Physics
drorzel | July 7, 2006I had errands to run this morning before work, which meant that I didn't have time to queue up the usual handful of blog posts to appear during the day. I don't want to have the site go dark, though, so I'll throw up a post or two on my lunch hour, to note some physics stuff that's kind of cool.
I've been meaning to say something about this for a while, as the physics blogosphere has been overrun with talk about how cool the Large Hadron Collider is going to be (my own contribution is a few posts back), but I keep putting it off on the theory that I'll do something really substantial. The…
drorzel | July 6, 2006The last couple of days at work have been Shop Days, with a fair bit of time spent in the department's machine shop making holes in a metal box. This would, I'm sure, be the occasion of much hilarity among my old junior high shop teachers, as my ineptitude in both metal and wood shop was pretty impressive, back in the seventh and eighth grades. I've gotten considerably more coordinated since those exceptionally gawky days, though, and I can use a drill press or a mill without too much trouble now, though no-one will ever mistake me for a machinist.
In a certain sense, Shop Days are among the…
drorzel | July 6, 2006p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics.
For the past 6 years I've taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100's years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single topic; there is little time for fun. And if we want to make room for something like that we usually have to squeeze out some other topic. Whoosh!
It gets worse. At the UW we are lucky enough to have a large contingent of students from excellent high schools. This means they have seen almost all of…
drorzel | July 6, 2006My Corporate Masters have finally posted the piece that ran in the most recent print edition of the magazine, in which prominent physicists comment on the LHC. They've got predictions and explanations of why the LHC is interesting from an impressive array of people.
Most of the answers are pretty predictable. Lisa Randall talks about extra dimensions, Leonard Susskind about the Anthropic Principle, etc. My favorite answer, though, is Steven Weinberg's:
What terrifies theorists is that the LHC may discover nothing beyond the single neutral "Higgs" particle that is required by the standard…
drorzel | July 2, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in July of 2002. This is the second part of the explanation started in the previous post.So, at the end of yesterday's post, I had talked about how to use light to exert forces on atoms, and change their velocity. This…
drorzel | July 1, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in July of 2002. If you're wondering what I need those diode lasers for, other than sharks with lasers on their heads, here's the beginning of an answer.Last week, when talking about how to do a public lecture, I wrote…
drorzel | June 30, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in August of 2002, and is at least vaguely relevant to the recent discussion of interpretations.
It's been a while now since I talked about science stuff, mostly because there hasn't been any news that I felt strongly…
scientificactivist | June 30, 2006There are a number of approaches scientists take to get at the fundamental nature of life, and one of those is elucidating the chemical structures of the molecules that make life happen, particularly proteins, which are the workhorses of the cell. One of the two primary methods for determining these structures is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and the other is x-ray crystallography. My current work is in the former, meaning I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a huge magnet and even more time staring at a computer screen trying to make sense of the data I get from the magnet. As…
drorzel | June 29, 2006Matt Leifer, whose blog I hadn't previously encountered, has a long and fascinating post on evaluation criteria for quantum interpretations. "Interpretation" here means the stuff of countless "Isn't Quantum Mechanics weird?" books-- Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian hidden variable theories, all that stuff. These are the "meta-theories" that are used to explain how you get from all that weird and messy wavefunction stuff up to the reality that we see and observe in our experiments.
The list is explicitly modeled after the well-known DiVincenzo Criteria for quantum computing (see also Quantum…
drorzel | June 29, 2006I ended the previous laser post by noting that diode lasers need some additional wavelength selection to be done in order to be useful as light sources for spectroscopy experiments. In their natural state, they tend to emit light over a broader range of wavelengths than is really ideal, and we'd like to narrow that down, and also to be able to control the emission.
(I should note that, while the emission of a typical diode laser is broader than people doing atomic physics experiments would like, it's still incredibly narrow by normal standards. The actual width, in wavelength, of the light…
drorzel | June 29, 2006A little while back, JoAnne at Cosmic Variance reported on the status of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant next-generation accelerator that is the cover story for the current print issue of Seed. Particle experimentalist Gordon Watts reports in with some more technical details about the delay in the proposed turn-on schedule. He's also got a link to a PDF of a talk by someone associated with LHC, for those who really want to geek out.
The bottom line appears to be that this is just normal, prudent caution, and not really unexpected. Though the delay is a little disappointing to those…
drorzel | June 28, 2006I haven't posted much about life in the lab lately, because even though I'm getting to spend a bit of time in the lab, I've been so fried from this past term that I haven't had much energy for blogging. Things are finally settling into the summer routine, though, and I've gotten a little rest since handing in my grades, so I'll try to post occasional updates on what's going on in the lab.
Of course, life in the lab has its own frustrations, chief among them being equipment failures for stupid reasons. We've had another such event in my lab, so I'll be spending a bit of time wrestling with my…
drorzel | June 27, 2006Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006:
Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such an effect had been known theoretically since shortly after Einstein applied his theory of general relativity to cosmology, but the general belief, including Einstein¡¦s own assessment, was that the cosmological constant had no basis in reality. Thus, the 1998 announcement of…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I've got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you're getting short, link-y physics blogging:
- The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this "string theory" thing (maybe you've heard of it?) for a little while longer. Talk slides from many of the speakers are available here. Of course, if you can understand them, you probably already knew that, and if you didn't know that, you probably won't get much from the slides, but there you go.
- The Wall Street Journal piece talking about Peter…
drorzel | June 22, 2006OK, it's not an official Ask a ScienceBlogger question (that answer will show up next week), but over at the World's Fair, they've raised an important scholarly question via a scene from The Simpsons:
Marge: Homer?
Homer: Yelloh?
Marge: There's a man here who thinks he can help you.
Homer: Batman?
Marge: No, he's a scientist.
Homer: Batman's a scientist.
Obviously, this leads to the question : "What sort of scientist is Batman, anyway?" Some of my colleagues are trying to claim him for psychology or genetics, but the real answer is after the cut:
It's a trick question. Batman isn't a…
drorzel | June 21, 2006Over at bento-box, there's a nice response to my recent post about simulations. He makes the very good point that the Sandia press release in question could sensibly be read as referring to the fact that recent computer technology requires fewer simplifying approximations:
Well, it isn't really until quite recently that computers have gotten fast enough that many of these approximations can be toned-down. Simulations are starting to match up on a more than qualitative level with experiment on more than simple and uninteresting systems. But computers have been around for a long time and there…
drorzel | June 20, 2006For those interested in keeping abreast of the latest stuff on string theory and its discontents, some links:
Jonathan Shock is based in Beijing, and blogging about the Strings 2006 meeting. He's got a first-day recap including descriptions of several of the talks, and incident events.
Victor Rivelles is also blogging from Beijing, and has recaps of day one and day two.
The Paper of Record loves Stephen Hawking, and writes about his visit to China for the conference.
Christine Dantas has re-posted her top ten lists (which were taken down in part due to some unpleasant comment behavior). The…
drorzel | June 19, 2006The big event of the moment in physics, at least on the high energy/ theory side, is the Strings 2006 meeting in Beijing, which will feature the usual suspects talking about the usual topics in string theory. This comes on the heels of the SUSY06 meeting, which was extensively blogged by Clifford and others.
This would probably be a good time to post a long entry about how string theory is all a bunch of crap, as that's been a reliable way to generate traffic in the past, but I just don't really have the heart for it. From my outsider's perspective, the big issues seem to be exactly the same…
drorzel | June 16, 2006Rob Knop has another post to which I can only say "Amen!", this time on the relatioship between simulation and experiment (in response to this BoingBoing post about a Sandia press release):
Can simulations show us things that experiments cannot? Absolutely! In fact, if they didn't, we wouldn't bother doing simulations. This has been true for a long time. With experiments, we are limited to the resolution and capabilities of our detectors. In astronomy, for example, we don't have the hundreds of millions of years necessary to watch the collision of a pair of galaxies unfold. All we can look at…
drorzel | June 14, 2006Rob Knop talks about a great teaching moment: A student who refused to just smile and nod:
I was very grateful for that student. You see, when professors ask, "do you understand that?", it's not a test. It's not the professor trying to catch the students up in admitting to being confused, it's not the professor trying to sepearate the good students (Hermiones) from the bad students, the latter being the ones who will admit to struggling with the material. When we ask the question "do you understand that?" we ask it because we want to, yes, find out if the students understood what we just did…