Physics

"Eddington had needed to make significant corrections to some of the measurements, for various technical reasons, and in the end decided to leave some of the Sobral data out of the calculation entirely. Many scientists were suspicious that he had cooked the books. Although the suspicion lingered for years in some quarters, in the end the results were confirmed at eclipse after eclipse with higher and higher precision." -Peter Coles If ever you attempt to come out with a new scientific theory, there are three criteria you must fulfill: You must reproduce all the successes of the old theory,…
To make up for last month's long delay in posting, I'll knock out this month's recap of Forbes blog posts really quickly. Also, I still have Vacation Brain, so writing anything really new isn't in the cards... -- What Should Non-Scientists Learn From Physics?: You probably won't be surprised to hear that, in my opinion, it's not a specific set of facts, but an attitude toward the world. -- Softball Physics: How Far Can You Run While The Ball Is In The Air?: In which SteelyKid learning softball's "tag up" rule the hard way leads to an interesting problem in physics. -- How Long Would A Fidget…
"By its very nature science knows no boundaries. Walling off any group, for any reason, from full participation damages the entire enterprise of science. We must be scientists without borders." -Rocky Kolb We normally think of “let there be light” as when the Universe got its start. In a particular sense, this is true, since you can go back to a time before stars and galaxies existed, when the Universe was only a few million years old or less. But even before the first star, there was still light. According to the original observations of Penzias and Wilson, the galactic plane emitted some…
"We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds regarding the significance of the results. It is obvious that "belief" is never an alternative to "understanding" in physics." -J. Creswell et al. Three times now, the LIGO collaboration has produced very strong evidence that black hole pairs, from across the Universe, inspiraled and merged, producing gravitational waves. The twin LIGO detectors in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA each detected these signals, and the signals were correlated between both detectors. For the first time ever (and the…
Long time readers (and I do mean really long time readers) know that I used to do a regular Friday feature called Your Friday Dose of Woo. In the feature, I used to look for the silliest, woo-iest bits of quackery and pseudoscience that I could find, like quantum homeopathy, SCIO, Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, or Magickal psychic amplification a-go-go. Over time, it got harder and harder to do that on a weekly basis, but I still think that, barring some new, deep, serious story, there's value to ending the week with something on a lighter note. Yes, I know, this is a rule or…
"Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea." -Richard Feynman There’s no doubt that LIGO has given us one of the most incredible breakthroughs of the 21st century: the direct detection of gravitational waves. But as wonderful as LIGO is, so far it’s only been able to detect the very final stages of mergers of stellar mass-scale black holes, and only every few months at that. The technique of laser…
"Chapel Hill is a beautiful place, and I was wanting to get out of Livermore for an academic position, so we went there, both of us, as visiting research professors. After a few years I was given a regular professorship and Cecile was demoted to a lecturer." -Bryce DeWitt "Without being told it was a demotion. 'Oh, it will be so much better for you.' And that's the part I didn't like, the hypocrisy of letting me believe that it was better." -Cecile DeWitt-Morette When you have rules that treat men and women equally in theory, but the practical application of the rules leads to unequal results…
“Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in our society. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with the roots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. We need to embrace 'inner disarmament,' reducing our own emotions of suspicion, hatred and hostility toward our brothers and sisters.” -Dalai Lama XIV From subatomic scales to very human ones to the largest conceivable ones in the cosmos, we do our best to cover the entire Universe here at Starts With A Bang! There's always so much to discuss that we're never going to lack for potential topics,…
"The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event." -Janna Levin Whenever there’s a catastrophic, cataclysmic event in space, there’s almost always a tremendous release of energy that accompanies it. A supernova emits light; a neutron star merger emits gamma rays; a quasar emits radio waves; merging black holes emit gravitational waves. But if there’s any sort of matter present outside the event horizons of these black holes, they have the potential to emit electromagnetic radiation, or light…
Orac Note: While Orac is on vacation, he's reprinting some of his "classics" (if you can call them that). He's also trying (but not always succeeding) to pick posts that have never been "rerun" before. (Orac has his favorites, and every few years when he's on vacation he can't resist rerunning them.) In any case, I used to run a feature called "Your Friday Dose of Woo." Basically, it was designed to feature the most spectacularly ridiculous pseudoscience and quackery I could find. It ran for two or three years, pretty much every Friday, until I got tired of being boxed in having to find…
"One volcano puts out more toxic gases - one volcano - than man makes in a whole year. And when you look at this 'climate change,' and when you look at the regular climate change that we all have in the world, we have warm and we have cooling spells." -John Raese Every year, dozens of volcanoes actively erupt across the Earth’s surface. In addition, other active volcanoes continue to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and even dormant volcanoes and other fissures in the Earth contribute to our overall carbon dioxide content. If we want to understand the effects that humanity is…
“It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.” -Dmitri Mendeleev When the Big Bang first occurred, the Universe was filled with all the various particles and antiparticles making up the Standard Model, and perhaps still others yet to be discovered. But missing from the list were protons, neutrons, or any of the atomic nuclei key to the life-giving elements in our Universe today.…
"There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these." -Enrico Fermi Want to uncover the secrets to the Universe? Find out what particles and interactions there are beyond the Standard Model? The conventional approach is to take particles up to extremely high energies and smash them together, hoping that something new and exciting comes…
"If you're puzzled by what dark energy is, you're in good company." -Saul Perlmutter We normally assume that the fundamental constants of the Universe are actually constant, but they don’t have to be that way. They could vary in space, in time, or with the energy density of the Universe, in principle. Before believing in such an extraordinary claim, however, you’d need some remarkable evidence. It’s arguable that exactly that sort of evidence is emerging: from the tensions in the expansion rate of the Universe. Three different types of measurements, distant stars and galaxies, the large…
“Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.” -George Carlin When you think of helium, you very likely think of balloons, birthday parties, and blimps. But this inert, lighter-than-air gas has a number of unique properties among all the elements, including that it’s liquid at very low temperatures and it enters a superfluid state. It’s scientific applications include particle accelerators, MRI machines, and anything…
"At least six lamp posts were snapped off while I watched. A few minutes later, I saw a side girder bulge out. But, though the bridge was bucking up at an angle of 45 degrees, I thought she would be able to fight it out. But, that wasn't to be." -Bert Farquharson If you’ve only ever seen one bridge collapse ever, it was probably the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. On November 7th, 1940, high, sustained winds sent the bridge from an up-and-down undulation into a twisting, rocking pattern that led to the eventual collapse of the structure. It’s been used as a classic example of resonance at work,…
"I don't always bet the same way I talk. Good advice is one thing, but smart gambling is quite another." -Hunter S. Thompson Did you know the world’s first wearable computer was built all the way back in the 1960s, was worn on your feet... and was used to help gamblers cheat at roulette? Physicists and mathematicians work with probability and predicting the behavior of a given system a lot, and when you combine that with the science of simple motion (as on a roulette wheel), the possibility of ‘beating the odds’ suddenly becomes real. Al Hibbs won an estimated $12,000 from the casinos in…
"My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected." -Stephen Hawking One of the most puzzling things about Black Holes is that if you wait around long enough, they’ll evaporate completely. The curved spacetime outside of the event horizon still undergoes quantum effects, and when you combine General Relativity and quantum field theory in exactly that fashion, you get a blackbody spectrum of thermal radiation out. Hawking radiation is what…
“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” -Ernest Rutherford Nuclear physics has, for decades now, been regarded less as a window into fundamental physics and more of a derived science. As we’ve discovered that nuclei, baryons, and mesons are all composite particles made out of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, though, we’ve realized that there are other possible combinations that nature allows, that should exist. Colour flux tubes…
"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it." -Ludwig Wittgenstein There are a great many events that occurred to give rise to the world, the Universe, and you. Everything from the Big Bang to the existence of the laws of physics to the cosmic history that created Earth to the biological history that gave rise to the 7+ billion of us today needed to unfold exactly as it did in order for things to be the way they are today. A standard cosmic timeline of our Universe's history. A series of extremely unlikely events all needed to occur in order so that you…