Physics
drorzel | November 21, 2006New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form:
Exciting new developments in my own field of research will completely transform our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Nevertheless, they make for some interesting reading. Of course, they're not sorted by topic, and it can get a little daunting trying to figure out who you should read, so it's good that Sean Carroll (who…
drorzel | November 10, 2006I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don't have a link to a transcript on the site-- in fact, they haven't updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would sort of give you access to a transcript, but it's broken now, or at least doesn't work in either Opera or Firefox on my home computer.
It's pretty much of a piece with the chat itself, actually-- I thought it was pretty sharp of them to email physics bloggers with invitations to the chat, but the chat itself…
drorzel | November 4, 2006Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I've been using it this way for more than five years, and I like to think I've gotten to be pretty good at it. I fully expect this to be brought up in my tenure review, though, and to have to justify my use of PowerPoint in class.
Here's the thing: PowerPoint is a tool, nothing more. It…
drorzel | November 3, 2006In the previous installments, I talked about identical particles and symmetry, and what that means for fermions. Given that there's only one other type of particle in the world, that sort of means that I need to explain what symmetry means in the case of bosons.
When I explain this to the first-year seminar, I generally do this by anthropomorphizing the particles somewhat, to describe fermions as "antisocial," and bosons as "gregarious." Not only does this give me the chance to use "anthropomorphize" and "gregarious" in class, thus confusing the hell out of a bunch of frosh, it's actually…
drorzel | October 31, 2006So, in the previous post about symmetry and the difference between bosons and fermions, I threw in a bunch of teasing comments about how the requirement that quantum particles be indistinguishable has surprising and interesting consequences. Of course, I never quite explained what all that was about. Which, I suppose, means I'm obliged to pull out something pretty big to hold up as an example of an interesting consequence of the symmetry requirements.
Well, how about chemistry? Not some sub-part of it-- the whole field. If it weren't for the requirement that quantum particles be…
drorzel | October 30, 2006I've had a chance now to read through the new papers mentioned in the Wolfgang Ketterle post last week, and there's some interesting stuff there. The second item on the list from the AIP news article, "First observation of Mott insulator shells," is particularly interesting, as I did some early work in that area when I was a post-doc. We're coming down to the end of the term here, and I have a ton of things to do, but I feel weirdly inspired to try to explain what that item is about. I really ought to do something about my blog addiction.
Anyway, explaining the new Ketterle experiment will…
drorzel | October 27, 2006I've had a tab open for a while containing an Inside Higher Ed article on a new approach to introducing science at Emory University:
David Lynn, who chairs the department of chemistry at Emory University, spoke about Emory's seminar program for entering freshmen. All Emory freshmen must take a seminar the first semester and the one for math and science teaches students how to think like a scientist.
The course consists of five modules. Each module is taught by a grad student who presents his own research, guiding students through the research process, from designing studies to defending…
drorzel | October 27, 2006Steinn reports a new metric for research productivity that some people are using: the "H-number":
The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest "k" such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations.
So, you start off with a H-score of zero.
If your 5th highest cited paper has 5 citations but your 6th highest cited paper has 4 citations then your H=5.
If your 10th highest cited paper has 11 citations, but your 11th highest cited paper has 9 citations, then your H=10.
And so on. High H is better.
Yeah, that's just what we need, another quasi-…
drorzel | October 25, 2006The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I've been trying to make about the reviews (I thought of several nasty and inflammatory analogies without much effort, but I'm trying to be a Good Person...). Unfortunately it requires me to explain a bit of physics... Please, please, don't throw me into that briar patch.
Some people say that the last really significant…
purepedantry | October 20, 2006Hydrogen is great, but I feel like there are some structural and technical issues that have to be solved before...you know...the angels fly down to save us and hugs and bunnies abound. Popular Mechanics introduces a note of realism to the debate on alternative fuels with a great article on hydrogen fuel:
At first glance, hydrogen would seem an ideal substitute for these problematic fuels. Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost three times as much energy as natural gas, and when consumed its only emission is pure, plain water. But unlike oil and gas, hydrogen is not a fuel. It is a way of…
drorzel | October 20, 2006Having made reference to the referee system in my post about a paper being accepted, this seems like a good point to dust off an old post about the peer review system in physics.
Like many of the other Classic Edition posts I've put up here, this one dates from July of 2002. Apparently, I wrote a lot of stuff about physics in July of 2002.
Anyway, the original text is below the fold, if you'd like a look inside the sausage factory that is the scientific publishing process...
I've just been asked to referee a journal article, for the fourth time in the last seven months. Since "peer review" is…
drorzel | October 18, 2006Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate...
For those who haven't heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They're moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up better to wear and tear.
Predictably enough, most of the players hate the new ball, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gone so far as to enlist physicists to look into the situation:
Jim Horwitz is chair of the physics department at UT-Arlington, and Kaushik De is the project leader…
drorzel | October 18, 2006It's fraternity pledging season on campus, which means there are dozens of slightly addled sophomores wandering around being forced to do silly things by upperclassmen. This, combined with the passing mention of cable-making in the college advice post, got me thinking about scientific hazing-- the sort of crap jobs that get given to first-year grad students in research groups.
I suspect this is mostly an experimental phenomenon, as experimental work provides many more opportunities for really unpleasant tasks. There are oil traps on vacuum systems that collect thick, nasty sludge that…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Sean Carroll is offering more unsolicted advice (though it is in response to a comment, which makes it borderline solicited...), this time about choosing an undergraduate school. He breaks the options down into four categories, with two small errors that I'll correct in copying the list over here:
Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Williams or Union.
Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.
There. That's much better.
I should note two things up front: the first…
drorzel | October 15, 2006Symmetry magazine has an article on travel tips for physicists, from other physicists. There are two scary things about this:
1) The degree to which the picture that emerges from the different tips aligns with unflattering stereotypes of physicists. Some of the items are funny travel stories, but the tips are all about keeping your laptop running, and how to live out of a single back for two weeks, and how to avoid actually talking to anyone during your travels.
2) The fact that I think most of the advice is excellent. God, I'm a dork.
They're absolutely right when they say "if you must check…
purepedantry | October 13, 2006Chris from Highly Allochthonous -- say that five times fast -- has a great post summarizing the geological issues of the North Korean nuclear test (how deep? how do we know that? etc.) Check it out.
purepedantry | October 13, 2006I expressed a certain level of skepticism about North Korea's nuclear test this week because of the low estimated yield and the failure of the earlier test of their Taepodong-2 missile. Basically, I question the ability of North Korea to make a nuclear weapon that will actually work, given the strict controls on their society and the limited ability to innovate. I think that we need to factor into our strategic calculations in dealing with North Korea -- serious as they are -- the possibility that they may not have the beef.
Now it would appear that North Korea's nuclear test -- in…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects.
The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that.
The original…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel picks up the Harry Collins thing I talked about last week, and asks an interesting question about the role of math:
We don't want to make "understanding the subject" mean "being able to do calculations about the subject", unless we have some reason to believe that this is a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one (and to be frank, I don't believe it's a sufficient condition; I've spent enough time with economists to know that ability to do the maths does not mean that someone understands the economics). Is there anything? Or is Collins' concept of "…
drorzel | October 11, 2006I know I have said this before, but it obviously didn't take, so I'll do it again. Allow me to explain a basic principle of economics.
You make high-quality technical instruments. I am interested in getting my hands on some high-quality technical instruments. In fact, I am sufficiently interested that I will write grants to obtain money to give you in exchange for your high-quality technical instruments. You are interested in obtaining money in exchange for your high-quality technical instruments.
However, and this is the key point, in order to obtain the money to give you in exchange for…