Physics
drorzel | April 12, 2006Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I'm not sure this will still work, but here's a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I thought of when I was writing about science books:
What topic or phenomenon that's generally in your area do you really wish people would stop asking you about?
I don't mean a major political controversy that you have a strong opinion about, but might be tired of (so no "creationism"…
maggie wittlin | April 12, 2006I like Chad Orzel's True Lab StoriesTM series so much that I've decided to be inspired by (read: steal from) him and tell the only vaguely worthy story from my short researching experience.
Not too long ago, I was but a wee undergrad doing her senior research in physics. The project had started with vast ambition ("Build a variable capacitor that will work under these extreme conditions!") and, over the year, turned into something more modest ("Figure out whether this one piece of equipment could possibly be a component in a variable capacitor that will work under these extreme conditions…
drorzel | April 11, 2006One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I've looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It's sort of cool to see how they differ from one field to another, while remaining largely the same.
Back when I was doing the "A Week in the Lab" series of posts, somebody asked me about my own lab notebooks. I present here the reason why Seed is never likely to ask me to supply notebook pages for their monthly feature…
drorzel | April 8, 2006Since the previous batch of lecture notes were surprisingly popular, here's the next couple of classes worth:
Lecture 5: Stellar Interferometry, coherence, intensity correlation functions, Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.
Lecture 6: Non-classical light, photon anti-bunching, single-photon interference.
Sadly, this exhausts the notes I had written in advance (what with one thing and another, I haven't written any new lectures this past week), which means I need to write at least three lectures this weekend, on the mathematical description of quantized light, coherent states of the…
drorzel | April 3, 2006If you're wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it's because I'm spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way.
I've mentioned before that I'm doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist's approach to the material, but if you'd like a look at what I'm doing, here are my notes from the first four lectures (scanned into large PDF files, which I'm posting to the class Blackboard site, but will upload here as well, at least for a couple of classes):
Lecture 1: Dirac notation, state vectors, operators as matrices…
drorzel | March 31, 2006If you'd like some, you know, physics from your physics blogs, here you go: Andrew Jaffe points out new results on neutrino oscillations from the MINOS group, providing new limits on the differences between the masses of different neutrino flavors. You can also read the Fermilab press release, which as a bonus contains some wonderful examples of stilted "quotes" constructed by cutting and pasting text from emails.
I've recently become sort of tangentially (very tangentially) involved in efforts to detect both neutrinos and dark matter, so I'm a lot more interested in these sorts of stories…
drorzel | March 30, 2006I realize that I've been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent Tuesday night writing up a lecture on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.
This Quantum Optics class is turning out to be a really interesting experience. It's a truism that you don't really find out what you know about a subject until you have to teach it to someone else. That's…
drorzel | March 30, 2006A couple of quick notes regarding physics stories that have caught my eye:
1) Like Doug Natelson, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about the PRL claiming to have seen vacuum birefringence. The idea here is that a group in Italy passed light through a huge rotating magnetic field (5 Tesla, or about 100,000 times the Earth's magnetic field), and found that the polarization of the light was rotated by a tiny amount. The effect is, I gather, larger than expected, which might be explained as the result of interactions between their laser photons, photons from the magnetic field…
drorzel | March 29, 2006Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you're accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here.
Below the fold, I will list the three most important decisions you will make in choosing a graduate school:
Choosing a research advisor.
Choosing a research advisor.
Choosing a research advisor.
It might be a slight overstatement to say that the choice of advisor is the single most important…
drorzel | March 24, 2006A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency:
Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.
Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein's Theory of…
drorzel | March 22, 2006I'm not taking as much heat as the other two amateur taxonomists on ScienceBlogs, but I'll also throw the topic open for suggestions. So, if I left your favorite sub-field of physics out of my Geek Taxonomy, drop me a comment suggesting a field that I left out, and what I ought to say about it. ( They needn't be serious.) If I get any good suggestions, I'll post an updated Taxonomy of Physics incorporating the suggestions.
If you have strong opinions about sub-fields of biology or anthropology, be sure to weigh in over at the Daily Transcript or Afarensis.
drorzel | March 22, 2006Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it's all excellent.
In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me of one of my favorite physics conference anecdotes, reproduced after the cut:
At DAMOP a few years back, a certain guy who we'll call B., just to have a convenient name, was giving a talk in a session chaired by C., a guy from NIST (not me). The talk was..., well…
drorzel | March 21, 2006Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago-- almost four years! That's, like, a century in blog-time...
I'll reproduce the geek taxonomy after the cut, and clean up a few rotted links.
Geek Taxonomy
So, what, exactly, is it that I do for a living? (Other than come in to work every morning and respond to disgruntled emails about the grades I hand out, that is...). Depending on the context, I have a bunch of different…
drorzel | March 21, 2006Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory:
Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are ever deployed in resolving the dispute.
I loves me some thermodynamics. But, why not clear some space in the freezer to do a side-by-side comparison of the ice cube tray filled with hot water and that filled with cold water? Doing an experiment certainly doesn't preclude…
drorzel | March 14, 2006I'm with Kevin on this one: this whole "Pi Day" thing is just too dorky for words (I'm looking at you, Clifford...)
However, as noted by Arcane Gazebo, it's also Einstein's birthday, which is an occasion much more worth commemorating. So celebrate as the man himself would have: invent a new theory of the universe while working at a boring and unchallenging job because you can't get an academic position. Or, possibly, divorce your wife and marry your cousin. It's all good.
drorzel | March 7, 2006I'm not sure what I did to PZ Myers to make him draw my attention to Fred Hutchison, but whatever it was, I apologize. Mr. Hutchison is apparently a columnist writing for a web site run by Alan Keyes-- the right-wing kook for people who find David Horowitz to be a little too sedate-- and prides himself on his knowledge of science. In fact, he's currently taking great pride in "defeating" two professional scientists in email debates about relativity and global warming. He has also previously posted an amazingly loopy piece about how Einstein is wrong about everything.
Now, it's been a bad…
drorzel | February 28, 2006I'm currently teaching our sophomore-level modern physics class, which is titled something like "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." We've finished with the basics of Special Relativity and abstract quantum theory, and have entered the mad sprint through applications (Union is on a trimester calendar, so classes end next week)-- three classes on atoms and molecules, three on solid state physics, two on nuclear and particle physics.
I've taught this before, so I have a rough idea of what I want to do in the remaining classes-- Wednesday is a lecture on semiconductor…
drorzel | February 27, 2006OK, let's say you want to explain something really difficult, like counterfactual computation with quantum interrogation, but you don't want to actually sit down and do all that typing (let's say you have a big stack of lab reports to grade, or something). There's a way to pull this off.
What you do is, you put yourself in a superposition of states in which you explain and don't explain this phenomenon, and then don't touch your blogging software (that would constitute an observation, and collapse your wavefunction) for a day or two. When you come back, you'll find that an explanation has…
drorzel | February 24, 2006The votes are in, and have been carefully tabulated by our bleary-eyed accounting firm (that is, me-- I would've posted last night, but I went to see Chuck D speak (because I'm down with the old-school rap), and he went on for more than two hours...) . What looked like a runaway victory for Michelson and Morley actually tightened up quite a bit, thanks to a late surge by Michael Faraday:
Michelson-Morley: 23
Faraday: 19
Rutherford: 10
Galileo: 9
Roemer: 9
Aspect: 8.5
Hertz: 3
Cavendish: 2.5
Newton: 2
Hubble: 2
Mössbauer: 1
A total of 89 people voted, 90 if you count the one write-in vote for…
drorzel | February 24, 2006A Dramatic Presentation of a Classical Analogue to the Quantum Zeno Effect
A Play in One Act:
John Boy: Good night, Mary Ellen.
Mary Ellen: Good night John Boy.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
Repeat several more times
Exeunt, pursued by a bear.