drorzel | February 21, 2006I really don't mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen's idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks...). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I'd like to address comes from Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, who asks about the student whose plight started this whole thing:
Were there just so many kids to get through, and so little in the way of support (on the extra-help/shifting to a different course/evaluating…
drorzel | February 20, 2006A couple of science-related items from the New York Times:
1) An article on the Cafe Scientifique phenomenon, in which scientists put on monthly get-togethers for the general public, where recent scientific research is explained in layman's terms. It's nice to be reminded that there's still interest in learning about science-- given the numbe of news stries about people rejecting modernity on the grounds that it's icky, it's easy to forget.
(Again, I'll mention that I was pleasantly surprised that twenty-odd people showed up for my "Weird Quantum Phenomena" talk, several of them taking notes…
drorzel | February 20, 2006(It's Presidents' Day, so remember to vote!)
Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective:
The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape is something to reflect upon. Maths that we assume to be fundamental elements of our mental toolkits would have been beyond the very conception of the most brilliant minds of our species over one thousand years ago.
I'm not really happy with this,…
drorzel | February 19, 2006A preliminary report on the standings in the Greatest Physics Experiment voting:
Michelson-Morley: 13
Faraday: 7 (including one vote in the Farady post)
Roemer: 5
Aspect: 4.5 (one indecisive person voted for both Cavendish and Aspect)
Galileo: 3
Rutherford: 3
Cavendish: 1.5
Hertz: 1 (in the comments to the Hertz post)
Newton, Hubble, and Mössbauer are currently getting shut out.
Voting will remain open for another couple of days, so if you're a backer of somebody other than Michelson and Morley, you've still got time for a late charge: round up some friends, and get out the vote.
drorzel | February 19, 2006We're back after a fun weekend at Boskone-- my various panels went well, and I got to meet, talk to, and hang out with some terrifically interesting people. I think the "Weird Quantum Phenomena" talk went rather well (it was scheduled as a half-hour talk, but there was nothing else scheduled for the room, so it stretched out to an hour). I was surprised and pleased to see that so many people were interested in hearing about quantum mechanics at the very ragged end of a convention, and I hope they enjoyed hearing the talk as much as I enjoyed giving it.
Of course, it's impossible for…
drorzel | February 17, 2006Another reminder that Republicans don't have a monopoly on offensive anti-science stupidity, from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who declares algebra useless in a column directed at a high-school drop-out.
If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.
(And again, I consider dusting off the Poetry for Physicists entry, and re-working it for the Chronicle of Higher Education or some such...)
I could spend a bunch of time ripping into Cohen…
drorzel | February 16, 2006The Top Eleven is now complete. Here's the full list of experiments, with links to my summaries:
Galileo Galilei: ~1610: Discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and measurements of the acceleration of falling objects.
Ole Roemer ~1675: Measurement of the speed of light by timing the eclipses of Io.
Isaac Newton ~1700: Dispersion of light and measurements of circulating fluids.
Henry Cavendish, ~1797: Measurement of the gravitational constant G.
Michael Faraday ~1831: Discovery of electromagnetic induction.
Michelson and Morley ~1887: Disproving the existence of the luminiferous aether.
Heinrich…
drorzel | February 16, 2006Union College Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Feb. 16, 2006
Speaker: Dr. Chad Orzel, Union College
Title: "Counting Atoms for Astrophysics: Atom Traps, Neutrino Detectors, and Radioactive Background Measurements"
Abstract: A new generation of neutrino and dark matter detectors is currently under development, using liquid neon or xenon as a detection medium. These detectors offer unprecedented sensitivity, but in order to reach their full potential, the liquid in the detector must be purified to an extraordinary degree to avoid contamination by radioactive krypton isotopes. I will describe a…
drorzel | February 16, 2006The final and most recent of the Top Eleven is an experiment that goes right to the heart of the weirdness inherent in quantum mechanics.
Who: Alain Aspect (1947-present), a French physicist. (Again, Wikipedia is a let-down, but CNRS has useful information.)
When: Around 1982 (there are several experiments involved, but the 1982 one is cited by most people).
What: His group performed the first experimental tests of Bell's Inequality, which shows that the predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be explained by a "local hidden variable" theory. Explaining that will take some space, so I'll…
drorzel | February 15, 2006A continuation of the lecture transcription/ working out of idea for Boskone that I started in the previous post. There's a greater chance that I say something stupid about quantum measurement in this part, but you'll have to look below the fold to find out...
At the end of the previous post, I wrote:
We can verify this by doing the experiment with single particles, and what we see is exactly the prediction of quantum theory. If we send one electron at a time toward a set of slits, and detect the electron position on the far side, we see individual electrons arriving one at a time, in an…
drorzel | February 14, 2006I'm teaching our sophomore-level modern physics course this term, which goes by the title "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." The first mid-term was a couple of weeks ago, on Relativity (special, not general), and the second mid-term is tomorrow, on Quantum Mechanics, and then we get three weeks of applications (basically, whatever topics out of atomic, molecular, solid state, nuclear, and particle physics I can manage to fit in).
I like to end the quantum section with one lecture on superposition and measurement, which isn't covered particularly well in the book. It's…
drorzel | February 14, 2006In case you've ever found yourself longing for a math/physics version of J.B.S. Haldane, Scott Aaronson ponders the nature of God.
drorzel | February 13, 2006The penultimate experiment in the Top Eleven brings us up to the first nominee who's still with us..
Who: Rudolf Moessbauer (1929-present) (that's Mössbauer with a heavy-metal ö), a German physicist. (The Wikipedia link is for consistency with the other posts, but contains very little information. A better bio is available from the Nobel Prize site.)
When: 1957-58.
What: This one requires a bit of background, so there will be more below the fold, but basically, he's nominated for discovering an effect that makes it possible to do precision spectroscopy of nuclear transitions.
Spectroscopy is…
drorzel | February 13, 2006Like PZ, I wasn't going to mention the whole "Cheney shoots another hunter" thing, because that is, after all, part of the sport of hunting. And while I don't personally hunt (I prefer fishing), I went to a high school where classes were unofficially cancelled on the first day of deer season, so I have no objection to the idea.
Finding out what kind of hunt it was changes my opinion, though:
Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a…
drorzel | February 12, 2006The New York Times this morning has a long article on the stolen paintings of Edvard Munch, most notably the iconic painting "The Scream." Copies of "The Scream" (there are apparently four versions, which I didn't know) have been stolen on two different occasions: in 1994, two thieves propped a ladder up against the wall of the Norwegian National Museum, broke a window, and snatched the painting, and in 2004, two men in ski masks burst into the Munch Museum with guns, grabbed two paintings off the walls, and ran to a waiting car.
Reading about the thefts, it occurs to me that if this is what…
drorzel | February 12, 2006My Terrapins lost to the hated Dukies yesterday, 96-88. I'd be more down, but they actually played pretty well-- they just aren't that good a team this year, and Duke is better than they are. They gave a great effort, though, and might've had a chance if they'd had more than half of the right game plan.
On offense, they had exactly the right idea of how to attack Duke. Nik Caner-Medley came out and went right at JJ Redick, who isn't a great on-ball defender, and Maryland concentrated on scoring inside, which is Duke's weakness year in and year out (generic office pool tip: When you're filling…
drorzel | February 11, 2006Miscellaneous quick things that I've noticed this week that don't quite rate a full post of their own:
First, a couple of links from : LiveScience offer a list of "Science Myths", with correct explanations. It gets scare quotes because "science" is pretty broadly defined, but there's some interesting stuff there.
Also from Scalzi, there's a bubble chamber simulator, for anyone who ever wanted to be a particle physicist. It generates particle track pictures as a sort of art form. Don't worry, you don't need to determine the charge and momentum of any of those aprticles. Unless you want to. You…
drorzel | February 10, 2006The preliminary Boskone program has been posted, and I'll soon be adding another tag with a "Participant" ribbon to my Wall of Name. (I have a big collection of nametags from various meetings hanging on a wall in my office.)
Excerpts of the schedule will appear below the fold, with scattered commentary, for those who would like to know exactly where I'll be next weekend.
Friday
Friday 5:00 pm Gardner: Five Things You Should Never Say to Your Favorite Authors When You Meet Them
People blurt out the most amazing things when tongue-tied. Here's a chance to think about what to say before you meet…
drorzel | February 10, 2006The next experiment in the Top Eleven is a set of observations, not an experiment.
Who: Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), an American astronomer, and the guy the Hubble Space Telescope is named after.
When: He was nominated for two related but different discoveries which were announced in 1924 and 1929.
What: Hubble's most famous work concerns galaxies: first, he proved that they were, well, distant galaxies, and then he showed that they were receding from us with a velocity proportional to their distance, which is the first piece of evidence leading to the Big Bang model of the universe. (More after…
drorzel | February 9, 2006In a comment to the AP post, "hogeb" asks an excellent question about pedagogy:
I'd like to enlist your advise and the advise of any readers who can provide it. I teach physical science to pre-service elementary school teachers. I try to elucidate the somewhat subtle differences between the application of a force and the just getting in the way of, among other things, and I try to point out why this isn't just semantics but truly important conceptual skills. I'm not sure they hear me, or how well they hear me, they rarely do well on these questions on my tests. If you can try to go back to…