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Physics, Politics, Pop Culture
"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.
You've read the blog, now try the book: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog will be published December 22nd by Scribner.
"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.
November 22, 2009
Category: Book Writing • Dog • Personal • Physics • Physics Books • Physics with Emmy • Pictures • Publicity • Steelykid!
Look! How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a real book:
Emmy says, very seriously, "You will buy a copy, won't you?"
Of course, like everything else in this house, SteelyKid had to grab a copy:
Posted by Chad Orzel at 6:22 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 20, 2009
Category: Basketball • Personal • Sports
Kate and I went to the two games of the "semifinals" of the 2K Sports Classic Supporting Coaches vs. Cancer, Your Name Here for a Prince pre-season "tournament" last night (the scare quotes are because the four teams playing last night were guaranteed to be playing last night, regardless of what happened in the earlier "rounds"). We were in section 329 of Madison Square Garden, which aren't great seats in an absolute sense, but are pretty darn good for a game-day impulse buy. Not that there was any trouble getting seats-- the lower levels were maybe 3/4 full.
The first game saw Syracuse beat Cal by 22 in a virtual home game for the Orange. At one point, the Cal band came out to do a T-shirt toss, and I have rarely seen a group of people that anxious to get the hell off the court at a major sporting event. One of them appeared to huck his shirt directly at Bob Knight, who was calling the game for ESPN.
The second game saw North Carolina outlast Ohio State, in a game that was sloppy and uninteresting most of the way-- hovering in that frustrating 12-15 point range where the outcome probably isn't in doubt, but it's not enough of a blow-out to write it off and go home early. Carolina made it interesting when we did decide to leave, with about a minute to go, and let Ohio State close to within two, needing some clutch free throws to secure the victory (which we watched from the gate closest to the exit, along with fifty other people who had also decided to leave early, but came back for the final plays).
You cant really take too much from November basketball, but some scatered observations are below the fold.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:17 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2009
Category: Basketball • Book Writing • Physics • Physics Books • Physics with Emmy • Publicity • Sports
It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"
On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and UNC vs. Ohio State. Not a bad double bill for November basketball.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 3:52 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Personal • Pictures • Steelykid!
Actually, this ought to be "Wednesday Morning Baby Blogging," as that's when the picture was taken. Kate and I are going to New York City for the weekend, though, and SteelyKid is spending the weekend with Grandma and Grandpa in Scenic Whitney Point. So, you get an early picture, posted late:
This was taken just before we bundled her off to day care Wednesday. Kate's playing the "got your red dog" game-- for some reason, when you pop the pacifier out of SteelyKid's mouth, she finds it hilarious. Provided that you give it back pretty quickly, that is...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:11 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 18, 2009
Category: Art • Personal • Polls • Pop Culture
Kate has a court appearance in New York tomorrow, and we're making a long weekend of it. I'm typing this from my parents' house, where I'm dropping SteelyKid off for some quality time with Grandma and Grandpa, and tomorrow, I'm heading down to The City. I've got some meetings scheduled tomorrow afternoon, and Friday at lunch, and then we're going to kick back and enjoy New York.
Of course, one of the paralyzing things about NYC is the sheer variety of cultural options. There's the AMNH, with lots of geeky exhibits, the Met, where you can spend days and not see everything, and MOMA, for a different sort of art experience. I've looked at the web sites for all of them, and none of the current exhibits looked like can't-miss shows to me. And it's too late in the year for the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters.
So, we'll throw this out to a poll: What should we go see during our free time in The City this weekend?
Please choose only one. We don't promise to abide by the results of the poll, but suggestions are welcome.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:03 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia • Blogs • Books • Education • Football • Politics • Pop Culture • Social-Science • Sports
It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends that led to the NCTM's approach to math have a long pedigree. During the 1970s and 1980s, educators in reading, English, and history argued that the traditional curriculum needed to be more "engaging" and "relevant" to an increasingly alienated and unmotivated--or so it was claimed--student body. Some influential educators sought to dismiss the traditional curriculum altogether, viewing it as a white, Christian, heterosexual-male product that unjustly valorized rational, abstract, and categorical thinking over the associative, experience-based, and emotion-laden thinking supposedly more congenial to females and certain minorities.
This veers a little too much in the direction of "we must protect our precious bodily fluids!," and really undercuts the effectiveness of the rest of the argument. This is not to say that there weren't nutty things said by people on the other side of the math-education argument, but any time you start to sound like Jack D. Ripper, you're headed to a Bad Place.
Of course, that's only the lowest-order effect of nuttiness. The next highest order contribution comes when people are able to use the reprehensible views of your associates to construct seemingly devastating counterattacks, such as Malcom Gladwell's response to Steven Pinker (who wrote a fairly devastating review of Gladwell in the New York Times), which consists mostly of pointing out that Pinker's comments about NFL quarterbacks are based on arguments from a creepy racist. Which is superficially very effective-- after all, who wants to be associated with a creepy racist, even twice removed?-- but doesn't really address the substance of the critique. It also neatly dodges the whole "igon value" issue (namely, that Gladwell misuses technical terms in a way that suggests he has no idea what he's talking about), which I'm sure Gladwell is more than happy to pretend never happened, but which is much more central to Pinker's argument than the NFL business.
So, not only do nutty views end up making it difficult for people who generally agree with you to, well, agree with you, but they also provide aid and comfort to those who disagree with you, by giving them an easy rhetorical dodge past people who use your arguments. The moral here is clear: people with creepy political views need to stop agreeing with me about stuff.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:41 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Links Dump
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:29 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Category: History of Science • Physics • Polls • Science
As every physics-loving dog knows, the idea that electrons behave like waves was first suggested by Loius Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (the 7th duc de Broglie) in 1923. The proper pronunciation of his surname is a mystery even to human physicists, though. So, how would you say it?
Even though Louis was a quantum pioneer, please choose only one of the available options.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:17 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Football • Physics • Quantum Optics • Sports
Sunday night, the Patriots lost a heartbreaker to the Colts 35-34. The talk of the sports world yesterday was Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fouth-and-two on his own 28 yard line when he was up by six with just over two minutes to play. They didn't get the first down, and turned the ball back over to the Colts, who went on to score a touchdown and win the game.
Yesterday's discussion was a low point even by the standards of sports talk radio, with one idiot after another holding forth about how stupid Belichick's decisions was, and how he "disrespected his defense," and various other dumb sports cliches. In actuality, people who know how to do math know that he was playing the odds, and had a higher probability of winning by going for it than he would've had if they had punted.
Belichick's problem is one that's well known to quantum mechanics. His decision to go for it increased his team's chances of winning, but the actual outcome of the game was still probabilistic-- no matter what he did, the result would come down to chance. And there's no way to get information about probability from a single measurement. The only way to determine probabilities is through many repeated measurements on identically prepared systems, but the rules of football do not allow this, no matter how satisfying it would be to stick it to jackass sports radio yappers.
In quantum terms, what Belichick faced was a superposition of winning and losing states, like so:
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:51 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
