drorzel | February 8, 2006Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics:It is the very apotheosis of "a mile wide and an inch deep." They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen not only Newtonian mechanics but also optics, sound, electromagnetic theory, Maxwell's equations, special relativity, quantum mechanics and even AC circuits. They don't understand any of it, but they've seen it all. They come into my class thinking, by and large, that objects move due to the force of…
drorzel | February 8, 2006I'm a bad basketball fan.
Duke played North Carolina last night, and I didn't watch. The Blue Devils are the #2 ranked team in the nation, the Tar Heels are the defending national champions, it was a back-and-forth game that went down to the wire, and I didn't watch any of it, other than a short stretch of the first half, to get the Maryland score from the crawl on the bottom of the screen.
There are lots of reasons I could give for this-- yesterday was a particularly difficult day at work, I'm still behind on grading from a couple of weeks ago when I was sick, I'm in the middle of a very…
drorzel | February 8, 2006The eighth of the Top Eleven is an experiment by the man who set the gold standard for arrogance in physics.
Who: Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a New Zealand-born physicist who famously declared "In science, there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
When: He's nominated for the alpha-particle scattering experiments that showed the existence of the nucleus, an 1909.
What: Rutherford is famous for carrying out early experiments with radioactive substances. Among other achievements, he coined the terms "alpha, beta, and gamma…
drorzel | February 7, 2006There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn't mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things.
In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after the cut):
If you were wondering when to expect your pony, Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats has an exhaustive analysis of the budget requests of various science agencies (start with that link, and work your way up through the more recent posts). Verdict: no pony for you!
Former…
drorzel | February 7, 2006The seventh entry in the Top Eleven is an experiment that leads directly to all forms of wireless communications.
Who: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894), a German physicist.
When: 1886
What: Hertz studied electromagnetism, and in particular, the prediction from Maxwell's Equations that it ought to be possible for electromagnetic waves to travel through free space. Today, this is a simple demonstration-- you grab a couple of loops of wire, a signal generator, and an oscilloscope, but in 1886, it required the invention of a good deal of apparatus.
In order to show that electromagnetic waves…
drorzel | February 6, 2006The Steelers won the super Bowl last night, in a game that didn't hold any rooting interest for me. As a result, I spent most of it doing other things-- making gourmet fried stuff (about which more later), marking a big stack of homework assignments, and writing today's lecture (solutions of the time-independent Schroedinger equation! Whee!).
Happily, Scott Eric Kaufman has a recap, and Fred Clark has the halftime show covered. Oh, and if you want football talk, Jim Henley has a partisan take.
drorzel | February 6, 2006I feel like I ought to say something about the whole Danish cartoon mess, but really-- and this isn't something you'll hear me say often about issues touching on religion-- PZ has it about right. The paper in question has every right to print them, but when you get down to it, the cartoons themselves are pretty terrible. They're badly drawn in a manner that's weirdly typical of European political cartoons (I prefer this sort of thing), and they're gratuitously offensive. Pubishing them was a stupid thing to do.
(Let me note, though, that I find a certain delightful irony in the fact that PZ…
drorzel | February 5, 2006I've occasionally joked in the past that it's unfair that the biologists get all the attention from the religious wing nuts. I mean, modern cosmology ought to be just as big an affront to the young-earth creationist types as evolution, so what are we, chopped liver?
Of course, now that a story has come to light about a Bush appointee in the NASA press office (a 24-year-old former campaign intern) demanding that cosmology reports declare the Big Bang to be "just a theory," chooped liver doesn't look so bad. You can find the money quotes at any number of science blogs, and Sean provides an…
drorzel | February 4, 2006The 2006 Locus Reader's Poll is now up, with a convenient on-line ballot for you to vote for your favorite books and stories of the year. For those not in the know, Locus is sort of the trade magazine of the science fiction field, publishing extensive reviews, and also all manner of publishing news and fannish gossip. If you're not into science fiction or fantasy books, skip the rest of this post. (After the cut.)
The on-line poll comes with pull-down menus to aid you in voting for the books recommended by the Locus staff, so you know it's completely scientific. The lists are pretty…
drorzel | February 3, 2006I realized the other day that since moving to ScienceBlogs, I'm turning into John Scalzi (Does my new body have a brand name?), what with all the posting of cute images (and spending an inordinate amount of time taking pictures with an eye toward posting them), and assigning other bloggers homework. If I had a novel, I'd put it on the web, and make millions! Or something.
Anyway, it's nice to have at least one of those things turned around on me: RPM at evolgen is asking for the "string theory" of other sciences: the most controversial and possibly overhyped fields of study.
RPM has obviously…
drorzel | February 3, 2006(Because, as anybody knows, that's the answer to "Pop Quiz, Hotshot"...)
The answer to the pop quiz posted below is "v." That is, the speed is unchanged between the start of the problem and the collision between the ball and the pole. There are several ways to see this-- conservation of energy is my usual approach (the only energy at the start of the problem is the kinetic energy of the ball's motion, and nothing else in the problem takes up any energy, so you've got to have the same kinetic energy at the end)., but I really like Ross Smith's dimensional analysis argument. If I were giving…
drorzel | February 2, 2006Kate and I will once again be attending Boskone in a couple of weeks, and for the second year running, I'll be on a handful of panels. I had a great time as a panelist last year, so I volunteered again, and I've been looking forward to finding out what I'll be on.
I got the preliminary schedule yesterday, and it seems I'm moderating a panel with the slightly alarming title "Is Science Fiction Necessary?" (There's no further description, other than a list of panelists (Tobias Buckell, Rosemary Kirstein, Karl Schroeder, Charles Stross), though that's apparently an oversight, and some more…
drorzel | February 2, 2006I play pick-up basketball at lunchtime a couple of days a week (in a good week, anyway). It's become a running joke that after a particularly long or hard-fought game, I'll announce my intention to give a pop quiz that afternoon in class. "Just work quietly at your desks, folks. I'm going to sit here and drink Gatorade."
I'm going to turn the joke around a little for the purposes of blogging: this week is an exceptionally busy week for me, as on top of the backlog of grading that piled up last week when I was sick, I'm teaching the junior/senior level lab course for the next two weeks, and I…
drorzel | February 1, 2006The next experiment in the Top Eleven is probably the most famous failed experiment of all time.
Who: Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward Morley (1838-1923), American physicists.
When: Their first results were reported in 1887.
What: The famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which tried and failed to detect the motion of the Earth through the "luminiferous aether." At the time, light waves were believed to be disturbances in some medium that permeated all of space, and was fixed in an absolute sense. In this picture, objects moving through space should also be moving relative to the aether…
drorzel | February 1, 2006Though the tagline promises politics in addition to physics and pop culture, I try to keep the political content to a minimum. Not because I'm particularly worried about offending anyone, but because I don't particularly like the way I sound when I write about politics these days. I get very cranky, and even if I like the post when I put it up, a few days later I'm posting short filler entries just to move it off the front page faster, because reading it makes me cringe.
Of course, that's only part of the reason why I didn't watch the State of the Union address last night, despite having…
drorzel | January 31, 2006Via Kieran Healy an example of the happy coexistence of science and religion: The Vatican Observatory. I particularly like Kieran's comment regarding the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope: I think that's just fantastic--like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?
I was already aware of the Vatican Observatory, thanks to Brother Guy Consolmagno, planetary scientist, Jesuit, and SF…
drorzel | January 30, 2006I should probably stick to doing only one audience-participation thing at a time (there are more Top Eleven posts on the way), but it's a busy week for me at work, and I'm not really going to have time to post a lot of long articles, so there will be a few "talk among yourselves" entries over the next few days, in hopes of generating some interesting content without a whole lot of typing on my part.
Back when I posted my request for "Great Experiments" in other sciences, Kate remarked that another good topic would be something along the lines of "Most annoying misconception about your field…
drorzel | January 30, 2006Next up in the Top Eleven is a man who is largely responsible for the fact that we have electricity to run the computer you're using to read this.
Who: Michael Faraday (1791-1867) a poor and self-educated British scientist who rose to become one of the greatest physicists of the 19th Century.
When: Around 1831.
What: Faraday's main achievement was the discovery of Faraday's Law (obviously), one of "Maxwell's Equations" describing the behavior of electric and magnetic fields (in a certain sense, Maxwell was a master of PR-- he took a bunch of equations that other people had already discovered…
drorzel | January 29, 2006The lunar new year on Janurary 29, 2006 marks the beginning of the Year of the Dog in the Chinese system. We are pleased to present New Year's Greetings from Her Majesty, Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna:
Bow before Emmy! Bow before Emmy NOOOOWWWWWW!!!!
Or, failing that, at least rub her belly:
drorzel | January 28, 2006Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it's really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or "Street Ball" on ESPN2 in the wee hours of the morning, you can get confused, and start to think it's a complicated game. It's not. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense.
My best game is really as a post player, where I depend on other people to get me the ball, so I confront this a…