In the News
drorzel | January 5, 2010"Slow light" is in the news again. The popular descriptions of the process usually leave a lot to be desired, so let's see if we can't do a slightly better job of explaining what's going on. The key idea is using one light beam to control the transmission of another.
Let's say you have a bunch of atoms in a gas and a laser. The laser happens to be at exactly the right frequency to be absorbed by the atoms, meaning that if you try to shine the laser through the gas, it'll be absorbed, and won't make it out the other side. This is traditionally represented by a diagram like to one to the right…
drorzel | December 18, 2009As a physicist with a blog, I am contractually obligated to do a post on the CDMS almost-a-result. This is that post.
The short version: they expected at most 0.8 events (that's total events, not events per day, or anything-- this is a whole community built on detecting nothing at all), and got 2, with maybe a third that was close to making the cut, but didn't. I think Joe Fitzsimons on Twitter summed it up best, writing:
Isn't that the least informative number of events possible?
It's more events than expected, but not enough to really be meaningful. The probability of this level of signal…
drorzel | November 30, 2009
Via Chris Mooney, a Seth Borenstein article about Obama's love for science:
Out in public, Obama turns the Bunsen burner up a notch, playing a combination of high school science teacher and math team cheerleader.
Last week, for example, the president announced that the White House would hold an annual science fair as part of a $260 million private push to improve math and science education.
"We're going to show young people how cool science can be," Obama said. "Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models."
It's nice to hear that the…
drorzel | November 5, 2009It's not getting as much press as the "X Prize" for private rocket launches, but NASA has quietly been running a contest for work toward a "space elevator," offering up to $2 million for a scheme to transmit power to a small robot climbing a 1km cable. Yesterday, the team from LaserMotive, including certified rocket scientist and friend of the blog Jordin Kare, successfully powered a robot up a 900m cable using diode laser arrays to send power to solar panels on the robot. They managed an average speed of 3.73 m/s, which doesn't get them the full $2 million prize, but qualified them for the $…
drorzel | October 14, 2009In the time that I've been at Union, I have suffered a number of lab disasters. I've had lasers killed in freak power outages. I've had lasers die because of odd electrical issues. My lab has flooded not once, not twice, but three different times. I've had equipment damaged by idiot contractors, and I've had week-long setbacks because the temperature of the room slews by ten degrees or more when they switch the heat on in the fall and off in the spring. I had a diode laser system trashed because of a crack in the insulation on a water pipe, that exposed the pipe to moist room air, leading to…
drorzel | October 7, 2009The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome." I know just about enough to recognize this as something biochemical, but I'm sure there will be plenty of commentary about this around science blogdom.
"Curious Wavefunction" is the name left by the commenter who predicted Yonath would win in this year's betting pool, and thus wins the right to author a guest post here. Congratulations, Curious. Send me email from the address you left in the comment form, and we can set…
drorzel | October 6, 2009The sneaky folks at the Nobel Foundation have thrown a spanner in the works when it comes to the Physics prize. All the speculation has surrounded exotic quantum effects and theoretical esoterica, and they turn around and give it to something -gasp- practical...
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics is split three ways: half to Charles K. Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and the other half to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor."
Now these aren't…
drorzel | September 2, 2009I sort of feel like I ought to have something to say about the recent controversy over creationists on bloggingheads.tv, which has caused Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer to renounce the whole site. If you're too lazy to click through those links, the basic problem is that bloggingheads has twice invited creationists-- sorry, cdesign proponentists-- to appear on their "Science Saturday" segments in recent weeks. Sean and Carl feel that giving people from the Discovery Institute this sort of platform amounts gives them more credibility than they deserve, especially since neither of them was…
drorzel | August 25, 2009NPR last week had a story about the changing kilogram:
More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time.
In Paris, scientists polished and weighed it carefully, until they determined that it was exactly one kilogram, around 2.2 pounds. Then, by international treaty, they declared it to be the international standard.
Since 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, that cylinder has been the standard against which…
drorzel | August 18, 2009The New York Times yesterday had a story with the dramatic headline DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show, explaining that, well, there are nefarious tricks you can pull to falsify DNA evidence, provided you have access to a high-quality biochemical laboratory. The story is a great boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere, especially with this sentence:
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
"See! They're selling fake DNA samples to…
drorzel | July 29, 2009The Corporate Masters have launched a "featured blogger" program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today.
The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling an Ordinary World, which starts out:
One of the most vexing things about studying quantum mechanics is how maddeningly classical the world is. Quantum physics features all sorts of marvelous things--particles behaving like waves,…
drorzel | July 20, 2009The Internet has been all abuzz today over the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Tor has the best one-stop collection of reminiscences, but there are plenty of others. They're roughly equally split between "Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?" and "Isn't it a shame we stopped going.
I was a bit over -2 when the Moon landing happened, so I have no personal recollections to offer. It's a significant enough anniversary for a geek like myself, though, that I wouldn't want it to pass completely without comment.
Personally, while I have some sympathy for the laments that we stopped sending…
drorzel | July 17, 2009I've been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it's not hard to find more). For those who haven't read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the decision by the IAU to demote Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet."
I didn't think the point of this was all that difficult to figure out, but it seems to have created a great deal of confusion. Some of this is probably disingenuous, but a number of people seem to be genuinely…
drorzel | July 9, 2009Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there's a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there's something in here to bolster every opinion.
The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems…
drorzel | July 8, 2009There's a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined "Physical reality of string theory demonstrated," in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit's head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in part because English was not the first language of the person writing it, I suspect). You have to go down to the third paragraph to find a sort-of explanation of what this is about:
Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical…
drorzel | July 7, 2009No, this isn't another "How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic" post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong's discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what "science journalism" actually means:
Certainly, the idea that journalism equated to talking or writing about science in any form was unpopular. In the opening plenary, Fiona Fox drew a fine line between science communication and journalism, the latter characterised…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction.
The first is last week's NOVA ScienceNOW segment on artificial diamonds and their technological potential. It's really cool to see time-lapse video of honkin' big diamonds being grown through chemical vapor deposition techniques.
The second is this New York Times piece on glass and the science of its use as a…
drorzel | July 1, 2009I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled "Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light "-- somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish:
Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.
Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday:
Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus
Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life
An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. In a report published in the international science journal Nature today (25 June), European researchers provide evidence that this magnificent plume is fed by a salty ocean. The discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life as well as our understanding of how planetary moons are formed.
and:
Jets on Saturn's…
drorzel | June 12, 2009There's a nice write-up about the World Science Festival in the New York Times today:
The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at Lincoln Center Wednesday night. Over the next three days the curious will have to make painful choices: attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost…