Physical Sciences
gregladen | February 1, 2012And I suspect he's done so willingly. Well, you know what they say about statistics and liars.
Here's the story. The Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail independently published highly misleading and blatantly idiotic pieces on climate change. We've covered this extensively already over the last few days. Phil Plait, of the Bad Astronomy Blog on Discovermagazine.com, was one of numerous scientists to respond to those flaming examples of horrific bottom feeding journalism with the post "While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower." In that post, he presented a still-image from a…
gregladen | January 27, 2012The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.
The scientists who signed to WSJ editorial are:
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the…
oracknows | January 17, 2012I had been planning on either discussing a study or analyzing another cancer cure testimonial, but things have been (mostly) too serious around the ol' blog the last few days. What with depressing posts about the return of whooping cough thanks to antivaccine idiocy, more evidence that Andrew Wakefield is a despicable human being, and evidence that there are equally despicable ideas prevalent in "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), I was starting to enter one of my periodic periods of depression brought on by contemplating the sheer scope of human gullibility and stupidity. I…
drorzel | January 13, 2012I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time and timekeeping. How well do you think students learn the big ideas about how science works from these classes, as apposed to a more traditional general physics class? How much transfer do you see in students' understanding of the content of this course to understanding of science in general?
The…
esiegel | January 11, 2012"I soon became convinced... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the Universe really consists of." -Fritz Zwicky
Making the entire Universe isn't easy. Even with 13.7 billion years of time, general relativity and all the known particles in the Universe, we still can't reproduce all the observations we see today.
Image credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope LenS team.
What does it take to get galaxies to form and cluster together the way they do in the Universe?
The large-scale structure in the…
esiegel | January 9, 2012"If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance." -Jack Handey
The most common type of question I get asked by people genuinely wanting to know more about the Universe goes something like, "Hey, I saw such-and-such-a-story about some fanciful-sounding-theory, and that could be the explanation for this-weird-thing-that-we-see. What do you think about that?"
Well, here's the thing.
Image credit: Contemporary Physics Education Project.
We've got a set of laws…
oracknows | December 30, 2011Given that this is the last weekday before the end of 2011 and this quite probably will be my last post of the year (that is, unless something so compelling pops up over the weekend that it tempts me more than I can resist), I wondered what would be a good topic. Then, readers started sending me a link to the perfect topic, and I agreed that it represents a loose end that I should try to take care of before the year is up. So take care of it I will.
Right before Christmas, a homeopath named Judith Acosta, who bills herself as a "licensed psychotherapist, classical homeopath, and crisis…
esiegel | December 28, 2011"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." -Dr. Seuss
2011 has been an amazing year over here. After more than two hundred new posts this year here on Starts With A Bang, where we covered everything from the science of tiny snowflakes to the earliest, farthest and most spectacular galaxies in the Universe, I've finally gone through and compiled the top 10 posts of 2011! (And sadly, no, the BEST climate study and associated controversy did not make the cut.)
Feel free to take a look back -- or if you somehow missed one of these stories, a deep look for the first time -- at the…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2011My earlier post on this subject was entitled “What is Scientism?” because, while I have seen the term thrown around in a number of venues, I have never been entirely sure what it means. Having had a chance now to digest some of the arguments raised in the comments, as well as the thoughts expressed at other blogs, I think it's time to go another round.
The first point I made in my earlier post was that, in the context of science/religion disputes, to be accused of scientism was to be accused of being insufficiently respectful towards religion. A perfect example of what I had in mind is this…
esiegel | December 23, 2011"Just as I did some 25 years ago, my graduate student is right now using one of the NOAO telescopes, learning how to do observational astronomy... Closing down one of these observatories in the next few years would likely lead to long term problems with producing adequately prepared astronomers in the future, and they are as necessary to achieving the goals of our decadal reports as any multi-billion dollar facility." -Adam Stanford, UC Davis
Every week, I come to you so excited to tell you all about some amazing physics or astronomy story, whether it's something new that's just been…
gregladen | December 20, 2011First, there were big-giant planets discovered orbiting other stars. Then, more recently, a planet in the star's Goldilocks Zone ... where water would be at least sometimes liquid, were it present. But that was a big planet that may or may not have been truly "class M" in having a surface, atmosphere, etc.
Now, NASA reports planets the size of the earth beyond our solar system. Unfortuntely, they are not in the zone. But still, this is cool.
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e…
drorzel | December 18, 2011As I said yesterday, I'm going to blow through another entire subfield of physics in a single equation, as our march toward Newton's Birthday continues. Today, it's statistical mechanics, a very rich field of study that we're boiling down to a single equation:
This is Boltzmann's formula for the entropy of a macroscopic system of particles, which says that the entropy s is proportional to the logarithm of the number N of microscopic states consistent with that macroscopic state. The constant kB is there to get the units right.
Why does this get to stand in for the whole field of statistical…
drorzel | December 17, 2011Once again, the advent calendar is delayed until late at night by a busy day with SteelyKid-- soccer in the morning, playing with a trebuchet after lunch, then Arthur Christmas at the Colonie mall. We're running low on days to honor great milestones in physics, though, so I don't want to skip a day entirely.
I'm also trying to spread this around to cover a fairly representative set of subfields; having done classical mechanics and E&M at some length, I need to rush through a couple of other subfields quickly. One of these is classical thermodynamics, a field with a rich history and wide…
oracknows | December 12, 2011I've made no secret of my admiration for Trine Tsouderos. Whether it be her investigations into the rank quackery of prominent members of the mercury militia wing of the anti-vaccine lunatic fringe, Mark and David Geier, who seem to think that chemical castration is a perfectly fine and dandy treatment for autism because testosterone binds mercury (it doesn't under physiological conditions) and prevents it from being removed by chelation therapy, the equally rank quackery that is the "autism biomed" movement, or the chronic Lyme disease underground, Tsouderos is one of the rare journalists…
kmcwalsh | December 2, 2011This guest post was written by Mona S. Rowe, science writer for Brookhaven National Laboratory's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) and NSLS-II.
The quest to authenticate an unknown Rembrandt painting, titled "Old Man with a Beard," hit a dramatic high at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Using an advanced x-ray detector developed at NSLS, scientists found compelling evidence that the famous Dutch master did indeed have his own hand on the painting.
"After doing the experiments at NSLS, I felt that the painting I held in my hands was a…
esiegel | November 23, 2011"Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving." -Henry Ford
Here in the United States, it's American Thanksgiving, our annual harvest festival. Traditionally, it's the one day out of the year where we spend it with the people most important to us, and give genuine appreciation for the good things we have in our lives. And there is so much to be thankful for.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA).
Last year, I gave thanks to the entire Universe, from the smallest subatomic particles and the laws that govern them…
milhayser | November 21, 2011Recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prizes were announced the week of October 3. The winners in medicine were honored for their work in immunology, as reported on Tomorrow's Table. Steinman "discovered a new class of cell, known as dendritic cells, which are key activators of the adaptive immune system;" shockingly, he died a few days before the announcement. On We Beasties, Kevin Bonham questions the significance of Beutler's contribution, saying "the conceptual groundwork for its importance in the immune response had already been laid" by a researcher named Janeway. Kevin continues, "giving…
drorzel | November 10, 2011I'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 numerous articles in magazines, newspapers and on television asking whether "Einstein was wrong". Just as quickly came numerous physicists denouncing the media frenzy, with Lawrence Krauss from Arizona State University and Cambridge University cosmologist Martin Rees both calling the…
esiegel | November 9, 2011"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements." -Orison Swett Marden
One of the greatest assumptions we make in our study of the laws of nature is, well, that they're laws of nature, not particularly special to where or when we happen to be looking at them.
Image credit: NASA & ESA.
Whether we look on our home planet, within our own galaxy, at a relatively nearby galaxy (like NGC 4522, above), or at galaxies extremely far away (faintly visible in the background), we always tend to assume that the…
hrynyshyn | November 4, 2011Among the very best of the science-oriented blogs I try to read regularly is Tom Levenson's Inverse Square Blog. Tom, who teaches science journalism at MIT, isn't a climatologist, but whenever he writes about climate science or politics, it's usually worth a look.
Apparently, the folks at Scientific American agree, and they recently invited Tom to contribute a guest post to the magazine's blog site. It's primarily about the recent kerfuffle over the possibility that neutrinos might be able to travel faster than light, and a bit on the lengthy side, but he does manage to work climate in…