Physical Sciences
tfk | October 22, 2009Slacktivist is talking sense. He notes a common problem in dealing with creationists:
I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things.
In particular, they use the word "theory" in ways that don't reflect the term's actual meaning in…
razib | October 21, 2009One of the banes of modern life is the stack of papers in one's "to-read" list. I guess that goes to show how cushy modern life is, as what sort of complaint is that? In any case, I began to consider this after reading Joe Thornton's magisterial response to Michael Behe's giddy excitement over his most recent paper, An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Thornton dispatches Behe's muddled misconceptions with economy and precision, but after reading the paper, as opposed to cogent summaries such as Carl Zimmer's in The New York Times I'm even more…
pontiff | October 20, 2009Two notes on chairs. Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of Mathematics replacing the esteemed Stephen Hawking. Green helped sparked the great optimism in string theory by discovering with John Schwarz the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism.
Elsewhere, the Perimeter Institute has named ten new distinguished research chairs, among them a host of the quantum computing afflicted:
Dorit Aharonov is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has made major contributions to the theoretical foundations of quantum…
drorzel | October 20, 2009
Myth Confirmed. : Built on Facts
"[U]ntil relatively recently, no one had ever actually done the experiment. It's difficult, both in terms of dropping the bullets properly and making sure the gun fires exactly horizontally. Horizontal fire is critical, because if there is an initial vertical velocity for the fired bullet, the equation will be different from the dropped bullet and they won't hit the ground at the same time. Nonetheless there is a group of experimenters who are very good at this sort of thing, and not so long ago they actually did the experiment. They are of course the…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2009Over at Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel expressed exasperation that Nature and New Scientist are paying attention to (and lending too much credibility to) an astronomical theory Ethan views as a non-starter, Modified Netwonian Dynamics (or MOND):
[W]hy is Nature making a big deal out of a paper like this? Why are magazines like New Scientist declaring that there are cracks in dark matter theories?
Because someone (my guess is HongSheng Zhao, one of the authors of this paper who's fond of press releases and modifying gravity) is pimping this piece of evidence like it tells us something.…
drorzel | October 19, 2009Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past.
This is a little hard to square with my personal experience (he says, procrastinating from grading a depressingly large stack of student lab reports), and that of many of the commenters at Wired. There are enough caveats in the description of the study that these needn't be contradictory, though that's…
drorzel | October 18, 2009
Analysis Of A Roulette Strategy
"As Hank explains in a recent article, when he visits a Casino he plays the Roulette. His simple strategy consists in betting on a single colour, doubling the bet every time he loses; when he wins, he starts back with the minimum bet.
Such a strategy is not going to make you rich, but no strategy does at the Roulette, especially the American one which has both a "0" and a "00" -two neutral numbers thrown in to enhance house odds. The idea of doubling every time is that eventually the colour you bet on is bound to appear, and you will win back all your fiches…
esiegel | October 15, 2009
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. --Peter Pan
Much like any new venture where the outcome is uncertain, there are a lot of fears surrounding the LHC. And I know, because it occasionally shows up in my comment threads, in my inbox, or in my office.
Could it form a black hole and destroy Earth? Could we somehow do something in the future that would destroy the past? Or is it just generally unsafe?
The answers to these questions are no, no, and no. The first question -- about creating a black hole and destroying Earth -- requires that we apply the laws of…
drorzel | October 15, 2009
Electrons flow forever in metal rings - physicsworld.com
"[I]f a metal ring is very small - about 1 μm diameter or less - quantum mechanics says that its electrons should behave in much the same way as electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus. And in the same way that electrons in the lowest energy configuration of an atom maintain their orbits without the constant input of energy, electrons in such "mesoscopic" rings should flow forever. Indeed, a 1 μm diameter ring cooled to 1 K should support a current of about 1nA. "
(tags: science physics quantum experiment news)
The Brancatelli File…
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, over the last few days I was in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting. At least, that's where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back home too late and was thus too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, for your edification today. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's another blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Well, this is encouraging to see: A…
oracknows | October 13, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Alright, I'll come right out and admit it up front. There was no part one to this piece. Well, there was, but it wasn't on…
drorzel | October 11, 2009
Physics - Protecting quantum superpositions from the outside world
"Quantum information science relies on superpositions of quantum states with a definite phase relation, but such superpositions are inherently fragile against interactions with their environment. Fortunately, if some kind of common property bounds these interactions, it is possible, though by no means easy in a practical setting, to come up with states that are essentially immune to their environment. In papers appearing in Physical Review A and Physical Review Letters, Magnus RÃ¥dmark and Mohamed Bourennane at Stockholm…
catdynamics | October 9, 2009"There is no use trying; one can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
This week, a short, innocuous little astrophysics paper appeared in Nature discussing the apparent inferred constant surface density of cold dark matter in the inner part of galaxies.
This somewhat startled fellow SciBling Ethan, enough for him to bang out a new post - discussing why cold dark matter is to be preferred to an alternative model…
esiegel | October 8, 2009Earlier this week, I wrote about an article that appeared in Nature, New Scientist and other places. The article -- and especially the popular writeups -- talked about a problem with dark matter and how MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) solves those problems.
And I'm livid about it. Another physicist/scienceblogger thinks my anger is misplaced, and left me the following in my comments section:
Ethan - this is not a creationism debate.
Hong Sheng is a top dynamicist and he knows perfectly well what the issues are.
The whole point of science at this level is to test models and propose…
palmd | October 7, 2009Even with cable, there isn't much on TV before six in the morning. On the stationary bike today I was flipping through the channels and I just had to watch the infomercial for No Evil Oil. According to the testimonials, this stuff not only keeps out the Devil, but gets rid of shingles and makes you rich. The smiling preacher with the mullet will send it to you for free (but there are plenty of donation buttons).
You may be asking yourself, "How dumb/desperate/gullible do you have to be to use the No Evil Oil?" Even my most credulous readers would agree that this stuff is snake oil.…
drorzel | October 6, 2009
Career Advice: I'm Sorry I Published - Inside Higher Ed
"Given that it seems to be common wisdom that publications are helpful, two anecdotes I heard in the past week or so scare me a little bit. Both anecdotes are about departments that were searching or are planning a search. Both departments see their department as mainly a teaching department, but they do have research requirements (I think 3/3 or 3/2 loads). Also, according to both anecdotes, these departments consider publications in top journals as counting against a candidate!"
(tags: academia jobs philosophy humanities stupid)…
clock | October 5, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Arikia Millikan, the former Overlord here at Scienceblogs.com, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
First and foremost, I consider myself a scientist, though perhaps not in the…
cwilcox | October 2, 2009If you haven't heard, the 2009 Ig Nobels have been given. The Ig Nobels are one of my favorite yearly treats. They are given to research that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."
The prizes "celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."
And the winners are...
Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows that are nameless. Hear that, Bessie?Reference:Bertenshaw, C., & Rowlinson, P. (2009). Exploring Stock…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009
Cajal's Revenge, 2007
Katherine Sherwood
It's been a while since I've been able to focus on my Art vs. Science series of posts, so I understand if you've forgotten Part One and Part Two. A quick recap: in Part One, I asked,
I think that lay audiences approach scientific art differently - perhaps more credulously - than they do other forms of art, simply because lay audiences feel insecure and uncertain about basic science. Audiences may have so much respect for science, that they extend respect reflexively when science appears in other contexts - like art or entertainment. Anyone who's had…
dmunger | October 1, 2009The other day, our car wouldn't start and Jim had to ask a neighbor over to help him jump-start it. There was much rushing in and out of the house looking for flashlights and other tools to help get the job done. After the neighbor left, Jim wanted to drive somewhere and couldn't find the keys. Clearly he had just had them because he was working on the car. Where could they be? We searched up and down throughout the house, but we couldn't find them and eventually had to use a spare set.
The next morning as I was getting ready to leave for our school carpool in our other car, I found them…