In the News
drorzel | May 27, 2011The big physics story of the week is undoubtedly the new limit on the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron from Ed Hinds's group at Imperial College in the UK. As this is something I wrote a long article on for Physics World, I'm pretty psyched to see this getting lots of media attention, and not just from physics outlets.
My extremely hectic end-of-term schedule and general laziness almost make me want to just point to my earlier article and have done with it. But really, it's a big story, and one I've been following for a while, so how can I pass up the chance for a ResearchBlogging…
drorzel | May 5, 2011NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be "twisted" by the Earth's rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically it's very impressive.
The shift measured is very, very small-- 0.04 arcseconds over the course of a year, or 0.000011 degrees-- but agrees nicely with the predictions of relativity. I'm not sure whether to try to work this into the book-in-progress as I…
drorzel | May 4, 2011It's been a hectic day here, so I haven't had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I've written up here in the past:
1) In the "self-evident title" category, there's Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year's antihydrogen trapping to times a factor of 6000 longer than the previous record. That's very good, and a good sign for plans to do precision spectroscopy and other such experiments. As always, Physics World offers a nice write-up.
2) As noted in the comments of Monday…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen's group at Texas which was mostly reported with an "Einstein proven wrong" slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little unfair to Einstein. It does draw media attention, though...
The experiment in question involves Brownian motion, and since I had to read up on that anyway for something else, I thought I might as well look up this paper, and write it up for the blog.
OK, so what did they do that…
drorzel | April 26, 2011This paper made a big splash back in November, with lots of news stories talking about it; it even made the #6 spot on Physics World's list of breakthroughs of the year. I didn't write it up then because I was hellishly busy, and couldn't take time away from working on the book-in-progress to figure out exactly what they did and why it mattered. I've got a little space now between handing the manuscript in last week and starting to revise it (probably next week), so while it's a bit late, here's an attempt at an explanation of what all the excitement was about.
So, what's this about, anyway?…
drorzel | April 21, 2011Several people blogged about a new measurement of gravitational states of neutrons done by physicists using ultracold neutrons from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France. I had to resort to Twitter to get access to the paper (we don't get Nature Physics here, and it's way faster than Inter-Library Loan), but this is a nice topic for a ResearchBlogging post, in the now-standard Q&A form:
OK, why was this worth begging people on Twitter to send you a copy? The paper is a demonstration of a sort of spectroscopy of neutrons bouncing in a gravitational field. They showed they could drive…
drorzel | December 28, 2010It's the last week of the (calendar) year, which means it's a good time to recap the previous twelve months worth of scientific news. Typically, publications like Physics World will publish a list of top ten physics stories of 2010, but we're all Web 2.0 these days, so it seems more appropriate to put this to a poll:
What is the top physics story of 2010?survey software
I've used the Physics World list as a starting point, because you have to start somewhere. I added a few options to cover the possibility that they left something out, and, of course, you know where the comments are.
This poll…
drorzel | November 17, 2010The big physics-y news story of the moment is the trapping of antihydrogen by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. The article itself is paywalled, because this is Nature, but one of the press offices at one of the institutions involved was kind enough to send me an advance version of the article. This seems like something that deserves the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, so here we go:
OK, what's the deal with this paper? Well, the ALPHA collaboration is announcing that they have created antihydrogen atoms-- that is, a single antiproton orbited by a single positron-- at low temperatures, and…
drorzel | November 12, 2010As mentioned in yesterday's post on ion trapping, a month or so back Dave Wineland's group at NIST published a paper in Science on using ultra-precise atomic clocks to measure relativistic effects. If you don't have a subscription to Science, you can get the paper for free from the Time and Frequency Division database, because you can't copyright work done for the US government.
This paper generated quite a bit of interest when it came out, because it demonstrates the time-slowing effects of relativity without any need for exotic objects like black holes or particle accelerators-- they deal…
drorzel | November 11, 2010One of the many physics stories I haven't had time to blog about recently is the demonstration of relativistic time effects using atomic clocks. I did mention a DAMOP talk about the experiment, but the actual paper was published in Science (and is freely available from the NIST Time and Frequency Division (PDF file), because you can't copyright work done at government labs) a month and a half ago, and generated a bit of buzz at the time.
Given the delay between publication of the article and me blogging about it, I feel obliged to provide a little more detail than you'll get from the news…
drorzel | November 6, 2010Having written in defense of analogies in physics yesterday, I should note that not all of the analogies that are brought out in an attempt to clarify physics concepts are good. For example, there's this incredibly strained opening to a Science News article on entanglement:
If the Manning brothers were quantum physicists as well as NFL quarterbacks, one of them could win his game's opening coin toss every time. The night before they played, the brothers would take two coins from a special quantum box to use the next day. If Peyton's game came first, after learning the outcome of his coin toss…
drorzel | October 6, 2010The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 goes to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for giving people a reason to care about palladium. OK, it might not be the only reason-- I'm not actually sure what palladium is used for other than organic synthesis and cold fusion-- but it's the context in which I'm most likely to hear the element mentioned.
I don't pay that much attention to the Chemistry prize, so my reaction to this was mild surprise that it hadn't already won. Palladium catalyzed reactions turn up often enough when people are talking about making organic molecules for some…
drorzel | October 5, 2010The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, a material consisting of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal array. This is one of those prizes that was basically inevitable, as graphene is one of the hot materials of the last couple of years. Hardly a week goes by without a couple of press releases touting some amazing new potential application.
Joerg Heber has a nice explanation of the basics of graphene, including some cautionary notes about overhype. From an experimentalist's perspective, the really cool thing about this prize is…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's a new medical study of the effects of alcohol consumption that finds a surprising result:
Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting…
drorzel | July 23, 2010This week's big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what's the deal?
What did they do in this paper? The paper reports on an experiment in which they looked at the interference of light sent through a set of three small slits, and verified that the resulting pattern agrees with the predictions of the Born rule for quantum probabilities.
What does Matt Damon…
drorzel | July 19, 2010Over at Jeff Vandemeer's blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web site:
Launch Pad is a NASA-funded education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton's space-based astronomical research. Our budget allows us to provide a workshop that is essentially free to participants. Our primary goal is to teach writers of all…
drorzel | July 12, 2010Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can't read because it doesn't display properly in Firefox, but I'm sure is very interesting.
Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:
If the Tevatron were to discover the Higgs boson before the LHC does, that would be:Market Research
There's a 99.7% probability that this poll is completely meaningless. That doesn't mean it's not entertaining, though.
drorzel | June 29, 2010A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics:
There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations seem to proceed at different rates for neutrinos and antineutrinos. This is a really surprising sort of asymmetry, and would be awfully hard to explain. These are, however, preliminary results that are being released now because there was a conference on neutrino physics, not because the people doing the experiments have rock-solid proof…
drorzel | June 28, 2010Last week, Dmitry Budker's group at Berkeley published a paper in Physical Review Letters (also free on the arxiv) with the somewhat drab title "Spectroscopic Test of Bose-Einsten Statistics for Photons." Honestly, I probably wouldn't've noticed it, even though this is the sort of precision AMO test of physics that I love, had it not been for the awesome press release Berkeley put together, and this image in particular (grabbed with its caption):
This is a nifty paper, and deserves a little explanation in Q&A format:
Is this another New Scientist style "Einstein was wrong" paper? No. If…
drorzel | June 25, 2010Inside Higher Ed has a news squib about gender disparities in academic science, which points to a Nature story about a survey on job satisfaction (bad IHE, giving a false impression on the story!). The gender portion of the story is limited to a short section at the end of the article, and one graph:
The larger story is actually pretty positive, but I fear that as IHE did, too much attention will be focused on this one graph (which, by the way, is surprisingly badly done). There's a fairly narrow point about the presentation of this that I think is worth making (even though it will likely be…