drorzel | December 2, 2013I got some feedback from my editor about draft chapters of the book-in-progress a while ago, and while it was generally pretty positive, there's a lot of work to be done. Shortly after that, I realized there was a big and awkward gap in the material I had, which involved a lot of frantic research and (re)writing to fix, so I'm not as far along in the revising as I'd like to be. And since I'd like to make the original end-of-the-year deadline for completing the manuscript, for a variety of reasons, that means some intense work in the next few weeks. Which, in turn, means a significant…
drorzel | November 30, 2013"Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!"
"It's not a dog, honey, it's an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog."
We came down to my parents' for Thanksgiving this year, because both Kate and I are really busy with work at the moment, and didn't need the additional stress of planning and hosting a big dinner. On Friday morning, my dad went up into the attic and dug out the bags containing the vast collection of Star Wars toys my sister and I…
drorzel | November 27, 2013Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on it to a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society.
Well, actually, that's not quite true-- Mendeleev did write up a paper for Russian chemists in 1870, but he didn't present it himself. He had a friend do the presentation in his stead. Mendeleev himself was out of town, inspecting artisanal cheese-making operations for the Russian government.
I talked a bit last week about Eureka moments and…
drorzel | November 26, 2013We had a very late colloquium talk on Monday-- on the next-to-last day of our fall term exam period, so student turnout was a little disappointing-- by the science historian Dieter Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who was in town visiting a colleague in our history department. He told us the story of Fritz Reiche, a student of Max Planck's whoc ended up having a Union College connection (which was a part of why Hoffmann wanted to give the talk).
Reiche did his Ph.D. under Planck, in 1907, then spent time at a few other great institutions in Germany,…
drorzel | November 24, 2013Since SteelyKid got her own cute-photo post last night, it's only fair to give equal time to The Pip. This morning, for reasons that passeth adult understanding, the kids decided to balance teddy bears on their heads, SteelyKid using Bertha the Big Bear (who is just a little smaller than The Pip), while the Little Dude had a tiny neon green beanbag bear. Leading to the "featured image" above, which is my new favorite picture of Il Duderino.
"Yeah, I got a bear on my head. And I make it look good."
Lest you think his exceptional knowledge of forces in equlibrium is employed only for totally…
drorzel | November 23, 2013One of SteelyKid's classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent "new kinds of water." The "featured image" above shows her reinventing stock images... And doing a better job of it than this clown. If you need an image to illustrate your chemistry story, shoot me an email-- our rates are very reasonable.
(The sludgy brown mixture in the tube is water with soap, cinnamon, and cracked pepper floating in it. If you shake it back and forth a bit, the pepper does float around in a kind of…
drorzel | November 22, 2013From The Fly in the Cathedral, Brian Cathcart's history of the experiments that led up to the splitting of lithium nuclei by accelerated protons in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1932. One of the incidents along the way was the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick, also in 1932. In describing Chadwick, who was Ernest Rutherford's assistant director in the years in question, Cathcart writes:
Chadwick's diffidence was familiar to all the students. [Thomas] Allibone was only one of several to describe taking a problem to the assistant director, explaining it at length and then leaving his…
drorzel | November 21, 2013I'm not talking about the tv show Eureka here, which was mostly silly fluff but not especially problematic. I'm talking about the famous anecdote about Archimedes of Syracuse, who supposedly realized the principle that bears his name when slipping into a bath, distracted by a problem he had been assigned by his king. On realizing the solution, he (supposedly) leaped out of the tub, yelling "Eureka!" (usually translated as "I found it!") and ran home naked, because he was so excited about the discovery that he forgot to dress.
As you know, I'm working on a book about the relationship between…
drorzel | November 20, 2013A couple of Mondays ago, I was at work and got the dreaded phone call from day care. "[The Pip]'s got conjunctivitis again. It's really bad, and he needs to go home right away."
Admittedly, this isn't the very worst phone call a parent could receive, but it's very much Not Good. Conjunctivitis means a trip to the doctor for antibiotics and eye drops (which The Pip HATES), and being sent home knocks out not only the rest of that day, but the entire next day, as he has to be on medication for at least 24 hours before he can return to day care.
The call came in around 10:00, and I had a class to…
drorzel | November 19, 2013My trip into the office today was for the express purpose of posting this job ad:
We invite applications for Visiting Assistant Professor starting in September 2014. This position is available for up to three years, contingent on satisfactory performance. Applicants should have some teaching experience and a strong commitment to undergraduate education. Union is a highly selective, small (2200 students) liberal arts college with an engineering program, located in the Capital District of New York State, a region heavily engaged in science and R&D. The Department of Physics and Astronomy (…
drorzel | November 18, 2013In comments to the Sagan post, Niall asked about how I spend my time. This is about to change, as today is the last day of my class for the fall term, then we have an extended break, but it's probably interesting in a life-in-academia way to put up my schedule at the moment:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday
06:00 - Alarm goes off. Wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Release dog, start breakfast prep.
06:30 - Wake SteelyKid, take her downstairs, give her breakfast. The usual division of labor is that I get the food, then carry her upstairs to go to the bathroom (because she's tired…
drorzel | November 13, 2013I am crushingly busy right now-- massive book rewrites needed, papers to grade, etc.-- so I've actually been fairly happy with the general lack of topics that inspire a deep desire to blog. which of course, was promptly upset this morning, when a brief outburst of hating on Carl Sagan erupted on Twitter just as I was about to head to the gym.
The catalyst was the hoopla surrounding the donation of Sagan's papers to the Library of Congress, which though it isn't specifically cited was the cause of a flurry of Twitter discussion that I think led to Erin Podolak's anti-Sagan manifesto, which in…
drorzel | November 12, 2013 I'm teaching Quantum Optics this term, and one of my students picked "Atom Optics" off the list of suggested paper topics. When he asked for pointers, I said "You should check out the diffraction stuff Markus Arndt's group does." And just like that, a paper from the Arndt group turns up from the Arxiv Blog...
This is apparently only recently posted to the arxiv, though the article in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics claims to have been online since July. Since I never get tired of talking about this, let's talk about this one, too.
So, what's this one about, then? In a lot of ways, it's…
drorzel | November 10, 2013Because I know there are still a few people who come here for the cute-kid pictures, I give you the official SteelyKid portrait for the 2013-14 academic year. This is actually a photo of a photo, because that's the easiest way to convert the print they sent us to a digital format, and also because it gave me an excuse to play with GIMP a little. It's not the greatest reproduction, but it's good enough for blogging.
I'm not entirely sure what's up with her hair, here. There were a few days when she went in with a braid, and this might've been one. Or she might've asked somebody to put it up…
drorzel | November 7, 2013Two years ago, as of 4:35 this morning, The Pip was born. And now he's a great big toddler, obsessed with pirates and dinosaurs, running everywhere and talking a LOT...
He's had a bit of a rough week, with another flare-up of conjunctivitis in his right eye, requiring eye ointment and antibiotics, the less said about the administration of which, the better. He's a remarkably cheerful Little Dude by nature, though, and is all smiles and giggles mere minutes after the screaming stops.
His main birthday gift is going to be a big-kid bed, just like his sister's, that's supposed to be delivered in…
drorzel | November 7, 2013One of the interesting things about the pile of old theses we found in the basement is the opportunity to look at things that nobody believes any more. Past installments of the Old Thesis Club have shown people fumbling toward an understanding of quantum physics via electron scattering and spectroscopy, but in both of those cases, they were working toward a correct theory. In this edition, we look at an investigation of a theory that's been wholly discredited.
The general category of the experiment isn't problematic-- it's basically a test of the equivalence principle, the idea that the…
drorzel | November 5, 2013In January of 1990, a friend and I designed the ultimate message to an alien civilization.
Okay, admittedly, this wan't a recognized scientific accomplishment. After all, in January of 1990, I was a freshman at Williams. The alien message we designed was part of a first-year Winter Study seminar class. Winter Study, for those not part of the Cult of the Purple Cow is the one-month January term sandwiched between the Fall and Spring semesters, and at the time, first-year students were required to take one of a handful of interdisciplinary seminar courses intended to introduce students to a…
drorzel | November 3, 2013October was a very heavy month, blog-wise, and I had planned to continue that labor. In working the word mines, though, I seem to have delved too deep, and unleashed a horde. And they have Halloween candy...
I'll try to fight my way clear by Monday, but not too hard, because, really, look at them. Have a good weekend.
My position has been overrun. Send reinforcements.
drorzel | October 31, 2013In 1967, a team of scientists hauled a big pile of gear-- electronics, particle detectors, a giant slab of iron-- into the burial chamber at the base of one of the pyramids at Giza. This sounds like a scene from a science fiction or fantasy novel-- throw in the fact that their first attempt was interrupted by the Six Day War and you've got an element of a Tim Powers secret history story-- but the goal wasn't the opening of an interdimensional portal or the raising of the dead. Instead, they were using astrophysics to do archaeology: their detectors measured the number of cosmic ray particles…
drorzel | October 30, 2013An article titled "Individualism: The legacy of great physicists," by Ricardo Heras. crossed my various social media feeds a half-dozen times on Tuesday, so I finally broke down and read it, and I'm puzzled. The argument is very straightforward-- single-author publications used to be common, now they're not, this might indicate a lack of truly independent work, that would be bad-- but a lot of it is at odds with my reading of the relevant history.
The most jarring thing about the article is the "Individualistic Team" graphic above, including a bunch of pictures of famous physicists who are…