Physics
pontiff | September 2, 2009Trip to Zurich for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing, Zurich 29th-31st August 2009.
Thursday 8/27 - 7:30am SEA to 3:30pm IAD, 6:00pm IAD to 8:00am ZRH. Attempt to upgrade first leg failed which is too bad as it was the international version of the 767-300 which has a pretty nice (by American carrier standards) business class. Both flights are completely full. Am I the only one who often goes to the self check kiosks by the gates and attempts to move my seat to one beside an empty seat? Sleep approximately 2 hours. Why does the lady behind me think that it is okay to start a…
drorzel | September 2, 2009This was delayed a day by yesterday's ranting, but I wanted to explain the significance of the people in Monday's lesser-known quantum mechanic smackdown. I'm happy to see that, as of this morning, three candidates have rallied past the "unique flower" option.
In reverse order of popularity:
Hendrik Kramers was a Dutch physicist who spent a long time working as a student and assistant to Bohr, and thus was involved in a lot of the early attempts to make a working quantum theory. He's best known for work in condensed matter physics, and for being the "K" in the WKB approximation.
Arnold…
jstemwedel | September 1, 2009Eugenie Samuel Reich is a reporter whose work in the Boston Globe, Nature, and New Scientist will be well-known to those with an interest in scientific conduct (and misconduct). In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, she turns her skills as an investigative reporter to writing a book-length exploration of Jan Hendrik Schön's frauds at Bell Labs, providing a detailed picture of the conditions that made it possible for him to get away with his fraud as long as he did.
Eugenie Samuel Reich agreed to answer some questions about Plastic Fantastic and…
rallain | August 31, 2009Maybe this is a little old (in internet age), but it is a great example. Here is the Loop-the-loop stunt from the show Fifth Gear.
I like this. First, it is a bold stunt. But also, there is some good physics here. Though, most importantly, the Fifth Gear producers were kind enough to include a shot that was very compatible with video analysis.
I went to the official site of this stunt - http://looptheloop.dunlop.eu. From here I found some useful info:
Loop is 40 feet tall
The car is a Toyota Aygo
Some physics-y guy calculated that the car must go 36 mph to do the loop (I think that is…
jstemwedel | August 31, 2009
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World
by Eugenie Samuel Reich
New York: Palgrave Macmillan
2009
The scientific enterprise is built on trust and accountability. Scientists are accountable both to the world they are trying to describe and to their fellow scientists, with whom they are working to build a reliable body of knowledge. And, given the magnitude of the task, they must be able to trust the other scientists engaged in this knowledge-building activity.
When scientists commit fraud, they are breaking trust with their fellow scientists and…
drorzel | August 31, 2009SteelyKid's day care is closed today, meaning that I will be spending the day chasing her in circles in a variety of different places. this doesn't allow a lot of blogging time, so you get a poll to pass the time.
We'll go back to the historical physics thing for this one. The following poll lists a bunch of less-well-known physicists (that is, not Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, etc.) who contributed to the development of quantum mechanics. Which of them was the best?
Which of these less-well-known quantum pioneers was the best?(surveys)
While these are quantum pioneers, we're still…
esiegel | August 28, 2009Yesterday, I showed you a picture of 100,000 nearby galaxies, which made me feel small, even when we just look at our (relatively) local Universe. Today, let's go down to the other end of the spectrum.
Electron microscopes have been around for a long time, and they've let us see some very advanced structures at amazingly high resolutions. For example, here are some individual pollen grains:
But what if you want to go deeper? What if you wanted, say, to see an individual protein and how it's folded? Well, we have the technology (such as at the Advanced Photon Source) to image and infer the…
rallain | August 28, 2009I found this in the most recent issue of The Physics Teacher (September 2009). Surprisingly, there were several good articles in this issue. One article discusses a doable version of the Millikan Oil drop experiment. Maybe you are not a (or were not) a physics major, so you might not be familiar with how cool, but tedious and squinty the oil drop experiment can be.
In the Millikan Oil drop experiment, small electrically charged drops of oil are placed in a constant electric field. It turns out that a small enough number of electrons are on each drop so that the quantization of charge can…
drorzel | August 28, 2009The Female Science Professor is thinking about what advisors owe their students:
When I got my PhD and went out into the great big academic world, I felt that I had the respect of my adviser, but I knew not to expect anything more from him in the way of support in my career other than the standard recommendation letter.
I never minded because he was that way with all of his students. He had a sink-or-swim philosophy of advising, and this continued after students graduated.
Now that I am an adviser with former students of my own, I think his approach makes some sense because it is a very fair…
drorzel | August 27, 2009I'm feeling slightly better, but still a little wobbly, so here's what may be the dorkiest Dorky Poll yet:
How do you like your quantum mechanics?(trends)
drorzel | August 26, 2009Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven't been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees-- including university faculty-- to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid "furlough" days, in order to cut costs enough to have an approximately balanced budget.
Janet's comments, and the stories about the impact on scientists reminded me of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995, when I was a grad student working at NIST.
That shutdown was the result of a game of "chicken"…
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…
esiegel | August 25, 2009There's a new book out there, Why Does E=MC2 (and Why Should We Care?), by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. One of Seed's editors, Elizabeth Cline, took a read through it and wrote about her experiences and what she learned. Is relativity, particle physics, and all the related science really incomprehensible to all except the scientists working on it? Cox and Forshaw don't think so, and neither do I. So I wrote an article for SEED Magazine here. Here's an excerpt:
Inside of every atom -- every proton, every neutron, every electron, even every neutrino in the Universe -- lies the secret of…
rallain | August 23, 2009I saw this video on digg or reddit. I can't remember which.
I was in awe. Then I started thinking. I wonder how fast that water was moving up right after the explosion. Too bad the video doesn't have a scale. Well, it kind of does - there is that ship. I am terrible at ship identification though. Maybe I can use my favorite scaling trick - assume the stuff is on the surface of the Earth. This means that free falling objects would have an acceleration of -9.8 m/s2. Let me try this on the water as it falls. Oh, trust me. I know it is not really free falling, but it is in this big…
rallain | August 21, 2009Forgive me if I don't know the official parkour term for this move. This is where you have two walls that are close to each other and you vertically climb them. Here is a shot of Mark Witmer (from Ninja Warrior) doing the wall climb.
Doesn't look too hard, does it? Well, I think it depends on how far apart the two walls are. This is actually one parkour move that my kids like to do (Hey kids! Don't do that! Let me get my camera though because this will be perfect for my blog)
I am going to start with this second kind of wall climb. Simply because it is easier due to symmetry. So,…
esiegel | August 21, 2009Recently, a discussion started in one of my comment threads about whether the Big Bang was necessarily valid or not, and whether there were any reasonable alternatives. The answer is that not only is the Big Bang the best theory to explain the start and evolution of the Universe, it's the only one that doesn't make incorrect predictions. Let's see this in action.
This all started in the late 1920s, when we realized that spiral nebulae were not just galaxies, but that these other galaxies were nearly all moving away from us. Moreover, the ones that were farther away from us were moving away…
drorzel | August 21, 2009So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there.
I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either),…
drorzel | August 20, 2009I have a bunch of errand-running to do today, so I will leave you with a Dorky Poll question for entertainment, this time regarding the work of the great Sir Isaac Newton:
Which of Isaac Newton's Laws is your favorite?(trends)
We're still dealing with classical physics, here, so superpositions of results are not allowed. Pick one and only one answer.
drorzel | August 20, 2009I tagged Steinn's post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it's been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like.
None of the subsequent discussion has answered what, to me, seems like the most obvious problem with the original story. Namely, why the insistence on publishing this as a Comment in the first place? I mean, here's the start of the saga:
1. Read a paper in the most prestigious journal in your field that "proves" that…
pontiff | August 19, 2009Want a job hacking away at topological quantum computing (and more) by day and surfing (by morning?) on the beautiful Southern California coast near Santa Barbara? Okay, well maybe surfing isn't part of the job description, but Microsoft's Station Q at UCSB has postdocs available with a deadline of October 16, 2009:
Station Q will be recruiting postdoctoral researchers. We are primarily interested in applicants with a strong background in quantum Hall physics, topological insulators, quantum information in condensed matter, and/or numerical methods, but will consider excellent candidates…