In the News
drorzel | October 7, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Half will go to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," with the other half split between Makoto Kobayahi and Toshihide Maskawa, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
I'll be honest: this is far enough outside my area of physics, that I can't say anything sensible other than "It's a good day to be a Japanese particle theorist." I can't begin to explain what these guys did. The…
drorzel | September 16, 2008Everybody's all abuzz about this picture:
This may be the first image of a planet around a sun-like star. May be, mind-- it looks likely, but there are still a lot of caveats. If it is a planet, and not a dim background star, it's got about eight times the mass of Jupiter, and is orbiting at eleven times the radius of Neptune's orbit. Those are a little hard to explain.
Still, isn't it cool to be living in the future?
Phil Plait has all the details.
drorzel | September 15, 2008As you might have guessed from yesterday's tease, the folks at ScienceDebate 2008 have now managed to get answers from the McCain campaign (to go with Obama's froma few weeks ago). Which means that while you may never see them answering science questions on a stage together, you can put them head-to-head on the Web, and see which you like better.
Of course, the key question regarding McCain's answers is "How long does it take him to mention elements of his biography?" The answer: There are 186 words before you get to:
I am uniquely qualified to lead our nation during this technological…
drorzel | August 1, 2008Well, OK, that's a stretch, but there is water, according to the latest Phoenix results:
"We've now finally touched it and tasted it," William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water, said at a news conference on Thursday. "And I'd like to say, from my standpoint, it tastes very fine."
No word yet on whether they've managed to figure out how to turn on the alien atmosphere-generating machine. That'll probably have to wait for the next mission.
Update: Here's a bonus link to…
drorzel | July 26, 2008I know nothing about art or music.
OK, that's not entirely true-- I know a little bit here and there. I just have no systematic knowledge of art or music (by which I mean fine art and classical music). I don't know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I'm not even sure those are both art terms.
Despite the sterling reputation of the department, I never took an Art History class when I was at Williams, nor did I take any music classes. They weren't specifically required, and I was a physics major-- my schedule was full of math and science classes, and between that and the boozing,…
drorzel | July 15, 2008As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson's Sizzle was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It's an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie.
Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test the old adage that "there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right." Most of the blog reviews collected at the ScienceBlogs page for the film were, um, less than glowing. My own kind of "Meh." review is one of the better ones on ScienceBlogs.
Having looked at a whole…
drorzel | July 14, 2008The forthcoming Sizzle, Randy Olson's follow-up to the well-received A Flock of Dodos, is a movie that's trying to do three things at the same time: 1) provide some information about global warming, 2) make a point about how scientific information is presented to the public, and 3) experiment with new ways of presenting scientific information to the public. As often happens with movies that are trying to do multiple things, it's not entirely successful at any of them, but it's a worthy attempt.
The film plays as basically a cross between An Inconvenient Truth and a Christopher Guest…
drorzel | July 12, 2008A couple of links about things that have turned up in my email recently:
-- As a follow-on to yesterday's post about grad school, I got an email a little while ago about Graduate Junction, a social networking/ career building site aimed at graduate students. I'm coming up on ten years of being out of their demographic, but it looks kind of cool. If you're a grad student, you might check it out.
-- The Union of Concerned Scientists is running a cartoon contest for the best editorial cartoon about the politicization of science. They've selected a dozen finalists, and now want your vote as to…
drorzel | June 3, 2008The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success-- they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and favorably impressed journalists. Good news, all.
Of course, at the same time on the opposite coast, the annual Book Expo America was going on, and as Jennifer Ouellete reports, science was shut out:
Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign…
drorzel | May 26, 2008So, the Martians go and helpfully draw a box on the ground as a target for the Phoenix landing, and what do they do? They land next to it, not in it. Way to go, NASA.
I bet if they hadn't screwed up the unit conversions, they would've hit it...
(The square pattern on the ground is really something to do with the water ice that the mission is there to look for-- it's a natural phenomenon, and a good sign for the mission.
(It just looks like a landing zone drawn by space aliens.)
drorzel | March 20, 2008The coolest-sounding science news of the moment is undoubtedly "Hubble Finds First Organic Molecule on an Exoplanet""
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made the first detection ever of an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star. This breakthrough is an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our solar system.
Of course, that sounds a little more dramatic and impressive than the reality: they used absorption spectroscopy of the plent's atmosphere to detect the presence of methane in its atmosphere. Now,…
drorzel | March 11, 2008The annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week in New Orleans. This is the biggest physics conference of the year, by far, with close to 7,000 attendees-- despite what you might think from the Internet, the Condensed Matter crowd who attend the March Meeting significantly outnumber particle physicists and high-energy theorists.
I don't usually go to the March Meeting-- it's just too damn big. I went to the Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999 (and gave an invited talk, in fact), and didn't care for it all that much. I prefer DAMOP, which is much smaller-- a…
drorzel | December 12, 2007There's another Mars article in the Times this morning, which I wouldn't bother to note in a full post save for one thing: the way they got the results.
The right front wheel of Spirit stopped turning in March 2006. Since then, the rover has been driving backwards, dragging the lame wheel along. This May, scientists noticed a bright spot in the trail of overturned dirt.
They turned Spirit around for a closer look, finding high levels of silica, the main ingredient of window glass. They then aimed the rover at a nearby rock, wanting to break it apart to determine if the silica was just a…
drorzel | November 14, 2007Dave Bacon watched "Judgement Day" last night, and has a question:
It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is "just a theory" wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn't illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial?
The answer: Because quantum physics involves math, and Math Is Hard.
If you want to construct a cockamamie theory that can pretend to be an alternative to quantum mechanics, it needs to have…
drorzel | November 14, 2007So, in case you missed the splashy banner ads that have been running here for the last week, NOVA ran a show about the Dover, PA "Intelligent Design" trial last night. You can find all manner of commentary on ScienceBlogs, for example here, here, and here.
I'm not as, shall we say, personally invested in the issue as many of my fellow bloggers, but this did look interesting to me, so I watched it last night (with occasional flipping over to the Syracuse basketball game). It was... pretty good. I doubt it would change anybody's mind, in the unlikely event that any "Intelligent Design"…
drorzel | November 13, 2007 Jennifer Ouellette meantions it as the jumping-off point for her particle-wave duality post, but I want to spend a little time talking about this paper on single-electron interference (Science 318, 949 (2007)), because it's a very nice piece of work. There's also a Physics World news article about the experiment, which is pretty good, but slightly understates the coolness of the experiment.
The experiment here is extremely simple: They take a jet of molecular hydrogen, and hit it with extremely high-energy photons from the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. These…
drorzel | November 9, 2007 I have a bunch of science news sources in my RSS feeds, and every evening, I scan through the accumulated articles to try to figure out what physics-related stories there are to talk about. Sometimes, it's hard to find anything, but other days, you get stories that lead to four press releases at EurekAlert (one, two, three, four), a write-up at Backreaction, a Physics World news story, and a Dennis Overbye piece in the New York Times. I guess I really ought to say something about the new results from the Pierre Auger Observatory, published this week in Science (Science 318, 938 (2007), if…
drorzel | November 5, 2007I'm suffering muscle twinges in my neck and shoulder that are usually linked to excessive typing. As I have a grant proposal to review, a senior thesis to help whip into shape, and a book under contract, this means that blogging will be substantially reduced while I ration my typing to those things that pay the bills. You'll get more linking and less thinking, at least until my shoulder calms down a bit.
I don't want to pass up a set of links-- two press releases and a news story-- on some new results regarding friction:
If you want to reduce the friction between tiny objects, just increase…
drorzel | October 28, 2007The Times today has an article on famous scientists who have nutty ideas, inspired by the James Watson kerfuffle of the last couple of weeks. Of course, they had to mention at least one kooky physicist, leading to this wonderful set of paragraphs:
Sometimes the wandering from one's home turf extends all the way to the paranormal. In 2001, when officials of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, issued a package of stamps commemorating the centenary of the Nobel Prize, they sought the counsel of Brian Josephson, who shared the prize for physics in 1973 for his superconductivity research.…
drorzel | October 15, 2007In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program. Under this program, I pledge to personally pay the full tuition for any student who is:
From a low-income family, or a historically disadvantaged group,
Enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited four-year college or university, and
Taking courses toward a degree in physics or related…