Theory
Category archives for Theory
Simple Answers to Stupid Rhetorical Devices
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 14, 2011 Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain’t Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize: A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer–let’s call him…
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Gauss and Maxwell
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 13, 2011 As the advent calendar moves into the E&M portion of the season, there are a number of possible ways to approach this. I could go with fairly specific formulae for various aspects, but that would take a while and might close out some other areas of physics. In the end, all of classical E&M comes…
The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 8, 2011 One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their…
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…
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…
Roller Slide Physics Simulated
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 14, 2011 I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph: This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I’ll reproduce…
It’s Magnetic Moment Season: Measuring Various g-Factors
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 12, 2011 Among the articles highlighted in this week’s Physics is one about a new test of QED through a measurement of the g-factor of the electron in silicon ions. This comes on the heels of a measurement of proton spin flips (this includes a free PDF) a couple of weeks ago, and those, in turn, build…
Playground Physics: Roller Slide Mystery
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 11, 2011 We took SteelyKid to the playground at one of the local elementary schools on Sunday morning. this one includes an odd sort of slide, made of dozens of rollers that are 1-2 inches in diameter (they’re all the same size– the range is just because I didn’t measure them carefully). They’re on really good bearings,…
