survey question: Please describe why someone applying to graduate school who is interested in a female-friendly department should choose your department.
Duke University
The physics department at Duke University has quite a few females. Interaction among the women of this department is encouraged by having lunch together a few times a year among and other social events. I am told by…
lundblad | August 18, 2007While I'm sure there will be a lot of chatter around here in the next few weeks about the vacuum (or, God help me, vacua), I feel like I should lay the groundwork by talking about laboratory vacuum. I know I'm here to talk about cold atoms and the hot stuff going in in experimental physics right now, but I've spent a lot of time in the last couple days dealing with vacuum, and I want to tell you about it.
If you want to do most sorts of atomic physics experiment, it's essential that you isolate what you're interested in studying (atoms) from stuff that will either knock those atoms away,…
sb admin | August 18, 2007This is mostly just an MLP ("Mindless Link Post"), and it's nearly two weeks late, but there's a post by Julianne over at Cosmic Variance that I think is of crucial importance. People who are outside the field of science very often lose sight of the huge amount of important science that is done, but doesn't produce the "amazingly sexy discovery" news headlines, or, say, the Gruber prize. Also, people working in one field of science often don't appreciate the value of other fields of science when it doesn't obviously overlap theirs... even though, as Julianne points out, all of that other "…
thusspakezuska | August 16, 2007Nothing gets by Absinthe's diligence.
Inspired by my recent post regarding women's washrooms, Absinthe writes to tell me:
Not having enough washrooms for women violates Title IX. who knew??? Check this out.
Absinthe suggests we study the ratio of womens' to mens' rooms in the top 50 physics, engineering, chemistry, and other science departments. It would certainly be interesting to see the results of such a survey.
nisbetmc | August 9, 2007
I'm back in DC after spending the previous two weeks in San Francisco as an Osher Fellow at The Exploratorium. It was my second visit this year to the world's greatest science center. Each time I go out there I tell my friends that I feel like Tom Friedman in The World is Flat, trading ideas with really smart and innovative people. (I'm not the only one to offer high praise for The Explo, check out this rave from Jennifer Oullette at Cocktail Physics.)
During my two weeks, I held several brown bag lunch discussions with staff on topics including science and the media; the effective use of…
goodmath | August 8, 2007 Once upon a time, I wrote about a jackass who was criticizing his college math instructor, because the instructor couldn't explain what made the calculus class christian, or why it was different from what would be taught in a math class at a secular college.
That kind of thinking is quite strong in certain segments of the conservative christian community, and that disgusts me. Let me show you an example, and then I'll explain why is annoys me so much. A reader
send me a link to the math curriculum for a Baptist high school, and it seriously bugs me.
Here's their explanation of a high…