Physics
drorzel | June 13, 2006Weirdly, this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question may be the hardest one to answer yet:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Most of the responses have taken this as an "If you had it to do over, what sort of scientist would you be?", and that's the source of the problem. It's not that the question itself is all that difficult-- I actually have a stock answer for that. The problem is that I don't really like the premise of the question (he says cryptically, promising to explain…
drorzel | June 9, 2006It's been a while since I did a True Lab Story, and it seems like an appropriate sort of topic for a rainy Friday when I have grades to finish. I'm running out of really good personal anecdotes, but there are still a few left before I have to move entirely to hearsay. And who knows, maybe I'll break something in spectacular fashion between now and then...
Anyway, lab safety offices are a rich source of True Lab Stories. Not just because they have to clean up from the really spectacular disasters, but also because their desire to prevent disasters sometimes leads to inflexible applications of…
drorzel | June 7, 2006My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as they can fit in their schedule.
Students in all majors are also required to take five "Writing Across the Curriculum" classes, which are intended to be courses with a strong writing component that should build their writing skills both in their discipline and out. As you might imagine, the bulk of…
drorzel | June 2, 2006The post title pretty much says it. Raymond Davis Jr., who shared the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on detecting neutrinos, died Wednesday. The Times obituatary showed up in my RSS feeds today.
Davis got his dynamite money for the neutrino detection experiment that he ran for years in the Homestake mine, where a giant tank of industrial cleaning fluid was placed so that an occasional neutrino would react with a chlorine atom and change it into an argon atom. Every few months, Davis would sift through the thousands of gallons of liquid to pull out tens or hundreds of argon atoms, and detect…
drorzel | June 1, 2006Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao's Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the "Geek Stuff" category of sidebar links. Still, I heartily agree with the recommendation to go try these out.
They first put that site up back when I was in grad school, and somebody or another found the link and brought it up on the computer in the lab. If you read through the text, you'…
drorzel | May 22, 2006A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your standard rubber chicken sort of fare to the multi-course gourmet meal (with a different bottle of wine for each course) provided at a conference I attended in Bordeaux.
DAMOP does all right in the food department, though you're not going to get real gourmet fare…
drorzel | May 9, 2006Woke up, got out of bed
Ran a comb across my head...
8:40: Leave home, bike to work.
8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab
8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.
9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes.
(Continued...)
9:35-10:40: Teach class on basics of quantum computing, logic gates, supeerpositions and entanglement.
10:45: Let class go five minutes late. Run to bathroom.
10:50-11:55: Second class, review for Tuesday's exam. Answer questions about right-hand rules, magnetic fields, and Faraday's…
drorzel | May 5, 2006Well, OK, they're mostly not new, just new to me. I'm vaguely ashamed at having to rely on Sean Carroll to point out new blogs to me, especially since one of the authors comments here moderately regularly, but my defense is that unlike faculty at semester schools, who are winding things down, I'm right in the middle of the most hectic part of the academic term. I barely have time to post original stuff, let alone read other people's blogs.
Nevertheless, Sean points out some good new blogs, that have gone into the RSS aggregator, and will make it onto the sidebar when I finally get around to…
drorzel | May 3, 2006Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff...
Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement.
Lecture 12: EPR "paradox," introduction to Local Hidden Variables.
Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell's Theorem/ Bell's Inequalities.
Lecture 14: Bell's Inequality experiments.
Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum key distribution.
Also, don't forget to suggest people to fill the Teddy Roosevelt spot on the Mount Rushmore of Science...
drorzel | April 28, 2006We had 45 responses to yesterday's poll/quiz question-- thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count:
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s
3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s
18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s
21 votes D) 4.37 +/- 0.03 m/s
2 votes E) Some other answer that I will explain in comments.
So, it's a narrow victory for D, among ScienceBlogs readers.
The correct answer and the reason for the poll are below the fold.
As far as I'm concerned, the correct answer is D). There's absolutely no reason…
drorzel | April 27, 2006The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics:
The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be built on American soil, the panel said. If that does not happen, particle physics, the quest for the fundamental forces and constituents of nature, will wither in this country, it said.
You might assume that, as a physicist, I'm all in favor of this-- half a billion is a lot of money, after all…
drorzel | April 27, 2006Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825 m/s.
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
(There was talk a while back about getting ScienceBlogs some fancy poll software that would allow me to do this with radio buttons and automatic counting, but I don't know how to do that yet, and I'm curious about the…
drorzel | April 24, 2006I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful advice-- I haven't even come up for tenure yet, after all. I might have something useful to say next year at this time-- that, or you'll know not to listen to anything I have to say.
Anyway, since I'm thinking about this, and since I'm otherwise afflicted with motivation-sapping medical crud, I'm…
drorzel | April 21, 2006Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who's the most overlooked scientist:
Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:
Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?
Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?
It's a little ironic that I can point to a nice magazine profle of my nominee, but I would have to say Ralph Alpher. As a grad student, Alpher realized that the Big Bang should've left an echo in the form of an all-pervading radiation field, and even…
drorzel | April 21, 2006I'm still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it's going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell's Theorem at the end of the class, but then I've been holding them late for three weeks already...). In an effort to perk myself up through blogging, here are some amusing tales about mishaps involving electricity.
(First, a disclaimer: Though these stories are presented in a manner that (hopefully) makes them sound amusing, most of what I describe here is, in fact, incredibly…
drorzel | April 18, 2006Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems.
There are some sample poems on that site, which give you an idea of the flavor of the thing (I don't think he read any of those specific poems, but they're fairly representative). They aren't so much poems about physics principles as they are poems about the history of physics-- lots of imaginary letters from one famous 20th Century physicist…
drorzel | April 17, 2006For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here's a bunch of lectures about photons:
Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons.
Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field.
Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry.
Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states.
This material, unsurprisingly, produced the most panicked looks from students to this point. One of the homework problems was also to recapticulate a couple of calculations from a Phys. Rev. A (…
drorzel | April 17, 2006Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you're carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here?
If you answered "Yes!" to any of those questions, then you're ready for the String Theory Diet!
Each rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch the pounds melt away! You'll lose weight so fast, your friends will think that gravity is leaking off your brane and affecting them more than you! You'll be your own walking hierarchy problem!
You can lose as much as one Planck mass per Planck time (…
drorzel | April 14, 2006RPM is dropping his Double Entendre Fridays, which threatens to cut off the world supply of really dorky sex jokes. But never fear, I'm here to pick it up with a physics version!
Back when I was a lowly undergrad, I was the TA for an optics lab section, and was helping some students to adjust a Michelson interferometer. One of them made some comment about being amazed that I could make such minute adjustments to the alignment of one of the mirrors (done by turning an 80-pitch screw very, very slowly), and the professor running the class (who was one of my honors thesis advisors that year)…
drorzel | April 14, 2006The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow's crack about Richard Dawkins:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
I don't quite understand the problem, here. I mean, he's right-- stamp collectors, the lot of 'em...
Consider this a sort of poor man's Casual Friday psych experiment-- I'm curious as to whether…