Physics
drorzel | January 2, 2007Kind of an arcane philosophical point, here, so I'll be a little surprised if anybody responds, but this occurred to me while writing the previous post, and I thought I'd throw it out there. In the previous post, I quoted Feynman's one sentence for the future:
Everything is made of atoms.
and suggested as an alternative:
Light is both a particle and a wave.
Part of the idea behind these is that the sentences would allow people who had received that bit of information as Revealed Truth to reconstruct much of modern physics. If you take seriously the idea that material objects are made of…
drorzel | January 2, 2007Some time back, Dave Munger called me out for the one sentence challenge, originally phrased thusly:
Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area?
Dave, as a writer, offers "Omit needless words." Over at Cosmic Variance, Risa responds with the much less elegant: "The Universe began, about 13.7 billion years ago, as a hot, dense soup of elementary particles, and has been expanding, cooling, and clumping…
purepedantry | December 20, 2006German scientists have created a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for far red light:
The trick is to assemble an array of electronic components that resonate with the electric and magnetic fields of the light waves as they pass through. These materials are unlike any conventional substance, hence the name "metamaterial". Pendry suggested that an array of coils and wires much smaller than the wavelength of light would do the trick and first demonstrated the idea for radio waves with a frequency between 15 and 20 megahertz.
Later experiments extended the technique to shorter…
drorzel | December 20, 2006There's a news squib from the Institutes of Physics this morning touting new results on a theory of modified gravity that the authors say can explain the structure of the universe without needing to invoke dark matter. This is a significant problem in cosmology, as the article explains:
[O]ur theory of gravitation - Einstein's theory of general relativity - cannot account for the extent of clumping without invoking the right amount of a mysterious substance called "dark matter". Originally introduced in the 1930s to explain anomalous galaxy dynamics, dark matter (which cosmologists think…
drorzel | December 18, 2006Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of "open science," and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license.
It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I'm a little dubious about it when I read things like this:
First, note that papers do not usually contain raw (useful, useable) data. They contain, say, graphs made from such data, or bitmapped images of it -- as Peter says, the paper offers hamburger when what we want is the original cow. Chris Surridge of PLoS puts it…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2006Dear Santa,
I know this is short notice, but only this week, while talking with my better half about matter, I thought of something so wonderful that I hope you'll be able to leave it in my stocking this year.
What I would like is a thermos full of photons.
Imagine how much fun this would be in a completely darkened room. Unscrew the top and suddenly, a burst of light! It's not altogether unlike the thrill of opening the can of "fancy mixed nuts" out of which springs the fake snake. But the jar of photons would be much, much cooler.
I understand how busy you are in December, so I tried to…
drorzel | December 15, 2006One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they're being honored. These frequently involve props and demonstrations, but George Smoot takes it to a new level, using the Cal marching band to demonstrate the Big Bang:
"Professor Smoot came up to the band and asked if later that week, when we practiced at Memorial Stadium, we could do a formation like the universe forming. He…
drorzel | December 14, 2006The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post). There's a very rare process, though, mediated by the weak nuclear force, that allows the production of a single top quark, without an anti-top (it's paired with a bottom quark and a W boson).
The D0 (or DZero) collaboration at Fermilab recently announced the…
drorzel | December 13, 2006There's a very nice article in the new Physics World in praise of James Clerk Maxwell of "Maxwell's Equations." Incredibly, Maxwell is probably somewhat underappreciated, what with wrapping up all of classical electromagnetism in one neat and Lorentz-invariant package, making pioneering contributions to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and taking the first color photograph, using basically the same process NASA uses for all those specatcular Hubble images. Sharp guy, that Maxwell.
He also gets credit for one of the best off-hand announcements of a titanic physics discovery I've ever…
drorzel | December 12, 2006That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the New York Times, aided and abetted by Boing Boing. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as this one. It doesn't help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the airplane stading still relative to the ground.
The key question here is whether the plane moves relative to the ground (not the treadmill) or not-- if it does, then the plane will eventually take off, and if it doesn't, it won't. The main source of confusion then seems to be what, exactly, the wheels…
drorzel | December 12, 2006A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration:
Dave Winer's got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: "Where is the Bronx Science for adults?" He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school "was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age." It's harder to find this in adulthood, he observes, even as a fellow at the Berkman Center, where Dave and I met four years ago.
I empathize with Dave - the experience of being surrounded by smart people working on the same kinds of problems is one of the most…
drorzel | December 11, 2006Over at Bora's House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this:
U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though none have explicitly abandoned ID in public, the focus of their scientific cover arguments has shifted from organic change to the creation of the universe. They have picked up on the controversial claim that human life could only have evolved because…
drorzel | December 10, 2006At least, that's the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the fact that not one string theory result has been nominated for either the Physics Result of 2006 or the Astronomy Result of 2006...
Well, OK, there are other conclusions to draw, such as "Nobody has nominated any string theory results because nobody has nominated much of anything," or "Nobody has nominated any string theory results because nobody reads your stupid blog anyway, you nihilistic Bush-hating anti-America liberal commie type." These might even be in better agreement with the experimental data...
I really was hoping for…
drorzel | December 7, 2006I have a couple of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS reader, because they sometimes turn up interesting things-- I got the Bill Wootters item there, for example, and they had a piece on strontium clocks that I keep meaning to say something about.
Of course, there's also some total garbage, such as the kookery from the "Quantum Aether Dynamics Institute" that crossed the feed yesterday (though it appears to have been taken down, to their credit). This makes it difficult to really trust anything I see there that claims to be a really new development.
Such as, say, this press release from Buffalo…
drorzel | December 7, 2006One of my former professors is collecting some awards:
Professor William Wootters is to be honored for his outstanding achievements in physics, not once, but twice in the academic year, by The American Physical Society and by the International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing.
In recognition of his pioneering work in quantum theory, the International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing in collaboration with Tamagawa University, bestowed its 2006 International Quantum Communications Award on Wootters at a ceremony in Tsukuba,…
drorzel | December 6, 2006David at the World's Fair celebrates Ninja Day with an Ask a Ninja video about physics.
Of course, what the ninja says is a lie-- Physics did the dumping, and he was all, "Please take me back, I promise to only move along geodesic paths in curved space-time from now on," but she was having none of it, so now he's out there bad-mouthing Physics on the Internet, and...
Um. Anyway, it's an amusing video.
drorzel | December 6, 2006Turnout has been disappointing in the Physics and Astronomy results of the year threads. Come on, I know there are some opinionated nerds out there reading this-- nominate some stuff.
Here, the AIP provides their own list, complete with links to Physics News Update stories. Are blog readers really going to let themselves be upstaged by a bunch of professional writers? Get out there and fact-check their asses. Or something.
drorzel | December 5, 2006It's more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling "Year's Best" lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I'll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.
So, a call for nominations:
In your opinion, what is the most important, influential, or exciting development in physics in 2006?
This could be a new experimental measurement, or it could be an exciting new theoretical development…
drorzel | December 4, 2006Next term, I'm teaching our sophomore-level "Modern Physics" class again. "Modern Physics," in ecuation terms, really means "Early 20th Century Physics"-- it's a couple of weeks of Special Relativity, followed by several weeks of basic Quantum Mechanics, with a mad 2-3 week sprint at the end where I try to cover as much material as possible relating to applications of Relativity and QM.
One of the things I did last year with this class was to try to introduce a little computational work using Mathematica. It's a useful tool for our students to learn about, and it allows you to discuss some…
drorzel | November 30, 2006There's a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. "Protein folding" is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible configurations. In nature, though, these proteins are normally found in only one configuration. Correctly predicting the folded configuration of a given protein is an extremely difficult computational problem.
The paper highlighted by the AIP takes a new approach to the problem, employing some calculational…