esiegel | April 9, 2010Those of you who've been reading Starts With A Bang since this last summer may have seen this article I wrote -- The Math of the Fastest Human Alive -- about Usain Bolt's world record in the 100 meter dash.
Little did I know what type of interest this would generate. A few weeks after I wrote it, I found that my article was reprinted -- verbatim -- in the St. Petersburg Times, and then was featured in MacLean's. And I thought that was going to be it.
And then Esquire Magazine called. I'm featured on page 133 and 134 of this month's (April 2010) issue, and you can read the article online…
esiegel | April 7, 2010"By early 2011, [Fermilab's Tevatron] will have recorded enough data to either find the Higgs or rule it out. -New Scientist, August 2009
Sure, there's a whole lot of well-deserved hoopla about the LHC, the world's #1 particle accelerator in terms of energy! But don't forget about #2, Fermilab's Tevatron, which also holds the honor of being the first place I ever worked in physics!
Fermilab has been operating since the 1970s, and has been responsible for many of the most outstanding discoveries in the history of particle physics. Remember the standard model?
The standard model tells us that…
esiegel | April 5, 2010The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. -Thomas Paine
I've been telling you the history of the Universe over the past few months in serial. Parts 1 through 8 are currently up, and have taken us from Inflation up through the formation of neutral atoms, covering the first 380,000 years of the Universe. During this whole time, like a giant balloon, space has been expanding.
One thing I haven't paid much mind to is just how the Universe has been expanding during this time. The concept is relatively straightforward…
esiegel | April 3, 2010
"But with dogs, we do have 'bad dog.' Bad dog exists. 'Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!' The dog is saying, 'Who are you to judge me? You human beings who've had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!'
'Well, if you put it that way, I think you've got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.'" -Eddie Izzard
Eddie Izzard is a funny, funny man. If you haven't seen his stand-up act (especially Circle, IMO), you are missing out. Someone set one of his funniest bits -- the Death Star Canteen --…
esiegel | April 2, 2010Why must I feel like that?
Why must I chase the cat?
Nothin' but the dog in me. -George Clinton
(And I'll get it stuck in your head, too, if you like. Have a go at the extended 10-minute version.)
Welcome back to the next installment of The Greatest Story Ever Told: the history of the Universe! We started from Inflation -- the phenomenon that set up the Big Bang -- and are coming forward in time. Last time, we made it up to the end of nucleosynthesis, where we made all of the elements that the big bang makes: by mass, we have about 76% Hydrogen, 24% Helium-4, trace amounts of Helium-3,…
esiegel | March 31, 2010The stakes are high, and win or lose, worth playing for. -Fred Hoyle
Yesterday was a record-setting day for humanity. Over at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider achieved a new record for the most energy ever created in a laboratory collision in the history of humanity: 7,000,000,000,000 electron Volts, or 7 TeV (Tera- or Trillion-electron-Volts) for short.
Sure, we get energies higher than this all the time from black holes, neutron stars, and other catastrophic processes in space. Occasionally, we even observe them, in the form of Cosmic Rays!
But there are two big differences between cosmic…
esiegel | March 29, 2010In mathematics, you don't understand things. You just get used to them. -Johann von Neumann
Sometimes, I have to deal with series: lots of numbers all added together. Some series clearly approach a limit, like the following:
1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + ...
I can visualize this in terms of pies. (What do you want? I'm hungry!) One = one whole pie. So that first number starts me out with one whole pie.
When I add the second number in my series, I'm clearly adding half a pie to that, for a total of a pie and a half.
When I add the third term, I've now got one-and-three-quarters pies,…
esiegel | March 27, 2010
The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere. Pieces of meat passed high over our heads while others were falling at our feet. The dunes were rapidly evacuated as spectators escaped both the falling debris and the overwhelming smell. -Paul Linnman, News Reporter
This past week was my spring break, and my family and I went down to the Oregon coast. And while we were down there, we learned a little bit of local history. Namely, forty years ago, a huge, deceased whale washed up on one of the beaches, and nobody quite…
esiegel | March 26, 2010"No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilites -- always see them -- for they are always there. -Norman Vincent Peale
Dark matter. I talk about it a lot here for a number of reasons. These include:
the fact that it makes up about 85% of the mass of the Universe,
the only way (so far) that it appears to interact with anything is gravitationally, and
from our observations, we've learned that it's made up of slow-moving, massive particles.
You put what we know about dark matter into a simulation, and it tells you what type of structure you…
esiegel | March 23, 2010Note: I'm on vacation this week, so here's one from the vault. This article first appeared on my old website, back in February of 2009.
Some days the questions I get are easy, and some days I get questions from our longtime reader, Ben. This past week, there have been reports all over the news that our world may be a giant hologram. Let's take a look at what's going on.
In Hanover, Germany, there's an experiment called GEO600. These are two perpendicular lasers, and they shoot out for thousands of feet, get reflected, and come back to their original location to make an interference pattern…
esiegel | March 22, 2010Welcome back to The Greatest Story Ever Told, where we're bringing you the story of the Universe. We're going to go from the very beginning -- before the big bang -- up through the present day, and tell you how we got here. This is part seven, and you can always go back for parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Last time, we got rid of all the antimatter in the Universe by letting it cool enough that every particle-antiparticle pair in the Universe annihilated with one another, producing a huge excess of radiation.
But there was also a little bit of normal matter -- protons, neutrons, and electrons…
esiegel | March 21, 2010Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. -Oscar Wilde
Yesterday was the spring equinox for the Northern Hemisphere, and my city was lucky enough to have a glorious day, clear skies, warm weather, and I spent most of the day outside. I had the type of day that Dan Tyminski pines for in this song, Some Early Morning.
But yesterday -- the equinox -- was special for another reason that you don't often hear about…
esiegel | March 19, 2010It's a question of whether we're going to go forward into the future, or past to the back. -Dan Quayle
This is my last day writing before my spring break begins, and I'm hoping for some great weather as I prepare to head to the Oregon coast. Warm weather, clear skies... I can picture it now. In my dreams, it looks something like this.
It makes me think about global warming, the greenhouse effect, and whether this is really cause for concern or not.
On one hand, it's definitely true that heating the planet up by even a few degrees will have catastrophic effects on our sea levels as the ice…
esiegel | March 17, 2010I have this one little saying. When things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man. -Jimi Hendrix
Hendrix is almost right: helium is the second lightest gas known to man, behind hydrogen. But there are many applications for helium -- both scientific and non-scientific -- that make it incredibly useful and practical. Helium is far lighter than air and is inert, which means it won't combust when you combine it with air and energy, like Hydrogen does (below).
(Too bad for the kids who want hydrogen balloons for their birthday parties!)
In addition to being lighter than…
esiegel | March 15, 2010Bart: Go, Dad, go!
Lisa: How doth the hero, strong and brave, a celestial path to the heavens paved!
(The family stares at her.)
Lisa (dejected): Go, Dad, go. -The Simpsons
Last week, I got a question from one of my online friends, cmgraves. His question was straightforward:
How do thrusters work in space? On Earth, when we want to speed up, slow down, change our direction, or to change our motion in general, we always have something to push against. This is true whether you're a runner and have the ground to push against,
or a turbofan engine with the air to push against.
But in the…
esiegel | March 14, 2010So here we have pi squared, which an engineer would call "10." -Frank King
It's Pi Day today in the United States: March 14th, or as we write it, 3/14. (Don't know how you do it in Europe, where there is no 31st of April.) So, let's start things off with a song for the day: Cab Calloway's "Everybody Eats When They Come To My House."
Of course, pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and trying to measure it as accurately as possible has been a challenge that humans have taken on for thousands of years.
(Even Google gets in on the Pi Day action.) Most people know…
esiegel | March 12, 2010Earlier this week, I wrote about an inclined treadmill, and talked about physical work. Physically, the amount of work that you do is equal to the amount of force that you exert in a certain direction multiplied by the distance you move in that direction.
If you walk up an incline, as opposed to moving on a level surface, you have to also fight the force of gravity to get up that hill, hence you have to do extra work.
I contended that, in order to walk up an inclined treadmill, you also have to do extra physical work, the same way you have to do extra physical work to walk up a real hill.
"…
esiegel | March 10, 2010A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul. -Jillian Michaels
One of the most popular exercises at the gym is the treadmill. And why wouldn't it be? Whether you're running or walking, it's a great way to get your heart rate up, get your body moving, and for many people, a great way to burn calories.
But however you use a treadmill, there's one extremely simple thing you can do to dramatically intensify your workout: incline it!
If you're an outdoor walker/runner, this is the equivalent of going uphill instead of over level ground. There are many physiological differences in walking…
esiegel | March 8, 2010Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. -Dave Barry
Welcome back to our series on The Greatest Story Every Told, where we start from before the big bang and come forward in time to get the Universe we have today. (If you're just joining us, go back for parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.) Last time, we talked about how we made more matter than antimatter (and we clarified some questions). So what does our Universe look like at this point?
Well, the Universe is still full of hot radiation, flying…
esiegel | March 7, 2010Find something that you're really interested in doing in your life. Pursue it, set goals and commit yourself to excellence. Do the best you can. -Chris Evert
The Olympics have recently ended, and there were a trio of athletes who left me awestruck at their level of mastery of their sport as compared to the rest of their field. Every one of Shaun White's halfpipe runs simply outclassed the other competitors, as did Lindsay Vonn's downhill run (did you see how steady she kept her skis as compared to everyone else?), and -- perhaps in particular -- I believe that Yu-Na Kim's short and long…