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.
It's been a little while since I wrote up what I've been doing in my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has already appeared here, though, so I can hopefully catch up a lot of stuff in one post.
The next week was shortened because I was out of town for the weekend, and introduced mechanical clocks. I started off with this video clip from Connections, which provides a very nice illustration of early mechanical clocks:
Also, you could land an airplane on the lapels of that jacket. As I told the students, I'm just barely old enough to remember the brief moment when that didn't look ridiculous.<.p>
"There's an argument that the process of federal legislation, at this point, is crippled by deep systemic problems. The filibuster is an obvious example. It's also worth pointing out that there is a space for activism beyond electoral politics. But laws exist for a very good reason. They are--roughly put--a compact between citizens and the state detailing the guidelines for governance. Laws--and their alteration or abolishment--are the means by which we change the compact. The alternative, to my mind, is revolution. At the end of the piece Greenberg notes that the leadership is seeking to emulate the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. I hope no one told him that directly. If they did, Occupy reflects a poor understanding of that movement's lessons. The Civil Rights movement neither eschewed the hard work of mapping out concrete goals, nor shied away from changing laws."
When I first encountered this idea of virtue as craft, I found it exciting and even liberating because it was so different from the idea of virtue I had learned growing up in American fundamentalist Christianity. I had been taught to think of virtue as mainly a matter of avoiding sin -- of abstaining from a long list of bad things. Virtue wasn't something to do, but something you had because of all the things you didn't do. It wasn't a craft to be learned, developed and practiced, but a stockpile to be safeguarded and hoarded. It was as though we had each been given an initial supply when we were born again as innocents, and that finite supply had to be preserved, clasped tightly, and kept pure from a dangerous and poisonous world. The best that one could hope for, in such a view, was that 10,000 hours later one might have vigilantly defended and retained most of one's original purity so that one wasn't any worse after all that time.
Physicists in the US have created an optical frequency comb that operates in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV). Touted as the first practical comb to work in this region of the spectrum, the device could be used to look for tiny variations in the fine-structure constant and other physical constants that could point to new physics. An XUV comb could also be used to create better atomic clocks and new techniques for atomic spectroscopy.
It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already:
If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this shameless publicity stunt: The second-ever Dog Physics Photo Contest!
Last time around, we did a LOLEmmy contest for a bound galley proof of the first book. This time, I'm giving away a signed copy of the finished book, so we'll go for something a little trickier: I've picked three pictures from my Flickr set of dog photos, showing Emmy sitting, play-bowing, and moping. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to crop her out of one of those three, and edit her into some other scene. Like this:
The best photoshopped picture of Emmy wins a signed copy of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Rules and conditions below the fold:
As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett at Dot Physics. We've been trying to do this literally for months, but the weather wouldn't cooperate. Until this past weekend, when we finally managed to make measurements that allow us to do some cutting-edge science. For 200 BC, anyway...
So, what did we do? Well, we each made a sundial, and shot time-lapse video of it using a webcam. Here's mine-- note the Lego gnomon, graciously donated to science by SteelyKid (whose attempts to help with "Daddy's 'spermint" weren't enough to earn a co-author credit, but do rate this acknowledgement):
The too-bright first few frames are because I forgot to adjust the exposure initially, and the greying out at the end is because some thick clouds rolled in. This was shot in our back yard in Niskayuna, and simultaneously (in some frame of reference, anyway), Rhett was taking video of his own sundial, in Hammond, LA. I took both videos, and ran them through Tracker video to measure the position of the end of the shadow for each frame, and produced the following results:
It's apparently a good day for asking questions of the readership, so here's another one: as SteelyKid has gotten older and more active, she's become a real drain on productivity, especially at bedtime. Bedtime is now a process rather like a certain spoof book, extending well over an hour, and involving repeated requests to come back into her room for some silly reason or another. If I don't respond quickly enough, she'll work herself up into a real tantrum, so I pretty much need to stay upstairs in our bedroom until she's asleep. Which means either I can't get any work done, or I have to try to do work on my laptop in bed, which is wrecking my neck.
Thus, I'm looking to get some sort of lap desk type thing that would allow me to work on the computer in bed without doing myself harm. There are a nearly infinite variety if lap desks for sale out there, but it's sort of hard to distinguish between them based only on web sites. Thus, if anybody has relevant experience and would like to recommend a solution for this, well, you know where the comments are.
I'm using Dava Sobel's Longitude this week in my timekeeping class. The villain of the piece, as it were, is the Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who promoted an astronomical method for finding longitude, and played a major role in delaying the payment to John Harrison for his marine chronometers. It's a good story, with lots of science and engineering and politicking.
There's one critical flaw, though, in terms of me teaching this book, which is that I don't really know how to say Maskelyne's name. And even Wikipedia is letting me down, here, by not providing a phonetic rendering of his name. Which means I'm depending on you, my wise and worldly readers, to help me figure this out:
Nobody had even begun to think about quantum physics during Maskelyne's lifetime, so you're only allowed to pick one answer, not a quantum superposition of multiple answers.
They don't warn you about the bewildering, befuddling vertigo that comes with having done everything they say to do, all to no avail, and having no idea what to do next. There you are, willing and eager to wear away whatever leather there still is on your shoes, but you have no idea what direction to walk. There sits the phone, but you have no one left to call. And you've refined your online job-searching skills to the point where it takes you only a fraction of the time to confirm that there's nothing out there. Now what? What happens when something must be done, but there is nothing left to do about having nothing to do? Such repetitive futility is sometimes described as "Sisyphean," but you come to envy Sisyphus. He never doubts his next step. He has a task at hand and knows what is required and expected of him. The boulder must be rolled up the hill again, and though his back is breaking and his muscles shudder from exhaustion, he will roll it.
Benford's law states that real-world numbers start more often with a 1 than a 2, more often with 2 than 3 and so on. If your dataset does not follow this distribution, it might hint at human interference.
In handing down its ruling, the N.C.A.A. issued a press release so malicious in its intent that I could not let it pass. Longtime watchers of the N.C.A.A. tell me that they have never seen an athlete and his mother thrown under the bus the way Ryan and Tanesha Boatright were on Saturday. One rarely gets so clear a glimpse of moral bankruptcy.
Science is complex. There's no getting around that. But it's essential that everyone engage constructively with it. That's particularly true of the political and business leaders in Davos, whose decisions on science-based subjects can influence everything from the well being of our children to the future of the planet. It's vital that those decisions are taken from an informed position and on rational grounds. The challenge that science faces is that we live in a world where it's de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe, but quite all right to be proudly ignorant of Faraday, Pasteur or Einstein. It hasn't always been that way, and it doesn't have to be that way. But right now, there's a trend in society towards scientific apathy, and even antagonism. This is dangerous for us all and it's incumbent on the scientific community to address the issue.
I ask the question anyway to highlight this point for the benefit of young-earth creationists and others who claim that the Bible contains scientific knowledge more advanced than human beings had achieved in the time these texts were composed. If that were so, we should expect them to include other sorts of more advanced knowledge, such as in the realms of medicine, health, and hygiene. Yet you will look in vain in the pages of the Bible for a recommendation that people cover their mouth and nose when they sneeze and cough. You will find mentions of strong drink, but nothing about distilling the alcohol and using it to clean wounds or disinfect anything at all. Nor will you find the Bible's authors recommending that drinking water be boiled to kill dangerous bacteria.
What is a goon? In 2005 John Cheney, then the coach of the Temple University basketball team, sent in "seldom used" forward Nehemiah Ingram in order to give hard fouls and send a message. While Ingram is long gone, are there still players like him? What players pick up quick fouls in bunches, and what if they actually played starter minutes? To investigate, I took all players in the "Big 6" basketball conferences (ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, and SEC), and found a small group of players that may qualify as "goons".
There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in favor of this, but Aram says one thing that bugs me a bit:
Just like the walled gardens of Compuserve and AOL would never grow into the Internet, no commercial publisher will ever be able to match the scope and ease of access of arxiv.org. Nor can they match the price. In 2010, there were about 70,000 new papers added to arxiv.org and there were 30 million articles downloaded, while their annual budget was $420,000. This comes to $6 per article uploaded (or 1.4 cents per download). Publishers talk about how much their business costs and how even “open access” isn’t free, but thanks to arxiv.org, we know how low the costs can go.
This is very nice, but has one major problem: The arxiv is not a journal.
