Science
drorzel | September 13, 2010A fairly straightforward question: quantum physicists divide the world into two categories of things, fermions and bosons. What's your favorite object having integer spin?
What's your favorite boson?online survey
Superpositions of answers, while allowed in properly symmetrized wavefunctions, are not valid responses to this poll.
pharyngula | September 12, 2010Stephen Hawking was on Larry King Friday night, and here's a little video of the event. Through no fault of his own, Hawking isn't exactly a dynamic stage presence — he's a bag of bones in a wheelchair with a computer voice speaking for him — and Larry King is…well, King is a genuinely dumb interviewer whose weak-minded talents are better suited to celebrity airheads.
That isn't the whole thing. There's also part 2 and part 3, which includes Leonard Mlodinow (who's good, but sucks up too much to the other panelists), and a couple of people whose intelligence is a better match to King's:…
drorzel | September 10, 2010When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but didn't quite get it all together.
Kate asked about what it would've been like to be a physicist working at that time, when both relativity and quantum mechanics were being born, trying out new approaches and not really knowing whether a given approach would turn out…
drorzel | September 9, 2010Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important.
I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…
oracknows | September 9, 2010Here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, over the last several years, what started out as a more general interest in skepticism and science with a natural focus on medicine and a side interest in combatting Holocaust denial became more focused on promoting science-based medicine. As the saying goes, "Science, it works, bitches," and I make no apologies for promoting science-based medicine as the best medicine and applying skepticism and science to claims of purveyors of unscientific so-called "alternative" medicine advocates and anti-vaccine loons. However, I am not blind to the shortcomings of…
drorzel | September 8, 2010The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. "Laws of physics" here includes Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers must see the same speed of light as stationary observers (Einstein included the constancy of the speed of light as a second postulate in his original relativity paper, but it's redundant-- the constancy of the speed of light is a direct consequence of the principle of relativity). This leads directly…
drorzel | September 7, 2010In chapter 2 of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, there's a footnote about the ubiquity of uncertainty principle analogies in the mass media:
To give you an idea of the breadth of subjects in which this shows up, in June 2008, Google turned up citations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in (among others) an article from the Vermont Free Press about traffic cameras, a Toronto Star article citing the influence of YouTube on underground artists, and a blog article about the Phoenix Suns of the NBA. Incidentally, all of these articles also use the Uncertainty Principle incorrectly--by the…
drorzel | September 3, 2010Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I'll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind of a condensed version of the three part series I did a few weeks ago.
A is for Acousto-optic modulator This is a device that uses sound waves in a crystal to deflect light and shift its frequency. It's essential for rapid control of laser properties.
B is for…
drorzel | September 2, 2010"Hey, dude, whatcha doin'?"
"Signing these contracts. I'm not sure why they need four copies, but they do."
"Contracts for what?"
"The new book. Remmeber, the one we've been talking about these last few weeks? Sequel-of-sorts to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog? About relativity?"
"Oh, yeah, that's right! We're doing another book! Where do I sign?"
"What do you mean, 'Where do I sign?' You're a dog."
"I could, you know, put a paw print on the line, or something."
"I suppose you could, but it wouldn't be legally binding. Dogs aren't allowed to sign contracts."
"You know that's horribly…
drorzel | September 2, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's a list of "survival tips" for women entering grad school in the sciences. It's a pretty good and pretty typical list of advice-- you can find more or less the same advice posted somewhere every fall.
What's striking about it, though, is that if you stripped all the specific gender references out, it would still be a good list of advice, for students of either gender. Here's the list with gender-specific terms removed:
Be realistic about support from faculty. As a general matter, faculty of either gender want to see their students of either gender succeed.…
drorzel | September 1, 2010Rubber dino, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
Rubber dino, fearsome roar,
Good thing you're a herbivore
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
doo-doo doo-de-doo
Every day when I,
get undressed next to the sink,
I find a
Little fella who's,
cute and yellow and extinct
When I squeeze you, water squirts,
Then I giggle, 'til it hurts
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
You're my favorite bathtime toy,
Watch out for that asteroid!
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of,
Rubber dino…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's a new medical study of the effects of alcohol consumption that finds a surprising result:
Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting…
drorzel | August 31, 2010A lot of people have been blogging and Twittering about this subway map of science, which puts various branches of science in the place of the lines on the London Underground map, showing connections between them. It's a huge graphic, but a kind of cool image.
I do, however, have a problem with it, which is illustrated by the key to the lines shown at right. The category of physics is presented as "Theoretical Physics and Quantum Mechanics." I have no problem with the quantum part, as quantum mechanics is one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. I do have a problem…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Back in July, I did a post looking at how the fountain in our ornamental backyard pond shoots higher when the level of the pond drops. I set up a simple model of the process, which worked surprisingly well, but I said at the time that I really needed more data to say whether that agreement was real or accidental. Well, yesterday, I got some extreme data:
The leak in the pond has gotten worse, I think, and the water was barely covering the top of the pump box at all. A very rough calibration of this image, using the fact that the brick is 2in high, gives a height of the spray of about 62in,…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Over in Discover-land, Razib has a couple of posts about the content of science blogs, based on an analysis of the content of the top science blogs according to Wikio. Razib's second post is sparked by a pointed question from the author of the original study:
I'm now curious to find out why there are no 'popular' blogs in certain subjects. Do working condensed matter physicists who want to engage with the public write about astrophysics? Or are astrophysicists the only physicists who want to blog for the public? Or does the public only read astrophysics blogs?
This is, of course, an obvious…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Sunday was a really long day around Chateau Steelypips, and I couldn't see staying awake to watch the premiere of Phil Plait's Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel, so I'm way late in writing about it. I DVRed it, though, and watched it last night.
The theme of the premiere/ pilot was killer rocks from out of space, and focused on Phil getting his MythBusters on to test various ideas about asteroid or comet impacts and how to stop them. They blew up a scale model, shot projectiles into various types of rock to simulate nuclear bombs or kinetic impacts, all in the name of testing what would…
catdynamics | August 30, 2010Virginia County Circuit Judge Peatross set aside a subpoena by Cuccinelli, Virginia's Attorney General, seeking the record of Prof. Michael Mann while he worked at the University of Virginia.
The ruling said the AG had failed state what was suspected to be false or fraudulent, but leaves the option for Cuccinelli to refile a new supoena.
UVa likes
Cuccinelli apperntly intends to refile the subpoena as soon as he can think of something suitable fishy to randomly allege.
h/t kos
NYT story
WaPo story
drorzel | August 30, 2010Last week, John Baez posted a report on a seminar by Dzimitry Matsukevich on ion trap quantum information issues. In the middle of this, he writes:
Once our molecular ions are cold, how can we get them into specific desired states? Use a mode locked pulsed laser to drive stimulated Raman transitions.
Huh? As far as I can tell, this means "blast our molecular ion with an extremely brief pulse of light: it can then absorb a photon and emit a photon of a different energy, while itself jumping to a state of higher or lower energy."
I saw this, and said "Hey, that's a good topic for a blog post…
drorzel | August 30, 2010There was a deeply silly New York Times article about "Past Life Regression" over the weekend:
In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office -- leather couch, granite-topped coffee table -- makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.
In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in…
drorzel | August 27, 2010Via Thoreau, a paper from a physicist in Oregon that's pretty much a grenade lobbed into the always-explosive grade inflation discussion:
We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective grading scale, one that is independent of grading curves, we find that 29% of intro astronomy students fail to meet minimal standards for college level work. Of the remaining students, 41% achieve satisfactory work, 30% achieve mastery of the…