Experiment
Category archives for Experiment
O Brave New-Media World That Has Such Bloggers In It
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 10, 2011 I’ve been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn’t create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site: The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with…
Strongly Correlated Physics in a Superposition State
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 23, 2011 It’s been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I’ve got some time between flipping pancakes, so here’s an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the wonders of string theory applied to condensed matter physics. This uses the “AdS/CFT” relationship, by…
Experimentalists Aren’t Idiots: The Neutrino Saga Continues
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 16, 2011 In a lot of ways, the OPERA fast-neutrino business has been less a story about science than a story about the perils of the new media landscape. We went through another stage of this a day or two ago, with all sorts of people Twittering, resharing, and repeating in other ways a story that the…
Shameless (if Belated) Self-Promotion: Me on the Radio
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 5, 2011 If you want to know how stressed and busy I’ve been lately, you don’t have to look any farther than the fact that I’ve totally fallen down on the shameless self-promotion front: I was on a radio show, and forgot to post about it here. I know, bad blogger, no pageviews… Anyway, I talked about…
Faster Than a Speeding Photon: “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam”
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 24, 2011 There have been a lot of pixels spilled over this faster-than-light neutrino business, so it might not seem like something I should take time away from pressing work to write up. It is the story of the moment, though, and too much of the commentary I’ve seen has been of the form “I am a…
Neutrino Hypotheses Non Fingo
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 23, 2011 The final sentence of the neutrino paper that everybody is buzzing about: We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results. From a somewhat older work in physics: Rationem vero harum gravitatis proprietatum ex phænomenis nondum potui deducere, et hypotheses non fingo. Quicquid enim ex phænomenis non deducitur, hypothesis vocanda est;…
Quantum Computing with Microwaves
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 6, 2011 It’s been a while since I did any ResearchBlogging, first because I was trying to get some papers of my own written, and then because I was frantically preparing for my classes this term (which start Wednesday). I’ve piled up a number of articles worth writing up in that time, including two papers from an…
Take A Moment to Remember
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 22, 2011 A few people last week were linking to this press release from Fermilab, which probably says more about the state of American particle physics than anything else: it’s about an experiment that they expect to be approved in 2012, to break ground in 2013, and start running in 2016. I guess with the Tevatron shutting…
How Does the Pulse Meter on Our Exercise Bike Work?
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 28, 2011 Unlike the previous post, this is not a rhetorical question that I will ask and then answer. I genuinely do not know the answer. I could Google it, of course, but I’d like to see if somebody reading this is able to deduce the correct answer from the available evidence. So, here’s the deal: as…
How Good Are Polarized Sunglasses?
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 28, 2011 A while back, I explained how polarized sunglasses work, the short version of which is that light reflected off the ground in front of you tends to be polarized, and by blocking that light, they reduce the effects of glare. This is why fishermen wear polarized sunglasses (they make it easier to see through the…
