In the News
drorzel | June 21, 2010An experiment in Germany has generated a good deal of publicity by dropping their Bose-Einstein Cendensate (BEC) apparatus from a 146 meter tower. This wasn't an act of frustration by an enraged graduate student (anybody who has worked with BEC has probably fantasized about throwing at least part of their apparatus down a deep hole), but a deliberate act of science: They built a BEC apparatus that is entirely contained within a two-meter long capsule inside the evacuated drop tower at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (which in German leads to the acronym ZARM, which…
drorzel | June 15, 2010Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing.
I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…
drorzel | June 5, 2010Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the video is off), because it was a physics-based topic, and because I wrote a guest-blog post on the topic for them.
(No, we didn't go to the controversial "Science and Faith" panel, opting instead to have a very nice Caribbean dinner at Negril Village, just around the corner. I'll take excellent…
drorzel | May 18, 2010It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching
"Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring
conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant
doze when:
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I yell at the dog, who
is standing in the middle of the living room, baying at nothing. She
stops.
"Scary things!"
The room is empty. "There's nothing here," I say, and then hear a
car door slam. I look outside, and see the mathematician next door
heading into his house. "Were you barking at Bill? He…
drorzel | May 18, 2010There's a Dennis Overbye article in the Times today with the Web headline "From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?" which I like to think of as a back-handed tribute to the person who linked to an interview with Sean Carroll by calling him "The cosmologist, not the scientist." This is the secret of human existence explained by science, not biology.
The physics issue in question is why we have more matter than antimatter in the universe, as symmetry would seem to demand they be created in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Had that happened, though, all of the matter should've…
drorzel | May 12, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter, I ran across a Discovery News story touting a recent arxiv preprint claiming to see variation in the fine-structure constant. It's a basically OK story, but garbles a few details, so I thought it would be worth giving it the ResearchBlogging treatment, in the now-traditional Q&A format.
What did they do? The paper looks at some spectral lines in radio emission from a moderately distant galaxy with the poetic name "PKS1413+135." These lines are produced by OH molecules in interstellar gas clouds, and the frequencies they see suggest that there may have…
drorzel | May 8, 2010While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture:
Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of Stanford, science writer Jeff Hecht, John Madey of Hawaii's FEL lab, and Eric Gustafson of Caltech and LIGO.-- about the current status of lasers in their areas of science, and the future prospects.
From ray-gun to Blu-Ray is a very nice survey of lasers and laser-like devices in…
drorzel | May 6, 2010There's a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment's early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments.
As a result, a couple of members of other collaborations have posted a response on the arxiv saying, basically, that they don't believe the sensitivity claimed for the XENON detector in the energy range in question, and that their result can't really be said to rule out the possibility of dark matter…
drorzel | April 29, 2010A sad and sordid story from the Times Higher Education following the rescinding of invitations to a conference on quantum foundations:
Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory.
Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the…
drorzel | April 28, 2010I'm a little surprised at the vehemence of some of the negative reactions to Stephen Hawking's comments about aliens. Not so much in blogdom-- Ethan's response is pretty reasonable, for example-- but there was a flurry of Twitter traffic yesterday of the form "Where does Stephen Hawking get off pontificating about aliens?" which strikes me as kind of silly.
As all the news stories point out, Hawking's comments were made in the context of a Discovery channel series based on filming Stephen Hawking pontificating about stuff. And, really, if the Discovery Channel called me up and offered to film…
drorzel | April 26, 2010As of 1:45 Monday, 217 people have cast votes in the Laser Smackdown poll. That's not bad, but it's currently being handily beaten by the 271 people who have voted for a favorite system of units.
The nice thing about using actual poll services for this sort of thing, though, is that I can re-post the poll to boost signal a little. So, here it is again, a list of the twelve most amazing laser applications suggested by my wise and worldly readers, with links to short explanations of the pros and cons of each:
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research…
drorzel | April 19, 2010What's the application? The goal of laser ignition fusion experiments is to heat and compress a target to the point where the nuclei of the atoms making up the sample fuse together to form a new, heavier nucleus, releasing energy in the process. Nuclear fusion is, of course, what powers stars, and creating fusion in the laboratory has been the holy grail (well, a holy grail, at any rate) of nuclear physics research for the last sixty-plus years.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we create fusion reactions in a laboratory setting on Earth?" 2) "How can we get more helium without…
drorzel | February 12, 2010There have been a bunch of stories recently talking about quantum effects at room temperature-- one, about coherent transport in photosynthesis , even escaped the science blogosphere. They've mostly said similar things, but Thursday's ArxivBlog entry had a particular description of a paper about entanglement effects that is worth unpacking:
Entanglement is a strange and fragile thing. Sneeze and it vanishes. The problem is that entanglement is destroyed by any interaction with the environment and these interactions are hard to prevent. So physicists have only ever been able to study and…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Dennis Overbye is a terrific writer, but I have to say, I hate the way that he falls into the lazy shorthand of using "physics" to mean "theoretical particle physics" in this article about a recent conference built around debates about the state of particle physics. He's got lots of great quotes from Lisa Randall and Lawrence Krauss and others about how things are really bleak on the theory side, and these are barely tempered by enthusiasm from experimentalists.
So, yeah, theoretical particle physics may well appear to be in crisis. But, look, theoretical particle physics is always in crisis…
drorzel | January 25, 2010There was a flurry of stories last week about an arxiv preprint on optical trapping of an ion. Somewhat surprisingly for an arxiv-only paper, it got a write-up in Physics World. While I generally like Physics World, I have to take issue with their description of why this is interesting:
In the past, the trapping of atomic particles has followed a basic rule: use radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields for ions, and optical lasers for neutral particles, such as atoms. This is because RF fields can only exert electric forces on charges; try to use them on neutral particles and there's…
drorzel | January 25, 20102010 marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. To mark the occasion, the American Physical society has launched LaserFest, which will involve a large number of public events over the next year. The website includes a bunch of cool things explaining the physics of lasers, and a timeline of laser history with one glaring bug that you'll have to figure out for yourself. Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette has an excellent historical survey of her own, saving me a lot of typing.
(Fun fact: Gordon Gould, who eventually won a lengthy patent fight, was a Union alumnus…
drorzel | January 22, 2010The NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators report came out not too long ago, and the bulk of it is, as usual, spent on quasi-quantitative measures of scientific productivity-- numbers of degrees granted, numbers of patent applications for various countries, etc. I find all of those things pretty deeply flawed, so I tend to skip past them and go straight to the stuff about public knowledge and understanding (chapter 7, available as a PDF at the link above).
This doesn't get much press, probably because the results are depressing. They've asked a bunch of factual knowledge questions of people…
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 10, 2010There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant.
This reminded me of something I've wondered about the public perception of climate change. There was a good deal of hand-wringing on blogs over some recent polls showing depressingly low numbers of Americans believing in global warming (see this one, for example). This was mostly attributed to the successes of the right-wing…
drorzel | January 9, 2010One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII era of European dominance faded away, we lost those awesome German names. Like, for example, zitterbewegung, a word that just demands an exclamation point: Zitterbewegung!
The phenomenon it describes, ironically, comes out of work by the great English physicist and odd duck Paul Dirac. Dirac's…