drorzel | December 21, 2011
Molly Grades the Charts: The Top Ten of 2011 - Hollywood Prospectus Blog
A Grantlad writer's personal top ten songs out of Billboard's top 100 for the year. Notable primarily because I only recognize one of the ten songs.
Our favourite pictures of 2011 - physicsworld.com
Much as we enjoy reporting the complex and intriguing advances made in physics each year, we do love an interesting picture to go with it. Here are 12 of our favourite images of 2011, in no particular order. These range from the beautiful and historical to pictures that show how science affects the world we live in. We hope…
drorzel | December 20, 2011Over at Backreaction, Bee is running an advent calendar of her own, with amusing anecdotes about famous physicists. Apparently, it's a good year for advent calendars.
A couple of days ago, her story was a famous one about Heisenberg nearly failing to get his Ph.D. because he disdained experiment:
Wien wanted to fail Heisenberg, but Sommerfeld, in whose exam on theoretical physics Heisenberg had excelled, put in a strong word for Heisenberg. Heisenberg passed the doctoral examination with the lowest possible grade
Between this, and my own advent calendar posts about historical physics, I got…
drorzel | December 20, 2011Yesterday's equation was the first real result of quantum theory, Max Planck's formula for the black-body spectrum. Planck never really liked the quantum basis of it, though, and preferred to think of it as just a calculational trick. It wasn't until 1905 that anybody took the idea really seriously, leading to today's equation:
From the year, you can probably guess the guy responsible: Albert Einstein. Einstein realized that if you took Planck's idea and ran with it, you could explain the photoelectric effect very neatly. Where Planck had viewed the quantized radiation as a fictitious…
drorzel | December 20, 2011
Charles P. Pierce on the religion of Tim Tebow - Grantland
If we're going to have a real discussion about the place of public religion in our public spectacles, then let's have one instead of some mushy, Wonder Bread platitudes about how great it is that Tim Tebow talks about Jesus and doesn't get caught doing strippers two at a time in the hot tub. If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels. If we keep faith with those American values,…
drorzel | December 19, 2011Moving along in our countdown to Newton's birthday, we come to 1900, and one of the most revolutionary moment in the history of physics, represented in today's equation:
This is Max Planck's formula for the spectrum of the "black-body" radiation emitted by a hot object at temperature T. It's also the equation highlighted on what might be the most famous xkcd cartoon (albeit in different notation).
This is a fitting next step in the countdown not only for reasons of chronology, but also because it's a nice bridge from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. After all, the red glow of a hot…
drorzel | December 19, 2011
Fun games for science-y kids. | Doing Good Science, Scientific American Blog Network
Any game where you have to make choices about what to do involves some sort of strategy, and formulating or refining strategies is a work-out for your brain. This means that games, in general, tend to be brain-friendly giftables. It's worth noting that many of the games which connect to qualities of mind that are useful in scientific problem-solving are fun for kids (and adults) who don't think of themselves as having any special interest in science. I'm not saying you should use such games to launch stealth…
drorzel | December 18, 2011As I said yesterday, I'm going to blow through another entire subfield of physics in a single equation, as our march toward Newton's Birthday continues. Today, it's statistical mechanics, a very rich field of study that we're boiling down to a single equation:
This is Boltzmann's formula for the entropy of a macroscopic system of particles, which says that the entropy s is proportional to the logarithm of the number N of microscopic states consistent with that macroscopic state. The constant kB is there to get the units right.
Why does this get to stand in for the whole field of statistical…
drorzel | December 17, 2011Once again, the advent calendar is delayed until late at night by a busy day with SteelyKid-- soccer in the morning, playing with a trebuchet after lunch, then Arthur Christmas at the Colonie mall. We're running low on days to honor great milestones in physics, though, so I don't want to skip a day entirely.
I'm also trying to spread this around to cover a fairly representative set of subfields; having done classical mechanics and E&M at some length, I need to rush through a couple of other subfields quickly. One of these is classical thermodynamics, a field with a rich history and wide…
drorzel | December 16, 2011To end this week, we wrap up electricity and magnetism with the fourth and final of Maxwell's equations. this one includes Maxwell's own personal contribution to these:
This is sort of the mirror image of Faraday's Law from yesterday, with the curl of the magnetic field on the left, and stuff related to a change in the electric field on the right. There are two terms instead of just one on the right, though, because when you're dealing with electric fields, you can get a change in the field in two ways: by changing the field directly, or by moving charged particles around.
The first term…
drorzel | December 16, 2011Physics World has released its list of the top ten breakthroughs in physics for the year, and it doesn't include either fast neutrinos or the Higgs boson:
The two physics stories that dominated the news in 2011 were questions rather than solid scientific results, namely "Do neutrinos travel faster than light?" and "Has the Higgs boson been found?". However, there have also been some fantastic bona fide research discoveries over the last 12 months, which made it difficult to decide on the Physics World 2011 Breakthrough of the Year.
But after much debate among the Physics World editorial team…
drorzel | December 16, 2011
Mellowmas | Popdose
Your go-to guys for Christmas songs that DO suck...
The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists : Monkey See : NPR
7. The Self-Punisher. "I always hate your tastes, so I knew this would be a miserable and useless list before I decided to click on it and read the whole thing, and now I know I was right."
[1112.3004] Time in the 10,000-Year Clock
The Long Now Foundation is building a mechanical clock that is designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years. The clock maintains its long-term accuracy by synchronizing to the Sun. The 10,000-…
drorzel | December 15, 2011We got a good group photo this week, showing everybody, with Appa for scale, even:
Here, SteelyKid is opening a bag of small presents that Aunt Norma and Uncle Dan sent, while the Pip engages in the traditional five-week-old-infant pursuit of sleeping a whole lot.
When she's not opening early Christmas gifts, SteelyKid too engages in traditional three-and-a-third-year-old pursuits, such as bouncing balls:
And playing with great big cardboard boxes:
The photo quality of that last one isn't great, because I was sternly ordered to put down the camera and help her by closing the box. We then…
drorzel | December 15, 2011Moving along through our countdown to Newton's birthday, we have an equation that combines two other titans of British science:
This is the third of Maxwell's equations (named after the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell), but it originates with Michael Faraday, one of the greatest experimentalists of the day. Faraday was a fascinating guy, who came from humble origins-- he was an apprentice bookbinder who managed to get a job as Humphrey Davey's assistant-- to become hugely influential in both chemistry and physics. He also played an important role in science communication and…
drorzel | December 15, 2011
A Muscular Empathy - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct. Still, we are, in the main,…
drorzel | December 14, 2011A predictably stupid discussion of this xkcd cartoon in a place I can't link to reminded me that I haven't posted the list of Christmas songs that don't suck yet this year. This has expanded somewhat since last year, thanks to some recommendations from readers, so it's worth posting again to see if there's anything else I ought to add.
These are the 49 songs in my "Good Christmas" playlist that are rated 4 or 5 stars on iTunes. The full playlist is 129 songs, but most of those are three-star "it's ok in December, but I wouldn't want to hear it the rest of the year" songs. These ones, I won't…
drorzel | December 14, 2011As we march on toward Newton's birthday, we come to the second of Maxwell's famous equations, which is Gauss's Law applied to magnetic fields:
For once, this is pretty much as simple as it looks. The divergence of the magnetic field is zero, full stop. As I said yesterday (albeit using the wrong terminology), the left-hand side of this equation basically means that you look at the magnetic field in the vicinity of some point in space, and ask how many little arrows point toward the point of interest versus how many point away. What this equation tells us is that no matter where you look,…
drorzel | December 14, 2011Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize:
A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer--let's call him Tachyon Tad--had "discovered" a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I'd love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad's dense elaborations…
drorzel | December 14, 2011
How to Rescue Education Reform - NYTimes.com
We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and teachers' unions that want money with no strings, and activists with little patience for concerns about federal overreach. When it comes to education policy, the two of us represent different schools of thought. One of us..., is an…
drorzel | December 13, 2011I was planning to let today's Higgs press conference pass with only a few oblique mentions in posts about other things, but apparently, I would lose my license to blog about physics if I did that. You'd think that, being married to a lawyer, and all, I'd know to read the fine print in these things...
Anyway, I don't really have anything useful to say about it. My very-much-an-outsider reading of this is that the evidence they see is suggestive, but somewhat less impressive than even the many attempts to lower expectations on Twitter and elsewhere suggested. It's probably there, but they're…
drorzel | December 13, 2011And what happened then?
Well, in Who-ville they say
That the Grinch's small heart
Grew three sizes that day.
And then the true meaning
Of Christmas came through
And the Grinch found the strength
Of ten Grinches, plus two
-- Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas
It's nearly Christmas, so SteelyKid keeps demanding to watch the two classic Christmas specials we have recorded, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Watching these over and over again, my thoughts naturally turn to physics, and what sort of physics you could do with these shows.
The…