You've read the blog, now try the book: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner, and available wherever books are sold.
"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
"Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)
Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.
I don't know if Dijon the giraffe has made a Toddler Blogging appearance yet, but in case she hasn't, here she is:
SteelyKid is in the process of explaining that Dijon is her giraffe ("My graph!"). Which she is, being a gift from Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. She's a rather heavy knit giraffe, and is awesome.
And that's all I've got for tonight's Toddler Blogging, as SteelyKid stubbornly refused to go to sleep, or even close her eyes for the hour and a half since bedtime, and I have a horrendous muscle spasm in my neck from sitting with her. Kate's tagged in on "Oh, God, go to sleep already!" duty, and I'm going to take some painkillers and find a heating pad. Owie, owie, owie.
Most research-assignment handouts given to undergraduates fail to guide the students toward a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, according to two researchers at the University of Washington who are studying how students conduct research and find information.
My initial reaction was "If I could give them a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, it wouldn't be research." Then I noticed the last three words, and remembered the source-- this is the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is almost exclusively about the concerns of humanities and social science faculty. When they talk about research assignments, they mean library research, not the sort of experimental or computational research projects we put students on in the sciences.
I had intended to write up a recent paper for ResearchBlogging today, but I cleverly forgot to bring either the hard copy of the PDF home last night, which wrecked that plan. And I've got real lab work to do today, so it's not happening at work.
This seems like a good opportunity, though, to ask if there are things I ought to be explaining here that haven't occurred to me for one reason or another. So, as the post title says:
What topics in physics or related areas would you like me to write about here? This could be a recent paper, something from a recent news story ("I heard these guys in India invented a room-temperature superconductor..."), or some background idea that you've always wondered about ("What's angular momentum, anyway?").
Leave your questions and suggestions in the comments. I won't promise to answer everything (there are a lot of topics even in physics that I'm not really qualified to comment on), but I'll make an effort to write up answers to any questions I have good answers for.
I'm going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of my day scrounging up adapters to connect two different classes of plumbing fittings. In honor of that, here's a poll question based on something that one research group used to do:
Amusingly, I have seen something that easily could have been turned into a Swagelok to BNC adapter (in fact, I might still have one in my lab), that served a serious purpose.
My initial reaction to the financial meltdown caused by the housing bubble was "Are our business leaders really that stupid?" Things like this news squib from Inside Higher Ed make me suspect the answer is "yes, they are that stupid":
Business schools -- including such prestigious ones as those of Columbia and Harvard Universities -- are adding courses on social media to the M.B.A. curriculum, Business Week reported. The rapid growth of social media has many companies wanting to know more about how to use various tools, creating an opening for new M.B.A.'s who want to make themselves more valuable to potential employers.
If you need a class to teach you how to use Twitter, you probably shouldn't be handling financial transactions involving millions or billions of dollars.
Now, to be fair to the business schools, reading the original article in Business Week makes clear that these classes are not on the basics of using social media, but on how to cynically exploit them for marketing purposes:
"Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely offering legal advice, and nonlawyers cannot be held accountable because they believed that what they did was legal. But now we are poised to drown in an even more dangerous tautology--first offered up by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey--which holds that the Bush administration lawyers made mistakes because they were the victims of the "difficulty and novelty" of the legal questions before them, and then victimized again by "relentless," "hostile," and "unforgiving" critics who would hold them responsible for their decisions. Under this view there can be no legitimate criticism of the Bush lawyers--no matter how well-intentioned or how well-reasoned, such criticism is partisan and political and vengeful. There is no law. There is only your team versus mine. "
"The excitation of macroscopic quantum matter often occurs in lumps: The amount of magnetic flux that pierces a superconductor can only increase in units of the flux quantum of h/2e; the conductance of a two-dimensional electron gas in a magnetic field is quantized in units of e2/h (the conductance quantum). Now, writing in Physical Review Letters, Wang-Kong Tse and Allan H. MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin, US, present theoretical calculations that show that the magneto-optical response of a three-dimensional topological insulator--an otherwise nonconducting material with a band structure that gives rise to conducting states along its surface--is quantized in units of the vacuum fine-structure constant, α=e2/ħc=1/137. Their finding is an example of how the exotic properties of topological order in a three-dimensional solid lead to an exactly quantized excitation"
"The AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, established in 2010, recognizes early-career scientists and engineers who demonstrate excellence in their contribution to public engagement with science activities. A monetary prize of $5,000, a commemorative plaque, complimentary registration to the AAAS Annual Meeting, and reimbursement for reasonable hotel and travel expenses to attend the AAAS Annual Meeting to receive the prize are given to the recipient.
For the purposes of this award, public engagement activities are defined as the individual's active participation in efforts to engage with the public on science- and technology-related issues and promote meaningful dialogue between science and society."
"[T[he Perry Preschool Experiment consisted of 123 low income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan. (All the children had IQ scores between 75 and 85.) When the children were three years old, they were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality preschool education, or to a control group, which received no preschool education at all. The subjects were then tracked over the ensuing decades, with the most recent analysis comparing the groups at the age of 40. The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They got much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs."
"Bringing the do-it-yourself market to a whole new level, a California firm is selling kits to build a personal satellite -- and get it into space -- for $8,000.
The program, called TubeSat, is the brainchild of Randa and Roderick Milliron, a Mojave, Calif.-based couple who've been developing a bare-bones, low-cost rocket system for the past 14 years. Selling flights as a package deal with satellite-building kits is proving to be a winning combination, with more than a dozen customers signed up to fly on the debut launch early next year."
"After using Google to get to a website, this interaction occurred between a researcher and a study participant:
Researcher: "What is this website?"
Student: "Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up."
"Search engine rankings seem extremely important," [Eszter] Hargittai said. "We found that a website's layout or content almost didn't even matter to the students. What mattered is that it was the number one result on Google.""
Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term-- say, leaving your car parked outside all day-- I hope everyone will agree that leaving the windows slightly open is the better call, but the answer isn't as clear for a short stop. There might well be some time during which the open-window car heats up faster as warm air from outside gets in, while the closed-window car holds in the air-conditioned goodness longer.
It occurred to me not long after posting that, while walking through the parking lot, that it was possible to test this with SCIENCE! A colleague in computer science has a car that is very nearly identical to mine, as you can see in this picture:
Chris's car is similar enough to mine that I have more than once stood next to it like an idiot pressing the "unlock" button on my car remote and wondering why the door wasn't opening. This makes for a nearly ideal test of the question of how to arrange your windows: just park both cars in the sun, one with the windows open and one with the windows closed, and monitor their temperatures over half an hour or so.
It took a while to get together, but yesterday, we did just that.
On Twitter, I saw Graham Farmelo link to this Physics World blog post about Ed Witten's Newton lecture, describing it as "Edward Witten's clearest-ever overview of string theory for laypeople (i.e. most others)." Witten's a name to conjure with, so I thought "That might be worth a look."
So I went to the blog post, which has video embeds for the two halves of the talk (~30 min each), each with a single frame frozen as an example. Both representative frames show slides that are nothing but words-- one full paragraph each, starting in the very upper left of the screen, and ending at the bottom right. They're formatted in a way that suggests they might actually be one continuous stream of text scrolling up the screen like the opening credits in Star Wars, only the text color is slightly different.
And, really, it's hard to think of a worse advertisement for a presentation than that. It's conceivable that a talk with slides like that might be brilliant, but my experience suggests that's not the way to bet. If I was arriving late to a colloquium, and saw a slide that looked like those, I would walk right on by.
Which is what I'm going to do, in a virtual sense, right now.
"Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple errors. For advanced students, these rules can also be applied to regular courses. "
"My frustration with graduate training is that from my (admittedly removed) perspective, scholars seem to be taught the ropes of building a career very thoroughly: which journals count, how to finely slice research into multiple publications, how to build a competitive CV. I get the impression PhD candidates are rarely prompted to ask themselves "so what?" unless it's to build an argument in a grant proposal. When scientists are asked "but what does this actually mean?" they usually are able to connect the dots to an eventual cure for a disease, a longer-lasting battery, a more sustainable planet. They have to be able to do that; science is expensive, and funders want answers. So they connect the dots even if, in reality, they are doing basic science and have no idea what it will lead to."
"The past news week was dominated by the Shirley Sherrod saga, a miserable episode that involved political operatives masquerading as journalists distorting fact in order to promote pre-existing bias, followed by a rush to judgment on the part of those too weak or fearful to exercise independent thought. A casualty of the Sherrod story's domination of the news is that it obscured the whimpering end of two of the largest crises of the past several years: the signing of the Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill and the plugging of the BP well.
As we all now know, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and here we have wasted two of them. "
"It is nearly impossible for most researchers to go through an entire career without ever working with a jerk.
Much has been written in the corporate world on the topic of difficult co-workers and bosses. Some of the issues are universal, but others are more specific to academe. That is, the personality types might be similar in academic and nonacademic settings (e.g., the bully, the manipulator, the patronizer, the whiner, the passive-aggressive underminer, etc.), but some of the methods and situations that academic jerks have at their disposal are different."
"Ms. Brox's narrative is in many ways a social history, told through man's relationship to light. In the Middle Ages cities were dark at night, residents locked into their houses. The term "curfew" dates from this period (couvre le feu), for the moment the lights were doused the streets became too dangerous to navigate.
By the 1700s cities were sporadically lit with whale oil lamps, kept alive by lamplighters. They tended to extinguish easily. Most were out by 9:00 or 10:00. Linkboys, bearing links, or torches, took over, hiring themselves out to pedestrians and lighting their way home. Eventually city lights came to define the very idea of urbanity, she writes. The countryside remained mostly in darkness until the Roosevelt era, when the hydroelectric projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority finally made possible the spread of electricity to rural areas. "
"The University of California campuses are known for top doctoral programs, but two new reports on graduate students suggest that the state's financial problems are posing dangers to that reputation."
