Physical Sciences
cmcclain | December 14, 2007Behemoth is the only word that comes to mind as I discuss, with mouth agape, about the deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu. JAMSTEC, the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, launched a venture in 2005 to take the deepest cores into the earth's crust following the route of Nautilus in Jules Verne's novel. The deepest core into the crust was currently 2111m but during the Center for Deep Earth Exploration (CDEX) the goal was 7000m. To accomplish this...the Japanese unleash Chikyu which translates into "earth", a fitting name given the size of the ship. Yes it is really that big…
jstemwedel | December 11, 2007David Ng at The World's Fair asks what kind of scientist Santa Claus might be. I'm not sure I have the answer to that, but I at least have a hunch about what kind of scientist might make the most headway studying Santa. (Of course, if Santa followed Socrates' advice to "Know thyself," that would be the kind of scientist Santa should be.)
So, here are the facts as we know them:
Santa delivers gifts or toys to millions of locations in a fairly narrow window of time in the same night.
Despite his reputed girth, Santa manages to make it down the chimney.
Observing Santa at work is a Very Bad…
drorzel | December 10, 2007
Catholic World News : Vatican astronomer likens creationism to superstition
Brother Guy Consolmagno, talking sense as always.
(tags: astronomy religion science biology)
Daily Kos: What was wrong with the debate education question
A good discussion of the issues involved with merit pay, teacher compensation, and teacher's unions, from a teacher and union member.
(tags: education academia society politics)
The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid - New York Times
I won't believe it until they do the experiment.
(tags: astronomy space science)
If It's Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener? -…
laelaps | December 7, 2007Note: As Larry Moran rightly points out in the comments everything isn't all about putting out papers and us science bloggers should put out graphs of our own publication rates, as well. For my own part, I've contributed nothing so I couldn't even make a graph, but I know there has been some discussion about some of the leading spokesmen for evolution and their publication rates (Dawkins and Gould, for example, have put out plenty of popular works, but how did that affect the amount of technical work they accomplished?). The point that jumping on the ID bandwagon adversely affects…
goodmath | December 6, 2007
Isaac Newton was a total nutjob. Did you know that he tried to pop his own eyeball out with a knitting needle as a part of an experiment? That he nearly blinded himself staring into the sun? That he was an avid alchemist?
Why do we pay so much respect to a person who was clearly mentally IMBALANCED? Why
would anyone take such a total lunatic seriously? It can't be because of science - his
science was a sloppy mess that he had a hard time explaining to anyone else.
The only reason we look on him as such a figure of respect is because we're told to.
Scientists and mathematicians are…
neurotopia | December 6, 2007Intelligent Design is a career-killer. There's just no two ways about it. And not because of how peers treat the ID supporter; they throw their own productivity under the bus, to use Casey Luskin's overworked cliche. We saw the same thing with Behe and Dembski. Behe has published ONE peer-reviewed paper in the last decade-ish. And Dembski... well, does anybody even know where he works these days?
All hyperbole aside, let's look at Gonzalez's publication track record while we keep in mind that tenure committees consider work that comes in after one joins the university to be of prime…
purepedantry | December 5, 2007Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction:
Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics.
Trust me, it is. Of course you don't need to appeal to cosmology to use the Second Law, or even to "derive" it under some reasonable-sounding assumptions. However, those reasonable-sounding assumptions are typically not true of the real world. Using only time-symmetric laws of physics, you can't derive time-asymmetric macroscopic behavior (as pointed out in the "reversibility objections" of Lohschmidt…
jstemwedel | December 4, 2007Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad's about the "fundamental difference" between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes.
One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical…
jstemwedel | December 3, 2007Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel tries to explain the fundamental difference between physics and chemistry:
My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study.
Chad's rough breakdown is fine as far as it goes. But it wouldn't (in my experience) be a terribly accurate guide to discerning what (say) a physical chemist actually worked on in his or her research.
Chad describes the corresponding…
drorzel | December 3, 2007An off-line question from someone at Seed:
Fundamentally, what is the difference between chemistry and physics?
There are a bunch of different ways to try to explain the dividing lines between disciplines. My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study.
At the most fundamental level, you have particle physics and high-energy nuclear physics, which sees everything in terms of quarks and leptons,…
drorzel | December 2, 2007
Hamlet - The Text Adventure
"It's so unfair! You're in trouble again, just because you called your uncle - or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius - a usurping git."
(tags: games internet literature silly)
YouTube - The Killers - Don't Shoot Me Santa
Silly spoof Christmas song video, featuring Brandon Flowers in a tragic sweater.
(tags: youtube video music silly)
Dynamical Control of Matter-Wave Tunneling in Periodic Potentials
Shaking a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice can stop the atoms from moving through the lattice.
(tags: physics experiment low-temperature news…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2007
Red-eyed tree frog, Agalychnis calidryas.
Red-eyed tree frogs live in Costa Rica and other Neotropical regions. Their bright red eyes presumably startle would-be predators. Their diet consists of flies and moths, and possibly includes smaller frogs and crickets. All tree frogs are classified into the families Hylidae and Rhacophoridae. Many tree frogs are green in color, while the terrestrial and aquatic species have muted coloration.
Image: Don Farral (Photodisc) via National Geographic.
Since the holidays are advancing upon us like a rampaging SUV, I thought I'd talk about an essential…
loom | December 1, 2007The great biologist Seymour Benzer passed away yesterday. If you know Benzer, it's probably through Jonathan Weiner's masterful book, Time, Love, Memory, which focused on how Benzer discovered the influence of genes on behavior in fruit flies. But Benzer was one of those rare scientists who had enough time in his life for more than one great project. Before Benzer turned to fruit flies, he studied E. coli. And in studying that wonderful microbe, he helped to figure out what genes are in the first place.
In the early 1950s Benzer gave up a career in physics for biology after reading Erwin…
pharyngula | November 30, 2007Let's ruin a perfectly pleasant Friday with a poll full of ugly reality.
The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults from Nov 7 to 13 found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in God, a figure unchanged since the question was asked in 2005.
It further found that 79 percent believed in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, while 72 percent believed that Jesus is God or the Son of God. Belief in hell and the devil was expressed by 62 percent.
Darwin's theory of evolution met a far more skeptical audience which might surprise some outsiders as the United States is renowned for its excellence in scientific…
oracknows | November 30, 2007
I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon.
I…
chaoticutopia | November 27, 2007I last left this blog on an ambiguous note. Followed by another unannounced absence, this might have seemed strangely ironic. It was for me--that post was written the day before my Thanksgiving break, and I had absolutely nothing planned--except to write. That, as you might have guessed, is exactly what I didn’t do. Hence the ironic part: I’ve been obsessing over prediction lately (that’s what I had intended to write about) yet I can’t seem to even predict my own behavior. Can we hope to predict anything, let alone global changes? That’s the big question.
Now, while I didn’t exactly write, I…
laelaps | November 27, 2007Note: I originally wrote this post in a bit of frustration, and so I've drawn a line through much of the latter half that has more to do with science education and not the list. I still find it a bit strange than not one science book made it to the list when there were, in my opinion, some "notable" science books out this year, but some of my reaction to this was more of a rant than anything else. I'm not saying that there should be X number of science books on the list, but it's hard to believe that in a list of 50 books (being that half the list was fiction) not one science book was picked…
evolvingthoughts | November 25, 2007
This paragraph:
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
Codswallop.
While it is true that the…
jstemwedel | November 24, 2007This New York Times op-ed, to be precise. My questions for Paul Davies can be boiled down to these two:
What kinds of explanations, precisely, are you asking science to deliver to you?
Just why do you think it is the job of science to provide such explanations?
Let's back up a little and look at some of what Davies writes in his op-ed:
... science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends…
clock | November 20, 2007'Noah's Flood' Kick-started European Farming?:
The flood believed to be behind the Noah's Ark myth kick-started European agriculture, according to new research by the Universities of Exeter, UK and Wollongong, Australia. New research assesses the impact of the collapse of the North American (Laurentide) Ice Sheet, 8000 years ago. The results indicate a catastrophic rise in global sea level led to the flooding of the Black Sea and drove dramatic social change across Europe.
Earliest Chocolate Drink Of The New World:
The earliest known use of cacao--the source of our modern day chocolate--has…