Physics with Emmy

A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Jefferson Lab in southern Virginia to give a talk for their Science Series of public lectures. They recorded the talk, and have done a very nice job of editing together the video, which you can see at that link, or right here: It's a bit under an hour, which must include the Q&A period at the end. So, if you've been wondering what sort of thing I do when I travel to give talks, well, here's an example. And it'll give you something to keep you entertained while I travel to Illinois to give another (different) talk tomorrow...

I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna (visible as the "featured image" with this post). This isn't the first dog-physics talk I've given since her death in December, but the previous one was the relativity talk, which has less Emmy-specific content. This one includes one of the video clips I made around a dog…

I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes: “HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!” “Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard. “But, those poodles..” “We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?” “Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.” “What?” “I would love to just lie in the sun, but…

I'm rooting around in my bag for a pen, and pull out a laser pointer by mistake. Since I'd really prefer not to be grading, I flip it on and shine it on the floor next to the spot where Emmy is half-dozing. She immediately leaps up (she's pretty spry for a dog of 12...), and pounces on it. Or tries to, as I flick the spot across the room. "Get the dot! Get the dot! Getthedotgetthedotgetthedot!" she mutters as I lead her on a lively chase around the room. After a few minutes, I click the laser off, and put it down. Emmy comes over, panting, and I scratch behind her ears. "That was fun, eh,…

The blog is recovering from the transition to WordPress, but I'm still not fully confident in it. So We'll turn to another corner of the social media universe for my procrastinatory needs this morning: Having Emmy answer physics questions on Twitter. The same deal as when we've done this before: If you've got a physics question you'd like my dog to answer, post it to Twitter with the hashtag #dogphysics (or leave it in a comment, or email it to me), and Emmy will answer via Twitter, where she's @queen_emmy.

"Hey, dude," the dog says, looking concerned. "We need to talk." "Yeah? What's up?" "Look, it's great that you're transcribing the human puppy's stories into Twitter and all, but I'm feeling left out. I've got my own Twitter account and all, but you hardly ever type any of my tweets any more. I have to do it myself, and it's hard to be witty when you have to type with your nose." "I'm sorry. Is there something specific you'd like to tweet about?" "Well, yeah," she says, in a tone like I've said something stupid. "I mean, obviously, we have a new book about relativity. And look at this…

I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?" I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?" "The superconducting wire. Where do we keep it?" "We don't have any superconducting wire. And you're a dog. What do you need superconducting wire for, anyway?" "I'm building a particle collider! I need superconducting wire for the beam-steering magnets." How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog goes on sale next Tuesday…

Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I wanted to write up something cool about quantum physics to mark the occasion. I looked around the house for inspiration, and most of what we have lying around the house is SteelyKid's toys. Thus, I will now explain the physics of quantum teleportation using SteelyKid's toys: "Wait, wait, wait... You're not seriously planning to explain something quantum without me, are you?" "I could hardly expect to get away with that, could I. No, I'm happy to have your contributions-- the book is about…

It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant doze when: "Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!" I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I yell at the dog, who is standing in the middle of the living room, baying at nothing. She stops. "Scary things!" The room is empty. "There's nothing here," I say, and then hear a car door slam. I look outside, and see the mathematician next door heading into his house. "Were you barking at Bill? He…

I'm standing in the kitchen, sipping tea and watching snow blowing across the back yard. It's cold enough that the digital thermometer has stopped working, which puts it in the single digits Fahrenheit. I'm not looking forward to walking the dog in this. "Pretty cold, dude," she says. "Yeah," I say. "It's cold, all right." "You better let me outside," she says, tail wagging. "I'm gonna catch a whole bunch of bunnies!" "A whole bunch? How do you figure?" "Well, it's so cold that they'll all be together. You know, like one of those Bozo Condensates." "Bozo Condensate?" It's too early in…

If you're still not sure whether you should be teaching physics to your dog, here's another good reason: Superconductors. The "super" in "superconductor" refers to the fact that these materials conduct electric current with absolutely zero resistance, better than the best ordinary metals. This has obvious applications in the green technology field (which dogs should definitely be interested in, as discussed in a previous installment)-- if you could remove the resistance of power lines, you would lose less energy on the way from the generating plant to your home, increasing the energy…

When I saw the data generated by the sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler was kind enough to put together, I joked that I hoped to someday need a logarithmic scale to display the sales rank history of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thanks to links from Boing Boing, John Scalzi, and Kevin Drum, I got my wish: For those not familiar with the concept, a log scale plots values on a scale that represents each order of magnitude as a fixed distance. So, the top horizontal line on that plot represents a sales rank of a million, the line below that a hundred thousand, the line below that ten…

A couple of quick book-related items that I can't resist posting, even while on vacation: First, the sales rank cracked the top 500 on Amazon last night, peaking at 396. I don't know if this is just a matter of relative sales volume being low, or what, but it's a huge kick all the same. For the moment, it's the top seller in the Physics category, and #35 in Science as a whole. Statistical fluctuation or not, that's very cool. Even better is this excellent online review from New Scientist: Talking quantum physics with a dog may seem a tad eccentric, but Orzel's new book is a true delight to…

Not that I'm obsessed, or anything (current Amazon rank: 1106), but here are the results from my incomplete survey of local book stores regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Barnes & Noble: "Out of Stock" in all local stores. Has never been in stock, really. Borders in Crossgates Mall: "Likely in store" according to the book finder computer, but if they actually put any out, either they sold them, or they're well hidden. The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: Two copies prominently displayed in the top row of the "new arrivals" case, between David Byrne's book about bicycling and John…

I'm typing this from the local Barnes and Noble, waiting for the dealership next door to finish changing my oil and inspecting my car. Sadly, they don't have How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the shelves in their (rather small) science section. Grump, grump, grump. The disappointment at not immediately finding it on the shelves is tempered a bit by seeing it featured in The Big Idea at Scalzi's blog: Want a Big Idea that's about a really big idea? Well, this week's book is about quantum physics, and it doesn't get much bigger than that (well, given the scale quantum physics works on, it…

Today is the official publication date for How to Teach Physics to your Dog! I've got another reason or two why dogs should love quantum physics that I'll probably post later, but if the ones posted so far haven't sold you on the book, how about a really nice review from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy,…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog goes on sale in fine bookstores everywhere tomorrow. But maybe the four previous posts explaining why dogs should care about quantum physics haven't yet convinced you to go buy a copy. So here's another reason, one appropriate to this solstice season, when dogs in the Northern Hemisphere will start to enjoy longer days again: Sunlight. You like sunlight, right? Of course you do, unless you're a vampire. And what dog doesn't like a sunny day? Well, you have quantum physics to thank for sunlight, because as hot as the Sun is, it's not nearly hot enough to burn…

I've been playing around with the spiffy sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler wrote, because I'm a great big dork, and enjoy playing with graphs. Here's a graph of the sales rank vs. time through 2pm EST today (plotted in Excel from the data table at the bottom of the page): As I noted in my previous post on this, the downward-going jumps are striking, and probably indicate discrete book purchase events. There also seems to be a clear trend that jumps starting at higher numbers are larger than jumps starting at lower numbers. If we assume that's the case, what does that tell us about the…

I was Googling for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" last night, to check whether a review of said book that I know is coming has been posted yet (side question: Does anybody know a good way to exclude the umpty-zillion versions of Amazon and other sellers from this sort of search? Most of the results are just product pages at one online retailer or another.). The review I was looking for isn't up yet, but I did find a goodreads page, a nice entry at the Cincinnati public library calling it "abstract science delivered painlessly," and this pre-publication alert from Library Journal. "Wait a…

I gave a talk last night to the Albany Area Math Circle, a group of high-schoolers who are interested in science and math, and enter and do very well in national math competitions. I think there were 48 kids there last night, which was pretty impressive. I gave basically the same talk I gave at Boskone on the Many-Worlds Interpretation, including reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4. I made an effort to update the SF references a little, to things that people born in the early 1990's might recognize. (Wow, I feel old.) The talk was probably a little too abstract for the audience, and I…