drorzel | November 10, 2014My new book comes out one month from yesterday, or four weeks from tomorrow. Of course, yesterday was Sunday, and tomorrow's a federal holiday, both lousy times for promotional posts, so I'll drop this in today instead. Here's a promotional video I put together, about how the history of quantum mechanics can be compared to working a crossword puzzle:
This is basically the talk I gave at TED@NYC last year, done in front of a green screen with slides edited in behind me for that An Inconvenient Truth vibe (Nobel committee, take note...). With some bonus cute kid photos and an explicit…
drorzel | November 10, 2014A couple of times last week, I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to demonstrate relativity with toddler toys and string. This was an inspiration that hit late on Thursday, when I was trying to think of a better way to explain embedding diagrams (the technical term for those stretched-rubber-sheet pictures that everybody uses to illustrate general relativity).
Specifically, I was hearing a lot from students who didn't understand the point of what was supposed to be weird about those. So I was trying to think of how to do a demo, when I realized we could measure the change in geometry that…
drorzel | November 9, 2014I'm teaching a Gen Ed course on relativity this term, which means I'm spending the last few weeks of the term discussing black holes. Which, in turn, means there was no way I couldn't use that story about Kip Thorne calculating the appearance of a black hole for the movie. Especially since I have the students reading Thorne's book.
And that, in turn, meant I needed to see the movie. So we got a sitter for the kids Saturday night, and went to the local theater to check it out. And, you know, it's pretty much what it's advertised as: A very pretty giant SF movie, with all that implies, both…
drorzel | November 7, 2014Exactly three years ago today, The Pip arrived, in a manner that will allow him to kill Macbeth should that become necessary. This is the age where kids first become aware of the concept of birthdays, so he's just a tiny bit excited about this.
He's a fast-developing Little Dude, chattering more and more every day. And using big words-- in the car the other morning, I pointed out that he could fit his whole hand in the pockets of the pants he was wearing, which he proceeded to do. "I want to show Mommy this, when we get home," he said. "Meanwhile, I can do it by myself!" He's getting into…
drorzel | November 6, 2014I'm teaching relativity in a course with an astronomy prefix, which means I'm obliged to talk about stars and stuff. Yesterday's lecture was about neutron stars, and how their existence was confirmed by the discovery of pulsars (with the story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell included). This requires some discussion of angular momentum to explain how something that big ends up spinning that fast (cribbing a bit from these online notes), so I needed a good demonstration of angular momentum. Which is when I remembered this 2013 post with SteelyKid on the playground, where I estimated the mass of the…
drorzel | November 3, 2014Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent, as it's crunch time in a lot of ways at the moment, including our double tenure-track search. Which it would be inappropriate to talk about in any more detail than "Wow, this is a lot of work."
There are, however, two academic-job-related things that I probably ought to mention briefly. One is this Inside Higher Ed Essay about metaphors for the academic hiring process, which rightly points out a lot of the problems with the "lottery" analogy that lots of people like to use. In fact, Gerry Canavan argues, it's best understood as a game:
But…
drorzel | October 29, 2014A fine if somewhat intermittent tradition hereabouts has been the offering of high-concept Halloween costumes for people interested in physics, surfacing in 2010, 2012, and 2013. I'm a little too fried right now to do anything all that deep, but I'll try to offer a few suggestions; see also these particle-physics suggestions from Symmetry magazine, who have an art staff to make animated GIFs of their ideas.
Sexy Tycho Brahe: Ruffled collar, magnificent mustache, a little gold paint on your nose. Critically important that you remember to go to the bathroom beforehand, though-- it's going to be…
drorzel | October 28, 2014As mentioned last week, I was the on-hand expert for the Secret Science Club's foray into Massachusetts, a screening of the movie Particle Fever held at MASS MoCA. This worked out nicely in a lot of respects-- it gave me an excuse to visit the newly renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and check out the spiffy new library at Williams (where they have my second book on the shelves, but not my first; I may need to send them an author copy in lieu of a check this year...). I also did some random nostalgia things like grabbing dinner at Colonial Pizza (now in a strip mall halfway to…
drorzel | October 25, 2014I got the time for the regular hangout wrong, and then we had some weird computer difficulties, so we only had ten minutes for Uncertain Dots this week. Which was enough time for me to say disparaging things about comic book movies, so, you know, if that interests you...
Here's the making of Interstellar story about Kip Thorne.
Here's the Avengers 2 trailer.
Also, a program note: I will be at MASS MoCA tonight talking about Particle Fever, if you'd like to hear me talk about real physics on film, or just take issue with my slagging off comic-book movies in person...
drorzel | October 23, 2014Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice piece on our current age of virality. Toward the end, she discusses some of the ways this applies to science, specifically a quote from this Nature article about collaborative efforts to measure "big G", and a story about a Chinese initiative to encourage collaboration. She writes of the latter, "Essentially, it seems, they’re giving out salary increases for scientists to think the same as their colleagues."
And I agree that this can be a problem-- there's a famous paper I can never find looking at the evolution of the accepted value of some physical…
drorzel | October 21, 2014That's "Mass" as in Massachusetts, not the stuff associated with the Higgs field... specifically, North Adams, MA, where I'll be this Saturday night, October 25th, at the Secret Science Club screening of Particle Fever. This will be at the MASS MoCA, tickets here.
The Secret Science Club is a regular gathering in New York City featuring mind-bending lectures, volatile experiments, and thematic chemical libations (special cocktails, that is). It’s like the coolest science class you’ve ever been to, but with drinks and a DJ. SSC rockets into MASS MoCA with a special screening of Particle Fever…
drorzel | October 18, 2014It's been a brutally busy couple of weeks here, what with reading folders for the job searches we have going on, trying to keep on top of my class, and multiple day-care closings for the Jewish holidays. But the kids are still very cute, as you can see from the above caricatures of The Pip as Pooh and SteelyKid as a Lego construction worker. These were done by Rich Conley who does caricatures at LT's Grill in Niskayuna on Tuesday nights, which probably explains what we're doing for dinner for Tuesdays in perpetuity...
We're off to Scenic Whitney Point for a bit (after kid soccer, that is),…
drorzel | October 17, 2014In odd-numbered years (by the Gregorian calendar, anyway), the University of Toronto offers the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and Their Applications. This is not connected to the Jon Stewart of the Daily Show-- he's purely classical, as you can tell from the fact that there's no "h" in his name. It honors the great Irish physicist John Bell, whose theorem showing that quantum models could be experimentally distinguished from local hidden variable theories helped kick off the thriving field of quantum information. (Bell's contribution is a big…
drorzel | October 16, 2014The fourth video I wrote for TED-Ed is now live: Einstein's Brilliant Mistake: Entangled States. The title is not just an Elvis Costello reference, but gets at the fact that while the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper was wrong in that the local hidden variable theories they favored are impossible, it turned out to be important and productive.
As with the others, I'm very happy with the way this came out. The images are great, and I'm glad to get in the point that Bell's key insight involves measuring different properties for the two particles, which is sometimes glossed over. It was…
drorzel | October 16, 2014I enjoyed Caleb Scharf's previous book, Gravity's Engines a good deal, so I was happy to get email from a publicist offering me his latest. I'm a little afraid that my extreme distraction of late hasn't really treated it fairly, but then again, the fact that I finished it at all in my current state of frazzlement may be the best testament I can offer to its quality. This is a sweeping survey of what we've learned about our place in the universe over the last five hundred years or so.
Now, a grandiose description like that often portends a bunch of wifty philosophizing that poses grand…
drorzel | October 14, 2014The third of the videos I wrote for TED-Ed is now live: Schrödinger's Cat: A Thought Experiment in Quantum Mechanics.This is using basically the same argument I outlined in this post, but with awesome animation courtesy of Agota Vegso. I'm impressed by how close the images that ended up in the video are to the pictures I had in my mind while I was writing it.
As I said in that old post, I dithered for a bit about whether to run with this argument, but decided I liked it enough to go ahead. You can legitimately quibble about some of the phrasing being a little too definite (or that Schrödinger…
drorzel | October 14, 2014It's baseball playoff time, so sport shows are full of one of the great mysteries of the season, exemplified by this .gif (from SBNation):
Raul Ibanez hitting a game-winning home run. GIF from SBNation.
No, not "Raul Ibanez, really?" but "How can he make the ball go that far?" After all, even very good outfielders are lucky to reach home plate with a throw from the warning track. Not even the hardest-throwing pitcher could stand at home plate and throw the ball into the second deck of a baseball stadium. Yet it's not uncommon for the ball to end up there after being hit by a bat. So, how…
drorzel | October 13, 2014I recently shot a bunch of video of myself in front of a green screen, for something that will be revealed in due time. Of course, if you have green-screen footage of yourself, you're pretty much obliged to do something silly with it, so here's a quick GIMP-ing of a still from the video (also visible as the "featured image" above...).
One does not simply science into Mordor
(I was going to try to put myself inside Mount Doom holding a Ring, but I couldn't find a suitable background image, and I've already spent too much time on this silliness. It's not the classic Boromir pose, but it'll…
drorzel | October 10, 2014If you like arbitrary numerical signifiers, this is the point where we can start to talk about plural dozens of Uncertain Dots hangouts. As usual, Rhett and I chat about a wide range of stuff, including the way we always say we're going to recruit a guest to join us, and then forget to do anything about that.
The video:
Other topics include how it's important to rip up your class notes every so often, the pros and cons of lab handouts/ lab manuals, and of course this week's Nobel Prize in Physics for blue LED's (shameless self-linkage).
I'm crushingly busy right now, largely because I had no…
drorzel | October 7, 2014The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for the development of blue LED's. As always, this is kind of fascinating to watch evolve in the social media sphere, because as a genuinely unexpected big science story, journalists don't have pre-written articles based on an early copy of a embargoed paper. Which means absolutely everybody starts out using almost the exact words of the official Nobel press release, because that fills space while they frantically research the subject. Later in the day, you'll get some different framing, once…