Science
drorzel | May 14, 2010Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before Freddie Mercury got hold of it:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Do objects have real states
Or just probabilities?
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
Studying quantum (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little psi, little rho
No interpretation ever…
oracknows | May 14, 2010
"I don't want knowledge. I want certainty!"
--David Bowie, from Law (Earthlings on Fire)
If there's one universal trait among humans, it seems to be an unquenchable thirst for certainty. This should come as no surprise to those committed to science and rational thinking because there is a profound conflict between our human desire for certainty and the uncertainty of scientific knowledge. The reason is that the conclusions of science are always provisional. They are always subject to change based on new evidence. Although by no means the only reason, clearly this craving for certainty the…
grrlscientist | May 14, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
drorzel | May 13, 2010I get asked my opinion of Bohmian mechanics a fair bit, despite the fact that I know very little about it. This came up again recently, so I got some suggested reading from Matt Leifer, on the grounds that I ought to learn something about it if I'm going to keep being asked about it. One of his links led to the Bohmian Mechanics collaboration, where they helpfully provide a page of pre-prints that you can download. Among these was a link to the Bohmian Mechanics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which seemed like a good place to start as it would be a) free, and b) aimed at a…
drorzel | May 13, 2010Spinning off a blog at Inside Higher Ed, the Dean Dad has a post on deciding what classes are essential:
My personal sense of it is that the distinction between core and periphery is largely a function of purpose. If your goal in life is to be an exhibited artist, then you might well decide that art is essential and history a frill. If your goal is to be an engineer, I could understand valuing a math class over a psych class. Since different students have different purposes, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that one student's frill is another student's priority.
But the questions go deeper…
pharyngula | May 13, 2010This essay on the accommodationists vs. the 'new atheists' gets off to a bad start, I'm afraid, and I had some concern it was going to be another of those fuzzy articles.
There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 "intelligent design" trial.
That's incorrect. The anti-evolutionists have not been defeated — they got smacked in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, and that's about it. The creationists are still thriving, and in some places (like Texas) getting even bolder and…
pharyngula | May 12, 2010
You don't have to tell me, I know I'm late to the party: the news about the draft Neandertal genome sequence was announced last week, and here I am getting around to it just now. In my defense, I did hastily rewrite one of my presentation to include a long section on the new genome information, so at least I was talking about it to a few people. Besides, there is coverage from a genuine expert on Neandertals, John Hawks, and of course Carl Zimmer wrote an excellent summary. All I'm going to do now is fuss over a few things on the edge that interested me.
This was an impressive technical feat…
drorzel | May 12, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter, I ran across a Discovery News story touting a recent arxiv preprint claiming to see variation in the fine-structure constant. It's a basically OK story, but garbles a few details, so I thought it would be worth giving it the ResearchBlogging treatment, in the now-traditional Q&A format.
What did they do? The paper looks at some spectral lines in radio emission from a moderately distant galaxy with the poetic name "PKS1413+135." These lines are produced by OH molecules in interstellar gas clouds, and the frequencies they see suggest that there may have…
grrlscientist | May 11, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
drorzel | May 11, 2010I should note up front that I'm kind of jealous of Marcus Chown regarding this book. Subtitled "What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe," The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck is a book that uses trivial everyday observations-- the fact that you don't fall through the floor, the fact that the sky is dark at night-- as a jumping-off point for discussions about deep and fundamental scientific ideas like Pauli exclusion and inflationary cosmology. It's a fantastic idea for a pop-science book, and I wish I'd thought of it first.
The range of topics here is pretty big, covering most of…
oracknows | May 11, 2010In yesterday's post, in which I discussed the President's Cancer Panel report on environmental toxins and cancer, I criticized one of the reactions to it, specifically that of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), even referencing a truly hilarious Daily Show clip in which Jeff Stier, Associate Director of ACSH didn't exactly come off looking particularly good. (Let's just leave it at that.) Apparently my criticism didn't sit too well with Gilbert Ross, MD, the Medical/Executive Director of ACSH, because he actually showed up in the comments, apparently wounded that I would point…
grrlscientist | May 10, 2010
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 29" has been published by me at my Nature Network blog, Maniraptora. So go there, read the linked essays and be sure to leave your comments on at least one of those essays, either telling those authors what they did well, or making suggestions for improvements in their writing.
After you've read this carnival, perhaps you also wish to submit your blog essays to the next issue of Scientia? If so, you're in…
drorzel | May 10, 2010I've written before about the problem of having in-between views on controversial subjects in blogdom. This is something that also comes up in Jessica's excellent entry on online culture, and has been scientifically demonstrated in political contexts.
I'm somewhat bemused, then, to see the same thing happen in a physics context. A while back, I got an email asking about quantum foundations that read in part:
I'm very keen to understand why you and Andrew Thomas reject [the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM].
I'd be very happy if you'd take a few minutes to try to describe why you think MWI is…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 28" was published this past Monday by Kelsey at her blog, Mauka to Makai. This nicely-done issue of Scientia filled with well-written and thought-provoking essays about a variety of topics.
After you've read this carnival, I hope you will submit your blog essays to the next issue of Scientia. We are trying an experiment right now: we are trying to publish this blog…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
drorzel | May 9, 2010One of my many character weaknesses is a fondness for the kooky UFO programs run on the History Channel and other educational cable networks. The nuttier the better-- there's something about the credulity and self-delusion displayed by the "researchers" they trot out that I find really hilarious.
I have to say, though, that they've outdone themselves with this new Ancient Aliens series. To the point where it almost has to be a put-on-- last week, they had a pudgy guy with wild eyes stating that stone obelisks around the world were really receivers in a global energy distribution network based…
pharyngula | May 9, 2010Years ago, when the Trophy Wife™ was a psychology grad student, she participated in research on what babies think. It was interesting stuff because it was methodologically tricky — they can't talk, they barely respond in comprehensible way to the world, but as it turns out you can get surprisingly consistent, robust results from techniques like tracking their gaze, observing how long they stare at something, or even the rate at which they suck on a pacifier (Maggie, on The Simpsons, is known to communicate quite a bit with simple pauses in sucking.)
There is a fascinating article in the NY…
drorzel | May 9, 2010When I was writing about the seemingly contradictory meanings of "adiabatic" the other day, I almost gave "theory" as an example of a word with nearly opposite meanings. After all, as anyone who has even glanced at the evolution-creation "debate" has heard, a "Theory" in science is something more exalted than a mere guess-- it's a guess that has been confirmed by observations and experiments, and can thus be regarded as true with a high degree of confidence (and assigned a capital letter in this post, to set it apart). (Also, in physical science at least, it makes quantitative predictions.).…
grrlscientist | May 8, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 28" was published this past Monday by Kelsey at her blog, Mauka to Makai. This nicely-done issue of Scientia filled with well-written and thought-provoking essays about a variety of topics.
After you've read this carnival, I hope you will submit your blog essays to the next issue of Scientia. We are trying an experiment right now: we are trying to publish this blog…
drorzel | May 8, 2010While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture:
Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of Stanford, science writer Jeff Hecht, John Madey of Hawaii's FEL lab, and Eric Gustafson of Caltech and LIGO.-- about the current status of lasers in their areas of science, and the future prospects.
From ray-gun to Blu-Ray is a very nice survey of lasers and laser-like devices in…