Physics
kmcwalsh | January 10, 2013
Theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan
We sat down with Brookhaven theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan for a conversation about “color glass condensate” and the structure of visible matter in the universe.
Q. We've heard a lot recently about a "new form of matter" possibly seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe — a state of saturated gluons called “color glass condensate.” Brookhaven Lab, and you in particular, have a long history with this idea. Can you tell me a bit about that history?
A. The idea for the color glass condensate arose to help us understand heavy ion…
esiegel | January 9, 2013"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Albert Einstein
It may be hard to believe, seeing as how it's been our leading theory of gravity for nearly a century now, but Einstein's General Relativity is possibly the most frequently challenged scientific idea of all-time. Of course, it's emerged victorious from each and every one of those challenges, making a slew of unintuitive predictions that have been spectacularly confirmed each time they've been tested.
Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller (Brno U. of Tech.), Peter Aniol, and Vojtech Rusin.
This…
drorzel | January 8, 2013The most talked-about physics paper last week was probably Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom (that link goes to the paywalled journal; there's also a free arxiv preprint from which the above figure is taken). It's a catchy but easily misinterpreted title-- Negative absolute temperature! Below Absolute Zero! Thermodynamics is wrong!-- that obscures the more subtle points of what's going on here. So, in the interest of clarity, I'm going to attempt an explanation, over the course of a few posts, but given my schedule these days, that might spread over a couple of…
drorzel | January 7, 2013Kate and I went down to New York City (sans kids, as my parents were good enough to take SteelyKid and The Pip for the weekend) this weekend, because Kate had a case to argue this morning, and I needed a getaway before the start of classes today. We hit the Rubin Museum of Art, which is just about the right size for the few hours we had, got some excellent Caribbean food at Negril Village, then saw The Old Man and the Old Moon in a church basement at NYU (the show was charming, the space was stiflingly hot by the end). All in all, a good weekend.
I drove back Sunday afternoon, and was…
drorzel | January 3, 2013As I hinted obliquely a little while back, I don't have a terribly high opinion of Wall Street or Wall Street traders. Given that, I'm not the most obvious audience for a book titled The Physics of Wall Street, and truth be told, I wouldn't've picked it up on my own. The publisher sent me an advance copy back in August, though, and I had a plane trip coming up to go play golf with some guys who work in business, so I thought it might make a decent read and possible conversation topic, and took it along.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it contains much more physics than Wall…
esiegel | January 2, 2013"Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others." -Timothy Leary
Here we are, on planet Earth, the product of generations of civilization-building, maybe four-billion years of evolution on our world, around 13.7 billion years into the existence of our observable Universe.
Image credit: Paranal Observatory, ESO / Babak Tafreshi.
The Universe, quite possibly, didn't have to be exactly the way it is. It didn't have to have the laws of physics be exactly what they are, with the masses and charges…
esiegel | December 28, 2012"People hear the happy story, but the truth is they could all disappear in the blink of an eye. The threats just keep coming." -Todd Steiner
It's taken generations of scientists, examining the night sky for millennia, to comprehend the full size and scope of what's out there in the Universe.
Image of the southern Milky Way, by A. Fujii.
Out beyond the planets and stars, outside of the Milky Way itself, is a great cosmic abyss filled with still-uncounted galaxies that stretch for billions of light years across the Universe.
Image credit: 2P2 Team, WFI, MPG/ESO 2.2-m Telescope, La Silla, ESO…
esiegel | December 26, 2012"We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility of the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be continuously forming. They are probably being put together now in the laboratory of the stars." -Robert Millikan
The Universe has been around for a long time, but without the Big Bang, we'd never have any of the matter or starlight that gives rise to practically all of our experiences in the entire…
drorzel | December 21, 2012We're at that time of year where people publish lists of top stories of the year, but as many crazy people will be happy to remind you, this Friday marks the end of another calendrical period, in the Mayan calendar. So, I'm going to steal an idea from a college classmate on Facebook, who wrote:
When I look back on Baktun 13, I'm going to remember all the wonderful things that happened. What's your best memory from the last 144,000 days?
This seems like a good way to get some more cheerful and science-y content on the front page of the blog. So, without further ado (or very much thought),…
esiegel | December 16, 2012"The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it." -Richard Feynman
What did you think about, wonder about, and dream about the first time you saw the true magnificence of the night sky? Did you wonder about planets orbiting each of the thousands of points of light you saw? Did you think about the possibilities of rocky worlds with liquid water, of life, and even of intelligent aliens? Or did you perhaps think on even larger scales, about what stars…
esiegel | December 14, 2012"And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make." -Paul McCartney
Every once in a while, I throw the chance out there (on facebook, twitter, or google+) to ask me whatever questions you want. Yesterday, for some insane reason, I invited people across all three platforms to ask me whatever they liked, with a dual promise that I'd not only answer them, but that the best ones would receive a free "The Year In Space" calendar for 2013, courtesy of the Planetary Society.
Image credit: The Planetary Society.
So I got a ton of questions, and now I'll do my best to answer them as…
oracknows | December 14, 2012Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Because it's vacation, he thought he'd rerun a fun post. He needs it; vacation is almost over, and it's back to work on Monday. So, here's one from 2007, which means that if you haven't been reading at least that long it's new to you—unless, of course, I reran it once and forgot about it. Besides, it's the post that introduced me to the woo-tastic wonder that is "Professor" Bill Nelson.
I admit it.
I'm a gadget freak. I sometimes think…
oracknows | December 13, 2012Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Because it's vacation, he thought he'd rerun a fun post. He needs it; vacation is almost over, and it's back to work on Monday. So, here's one from 2007. I believe I reran it once a few years ago, but it's been at least three years, which means that if you haven't been reading at least that long it's new to you. Besides, it's the post that introduced me to the woo-tastic wonder that it Lionel Milgrom.
While thinking about ways to make…
esiegel | December 12, 2012"I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man." -Jimi Hendrix
Hendrix, as I told you once before, was almost right. We know of helium, conventionally, as the lighter-than-air gas that we fill balloons, blimps and zeppelins with in order to quickly and easily "defy gravity" here on Earth.
Image credit: Jonathan Trappe.
At least defying gravity is what it appears to do. But what's really going on is that helium is simply a very low-density gas. Our atmosphere, a mix of mostly Nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2) gases, has an average…
jhalper | December 11, 2012At the beginning of the year, we published an interview with Dr. Zohar Komargodski on this blog. Apparently we were not the only ones impressed by Komargodski’s accomplishments: The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation has announced that he will be one of three recipients of a New Horizons in Physics Prize. This prize is given to promising young theoretical physicists, and it includes $100,000 in prize money.
We also wrote about last year’s Fundamental Physics Prizes, handed out by billionaire Yuri Milner. The new Prizes will be officially announced in March, 2013, at CERN.
Our…
jhalper | December 10, 2012Is anyone old enough to remember the ad in which two people walking down the street while snacking accidently bump into each other and discover peanut butter on a chocolate bar? Well, it turns out that when physics students run into each other on the street, the result is a quasicrystal with topological properties.
The students in question were members of two different labs in two different physics departments who were both out for a stroll on the same street in Tel Aviv – far from Rehovot and the Weizmann Institute. One was experimenting with a new kind of quasicrystalline optical system –…
esiegel | December 7, 2012"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe." -Carl Sagan
The Universe is a lot like an extremely intricate cake. We view it today as a snapshot in time, now that it's complete.
Image credit: Blogger user Hilly of http://makesbakesfakes.blogspot.com/.
We can view the whole thing from one point of view, determined by where we happened to be located. But we can also look intricately inside certain sections of it, so long as we have the right tools.
Image credit: Blogger user Hilly of http://makesbakesfakes.blogspot.com/.
But if we truly want to…
esiegel | December 6, 2012"Forget it. I didn't have that thing inside me where I wanted to smash against somebody and watch them break. I was too sensitive for that and disliked being that sensitive." -Josh Brolin
How do you figure out what something is made of? You take it apart -- cracking it open if necessary -- and look inside. This is something we've been doing since... well, since before our ancestors were even human.
Images credit: Elisabetta Visalberghi.
For most things here on Earth, that's easy enough. If you wanted to go down to the smallest scales possible, however, it becomes harder and harder to "crack…
jeure | December 3, 2012
Ever imagined that an Xbox controller could help open a window into the nanoworld of groundbreaking physics? Well, check out the video above.
Brookhaven scientist Ray Conley designed that one-of-a-kind machine to grow (through a technique called sputtering deposition) atomically precise lenses that can focus x-rays to within one billionth of one meter, revealing the internal nanoscale structure of materials such as electric vehicle fuel cells.
When tweaking his recipe for these multilayer Laue lenses (MLL), Conley used to have to manually enter commands into a computer to move a crucial…
esiegel | November 28, 2012"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night." -Hal Borland
Of course you know the danger that would befall us if the Earth ever got too close to the Sun, as the Perry Bible Fellowship shows, atop. But have you ever stopped to think about the Moon in our skies, and what would happen if the Earth and Moon were closer together than they actually are?
Image credit: NASA / Galileo mission.
While photos such as this -- from the Galileo spacecraft -- accurately show the relative size and illumination of the Earth and…