Science
drorzel | February 1, 2006The next experiment in the Top Eleven is probably the most famous failed experiment of all time.
Who: Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward Morley (1838-1923), American physicists.
When: Their first results were reported in 1887.
What: The famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which tried and failed to detect the motion of the Earth through the "luminiferous aether." At the time, light waves were believed to be disturbances in some medium that permeated all of space, and was fixed in an absolute sense. In this picture, objects moving through space should also be moving relative to the aether…
pharyngula | February 1, 2006…but my university actually supports me. There's a profile of yours truly that's part of a random rotating collection of links on UMM's main page (if you don't see it there, reload the page; it'll appear eventually.)
I am aware that I am slightly harsher and more radical than many of my colleagues on some issues (others have their own domains of expertise and radicalism), but one of the great things about UMM is that even if they don't explicitly endorse all of my opinions—and that acknowledgment on the main page is not an admission that this university is a hotbed of militant atheist…
drorzel | January 31, 2006Via Kieran Healy an example of the happy coexistence of science and religion: The Vatican Observatory. I particularly like Kieran's comment regarding the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope: I think that's just fantastic--like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?
I was already aware of the Vatican Observatory, thanks to Brother Guy Consolmagno, planetary scientist, Jesuit, and SF…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006I've got a couple of posts that have been nominated for The 2005 Koufax Awards: Best Post, so I've quickly brought them on board here at the new site. Voting isn't yet open, but here they are:
Idiot America. This one is something of a howl of anguish, and it's really more a lot of quotes from Charles Pierce's article of the same name in Esquire. If this gets the nomination, credit should go more to Pierce than to me—and that's OK.
Planet of the Hats. This article is probably the best representation for how I actually feel about religion. It's all metaphor, but if you don't get it, I won't be…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006
Some people might think I'm a rather morbid fellow. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate lackey at the University of Washington and working at the med school, there, I made a wonderful discovery one lunch hour: a bone room. Tucked away in an odd corner of the building was a room full of shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, each one containing the bones of some individual who'd left their remains to science. They'd been thoroughly cleaned and disarticulated, and many had parts sawed apart so you could peer into the sinuses or the hollow spaces for marrow or poke around in the caverns of…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006Well, Kevin Drum's prediction about the State of the Union address is a bit vague and general:
Bush's theme may well be that he's right and his critics are wrong; and his vision may well be of a year of partisan trench warfare with congressional Democrats.
But Chris Mooney gets specific:
A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the "science" president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems…
drorzel | January 30, 2006I should probably stick to doing only one audience-participation thing at a time (there are more Top Eleven posts on the way), but it's a busy week for me at work, and I'm not really going to have time to post a lot of long articles, so there will be a few "talk among yourselves" entries over the next few days, in hopes of generating some interesting content without a whole lot of typing on my part.
Back when I posted my request for "Great Experiments" in other sciences, Kate remarked that another good topic would be something along the lines of "Most annoying misconception about your field…
drorzel | January 30, 2006Next up in the Top Eleven is a man who is largely responsible for the fact that we have electricity to run the computer you're using to read this.
Who: Michael Faraday (1791-1867) a poor and self-educated British scientist who rose to become one of the greatest physicists of the 19th Century.
When: Around 1831.
What: Faraday's main achievement was the discovery of Faraday's Law (obviously), one of "Maxwell's Equations" describing the behavior of electric and magnetic fields (in a certain sense, Maxwell was a master of PR-- he took a bunch of equations that other people had already discovered…
pharyngula | January 29, 2006This post on the Republican war on science was chilling enough, but did you really have to draw the logical conclusion of it all at the end? I'm trying hard to preserve the tattered shreds of my optimistic state of denial, you know.
pharyngula | January 28, 2006Chris Clarke sent me some unfortunate news about my alma mater, the University of Washington. There's a scandal brewing at the Burke Museum, involving a retired curator of vertebrate paleontology, John M. Rensberger. The Seattle Weekly has published a series on the troubles, with a professional evaluation of the collection. Basically, the Burke has a beautiful assemblage of vertebrate fossils, but their collection was very poorly documented (scribbled notes on scraps of brown paper bags?), and there are also allegations that many of the collecting trips were made without permits or permission…
drorzel | January 27, 2006This is true.
A guy I knew in graduate school, he had a buddy who was working late in the lab one night. He was all alone, and he got a little bored, so he took a two-liter soda bottle, and he filled it halfway up with liquid nitrogen. Then he screwed the cap on tight.
Now, liquid nitrogen, when it boils, it takes up something like 700 times the volume of the liquid. So this guy, he's got this bottle, and he's kicking it around in the hall. But the bottle starts to swell up, so he tries to open the cap, and it's stuck. So he runs into the bathroom, and he dumps it in a sink, and runs back out…
pharyngula | January 27, 2006Sometimes creationists say things like, "Evolution doesn't explain the origins of life!" The common reply is that that's the domain of abiogenesis, not evolution, with the implied suggestion that the creationist should go away and quit bugging us.
That's a cop-out.
I'm going to be somewhat heretical, and suggest that abiogenesis as the study of chemical evolution is a natural subset of evolutionary theory, and that we should own up to it. It's natural processes all the way back, baby, no miracles required. Life is chemistry, vitalism has evaporated and is one with phlogiston, and scientists…
drorzel | January 27, 2006Next up in the Top Eleven is an experiment whose basic technique is still in use today.
Who: Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), a British scientist who made a number of discoveries in physics and chemistry, but received credit for very few of them.
When: 1797.
What: Cavendish's modern claim to fame is the torsion pendulum experiment, an idea that originated with John Michell, who died before completing it.
The apparatus for the famous experiment, shown at left, consists of a dumbell-shaped pendulum hung from a very fine wire. Two larger masses (Cavendish used 350 lb lead spheres) are brought near…
pharyngula | January 26, 2006
Here's a nifty video (mpg) of an octopus confronting an ROV working off Vancouver Island. The poor thing was just trying to crush and eat an interloper (or perhaps disassemble it for spare parts to use in its high-tech scheme to take over the world), and the ROV operator uses its thrusters to fling debris at it and drive it away.
It's quite a battle, and the octopus holds on for a surprisingly long time in the face of an extremely obnoxious machine.
drorzel | January 25, 2006Some interesting astrophysics news this week, from Nature: scientists have used "microlensing" to discover a extrasolar planet only five times Earth's mass:Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb looks much more like home. It lies about 390 million kilometres from its star: if it were inside our Solar System, the planet would sit between Mars and Jupiter.
It takes ten years for the planet to orbit its parent star, a common-or-garden red dwarf that lies about 28,000 light years from Earth, close to the centre of our Galaxy.
Of course, it's not quite time to start buying tickets for the colony ships: at…
pharyngula | January 25, 2006Carl Zimmer reviews the new Darwin exhibit at the AMNH. He has a few complaints, but otherwise it sounds wonderful.
pharyngula | January 25, 2006I saw on Muton, and several readers have mentioned it to me, this article about the world's smallest vertebrate, fish of the genus Paedocypris. It's a gorgeous translucent cyprinid, so is somewhat related to my favorite fish, Danio rerio. They live in cool, slow moving water in peat swamp forests of Southeast Asia. One female, only 7.9mm long, contained about 50 eggs, so they know it was sexually mature.
Living Paedocypris progenetica, CMK 18496, (a, b) male, ca 9 mm; (c) female, ca 8.8 mm.
That size isn't at all shocking—my zebrafish larvae at about that size are active hunters with…
drorzel | January 25, 2006Third in the Top Eleven is Sir Isaac Newton, who squeaks in with two nominations for two different experiments.
Who: Isaac Newton (1642-1727), famous English physicist, mathematician, alchemist, Master of the Mint, and Neal Stephenson character.
When: Newton was secretive and reluctant to publish anything, so it's sort of hard to assign dates. I'm going with "About 1700."
What: Newton pretty much kicked off modern science, so you could go on for a long time about his various accomplishments, but he was cited for two specific experiments: splitting white light with a prism, and measuring the…
drorzel | January 25, 2006The second in the Top Eleven is the first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, by Ole Christensen Roemer (whose last name ought to contain an o-with-a-slash-through-it, that I've rendered as an "oe").
Who: Ole Roemer (1644-1710), a Danish astronomer.
When: The crucial observations were made around 1675.
What: Roemer made careful observations of the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io (which circles the planet once every two days or so), and noted that the time between eclipses of Io (times when it disappeared behind Jupiter) got shorter as the Earth moved closer to Jupiter, and got longer…