History of Science
drorzel | January 18, 2010Before leaving Austin on Friday, I had lunch with a former student who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas, working in an experimental AMO physics lab. I got the tour before lunch-- I'm a sucker for lab tours-- and things were pretty quiet, as they had recently suffered a catastrophic failure of a part of their apparatus.
Of course, there are catastrophic failures, and then there are catastrophic failures. Some dramatic equipment failures, like the incredible exploding MOSFET's when I was a post-doc, are just God's way of telling you to go home and get a good night's…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than if you only know a little. I'll reproduce it here first, if you would like to take a crack at it, and then I'll explain why it's tricky below the fold.
The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?(answers)
Choose only one answer-- this is being recorded…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
drorzel | December 1, 2009Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show.
So, I put together a puppet show. It took a little while, because I couldn't find any Niels Bohr puppets (maybe in Denmark?). I found an acceptable alternative, though, and put together a video of the Bohr-Einstein debates, using puppets. Here's the whole thing…
drorzel | December 1, 2009The Royal Society has launched a spiffy new site that lets you browse highlights of the last 350 years of science as published in the Philosophical Transactions ("Giving Some Accompt of the Present Understanding, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World since 1665."). These include things like Ben Franklin's very matter-of-fact instructions for flying a kite in a thunderstorm, Thomas Young's introduction of the wave theory of light, and Maxwell's original treatise on electromagnetism. These are available as scanned PDF's, in all their oddly-typeset glory (…
drorzel | November 25, 2009Thony C has a post about the Great Man theory of science spinning off some thoughts about Darwin by ex-ScienceBlogs silverback John Wilkins. As Thony writes:
Now you may ask why I as a historian of Renaissance mathematics should comment on a blog post about a 19th century work of biology and its author? The answer is quite simple; everything that John says about Darwin and his book can and should be applied to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and a host of other scientist from the early modern period and their works.
Nothing that any of these scholars did or wrote existed in a…
drorzel | November 17, 2009As every physics-loving dog knows, the idea that electrons behave like waves was first suggested by Loius Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (the 7th duc de Broglie) in 1923. The proper pronunciation of his surname is a mystery even to human physicists, though. So, how would you say it?
Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie's surname is pronounced:(polls)
Even though Louis was a quantum pioneer, please choose only one of the available options.
drorzel | October 15, 2009I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time.
I've long considered using "A Brief History of Timekeeping" as the theme for a general education course-- there's a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn't go into too much detail:
A Brief History of Timekeeping
View more presentations from Chad…
drorzel | October 8, 2009A couple of days ago, I answered a question from a donor to the Uncertain Principles challenge page in this year's Social Media Challenge (we've raised $1,807 thus far-- thank you all). If you'd like a question of your own answered on the blog, all you need to do is send me the confirmation email for a donation of at least $20, and your question.
The donor from the other day, Lauren Uroff, had a second question as well, also on behalf of her teenager:
He's an avid Discworld fan (where the speed of light seems to be variable) and wants to know what would happen in our real world if the speed…
drorzel | September 27, 2009There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…
drorzel | September 25, 2009So, who are the people in yesterday's poll about theoretical physicists, and why should you know them?
Three of the four shared a Nobel Prize for developing quantum electrodynamics. In reverse order of voting:
Julian Schwinger was an American physicist who came up with a very formal, mathematically rigorous way of describing the behavior of electrons interacting with light. This turns out to be a hard problem, because any attempt to calculate an electron's energy by simple, straightforward means ends up giving an infinite answer. Schwinger helped "renormalize" the theory, getting rid of the…
drorzel | September 24, 2009I'm nearly done with Graham Farmelo's biography of Dirac (honest), which discusses the major attempts to understand the behavior of electrons in quantum mechanics. this calls for a dorky poll:
Which theorist of the electron was the best?(poll)
Try not to base your selection on which of these historical physicists has the best biography written about them.
drorzel | September 21, 2009I'm halfway through Graham Farmelo's Dirac biography at the moment, and enjoying it quite a bit. Farmelo cites Dirac as one of the first physicists to evaluate theories on their mathematical beauty, rather than waiting for experiments. This is in stark contrast to his Cambridge colleague Rutherford, who was highly skeptical of abstract theory, and preferred to deal in concrete experiments.
This is one of the great chicken-and-egg problems in science: Should data come before theory, or should theory come before data? Thus, this seems like a good topic for a poll:
How do you like your science?(…
drorzel | September 2, 2009This was delayed a day by yesterday's ranting, but I wanted to explain the significance of the people in Monday's lesser-known quantum mechanic smackdown. I'm happy to see that, as of this morning, three candidates have rallied past the "unique flower" option.
In reverse order of popularity:
Hendrik Kramers was a Dutch physicist who spent a long time working as a student and assistant to Bohr, and thus was involved in a lot of the early attempts to make a working quantum theory. He's best known for work in condensed matter physics, and for being the "K" in the WKB approximation.
Arnold…
drorzel | August 31, 2009SteelyKid's day care is closed today, meaning that I will be spending the day chasing her in circles in a variety of different places. this doesn't allow a lot of blogging time, so you get a poll to pass the time.
We'll go back to the historical physics thing for this one. The following poll lists a bunch of less-well-known physicists (that is, not Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, etc.) who contributed to the development of quantum mechanics. Which of them was the best?
Which of these less-well-known quantum pioneers was the best?(surveys)
While these are quantum pioneers, we're still…
drorzel | August 20, 2009I have a bunch of errand-running to do today, so I will leave you with a Dorky Poll question for entertainment, this time regarding the work of the great Sir Isaac Newton:
Which of Isaac Newton's Laws is your favorite?(trends)
We're still dealing with classical physics, here, so superpositions of results are not allowed. Pick one and only one answer.
drorzel | August 18, 2009One of the blogs I hyped at the science blogging panel at Worldcon was Built on Facts, Matt Springer's blog explaining introductory physics concepts. You might not think that you want to read a blog that goes through freshman physics problems in detail-- I would've been dubious on the concept, had you explained it to me that way-- but it's really excellent stuff.
He's recently completed a series of posts on Maxwell's Equations, with one post for each of the four equations, plus one bringing them all together: Gauss's Law for Magnetism, Gauss's Law for Electricity, Faraday's Law, and the…
drorzel | July 31, 2009Yesterday's historical physics poll was about precision measurements. Who were those people, and why are they worth knowing about?
As usual, we'll do these in reverse order of popularity...
First up is Ole Rømer, a Danish astronomer who is no stranger to this blog, having been profiled as part of the Top Eleven series back in the early days of ScienceBlogs. Rømer's big accomplishment was the first really good measurement of the speed of light, which he did by timing the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io. These are seen to occur slightly sooner when Earth and Jupiter are on the same side of the…
drorzel | July 30, 2009Keeping up the string of poll questions about less-well-known physicists (started here), here's a list of physicists who are known for having made very precise measurements of physical quanitites. Which of them is the best?
Which of these physicists who made precision measurements is the best?(poll)
(Note: I have deliberately limited this to physicists who are no longer alive, which is why some recent names are missing.)
drorzel | July 30, 2009Yesterday, I posted a silly poll about optical physicists. Who are those people, and why should you care about them?
In inverse order of popularity:
Bringing up the rear in this race is John William Strutt, who, even more than Lord Kelvin in the thermodynamics poll, is hurt by the fact that people know him by his title, Lord Rayleigh. His notable achievements in optics include a formalization of the resolution limits for optical devices, and the phenomenon known as "Rayleigh Scattering," which is the short answer to the question "Why is the sky blue?" (The long answer requires a whole book.)…