Physics
drorzel | February 28, 2012I'm home with The Pip today, so no extended typing for me, but I pre[ared for this by typing something up ahead of time, and getting John Scalzi to post it for me, as part of his Big Idea series:
In a way, a book about Einstein's theory of relativity is uniquely suited to a series about Big Ideas. Relativity, at its heart, is a theory built on a single Big Idea:
The laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving.
For all its fearsome reputation, everything stems from that single,simple idea. Whether you're moving or standing still, floating in space or on the surface of a planet, you…
drorzel | February 28, 2012The Pip says, "Hi, folks. My daddy's book is released today, and he's shameless enough to use me to promote it:"
"I can't read it yet, because I'm just a baby, but I can report that it was very satisfying to drool on. So you should definitely buy a copy, maybe two."
"Also, dig the awesome stuffed alligator toy I got from my Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. It crackles, and it has a mirror! It's so cool!"
drorzel | February 27, 2012If you're allergic to hype, you might want to tune this blog out for the next couple of days, because How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, so it's all I'm going to talk about for a little while. Because, well, I'm pretty excited.
And tonight's exciting finding is that it's mentioned in the Washington Post:
If "Physics for Dummies" left you baffled, maybe it's time to go a step further: Why not physics for pets? In "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," physics professor Chad Orzel attempts to explain Einstein's theory of relativity via a dialogue with his dog,…
drorzel | February 27, 2012We're in the home stretch of this term, and it has become clear that I won't actually be using the toy model of the arrow of time I've talked about in the past in my timekeeping class this term. These things happen. Having spent a not-insignificant amount of time playing with the thing, though, I might as well get a final blog post about it, with something that sort-of worked and something that shows why I'm not a computational physicist:
First, the thing that sort-of worked: in thinking about trying to use the code I wrote, I was struggling to come up with a way to quantify the apparent…
drorzel | February 26, 2012Hey, you might not know this, but I wrote a book...
The official release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog isn't until Tuesday, but a friend reported buying a copy in Missouri, so when I was headed out to do some work this afternoon, I went to the cafe at the local Barnes&Noble so I could check for myself, and there it was:
That's How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog spotted in the wild. I'm not going to say "in its natural habitat," because it's really a domestic animal, which belongs in a loving home, with people to care for it. Copies in the bookstore are feral editions,…
drorzel | February 24, 2012The other controversial thing this week that I shouldn't get involved in is the debate over whether Brian Cox is talking nonsense in a recent discussion of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Tom at Swans on Tea kicked this off with an inflammatory title, and Cox turned up in the comments to take umbrage at that. Sean Carroll provides a calmer and very thorough discussion, the comments to which include a number of well-known science popularizers duking it out.
My take on it is basically the same as Tom and Jim Kakalios in Sean's comments: unless the two particles you're talking about are within…
drorzel | February 24, 2012It's not a good week for me to be writing about anything remotely controversial, but if I want to keep my physics blogging license, I need to say something about the latest fast neutrino news. This has followed the usual trajectory of such stories, with the bonus farcical element of people who blasted the media for buying into the initial release seizing triumphantly on an initial rumor in the press that was garbled into incomprehensibility. With a little more time, it's become more clear how their result has become less clear, and the best place to look for a description of this is Matt…
drorzel | February 23, 2012I'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…
esiegel | February 22, 2012"I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time."
-Sergio Bertolucci, research director at CERN, on faster-than-light neutrinos
You know the story. Last year, the OPERA experiment at CERN announced, to the shock and surprise of practically everyone, that they had observed what appeared to be neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light.
How did the experiment conclude this? Let's refresh your memory.
Image credit: OPERA collaboration; T. Adam et al.
A beam of high-energy protons, moving very close to the speed of light (but not quite there thanks to…
drorzel | February 22, 2012A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport:
As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I'm not sure what this says about London call girls, but I'm pretty psyched that it's still selling well over there.
On this side of the Atlantic, I got a note from my editor at Scribner the other day that they've just printed another batch of the US paperback of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is also good news. There's probably a blog post in…
drorzel | February 16, 2012Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics:
You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what is the most difficult course at your university? Or even more broadly, how would one determine what course is the most difficult?
This is a good question, but hard to give a single answer to. The most difficult course at the college as a whole would be nearly impossible to determine, because different students find different…
jhalper | February 16, 2012
At age 28, theoretical physicist Dr. Zohar Komargodski became head of a research group in the Institute's Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department. A recent paper, published with Prof. Adam Schwimmer of the Physics of Complex Systems Department, made some waves in the physics world with a proposed proof of a 23-year-old theorem. If the proof stands, it will have implications for many fields, including the analysis of LHC results and supersymmetry. Komargodski and Schwimmer claim they had been kicking around various ideas for a proof for several years before the solution came to them -…
drorzel | February 14, 2012As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up and have them revise.
One of the many, many problems with teaching writing is that too many students regard the writing of drafts as pointless busy-work. Others have no real concept of what a rough draft is-- when I've collected drafts in the past, I often get things that would barely qualify as an outline, let…
drorzel | February 13, 2012So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come up with a solution.
But first, the entries:
Jane Di Giuseppe has Emmy as the dog pulling Einstein's strings:
John Pearce has Emmy playing with Einstein as well:
And Joseph Roith tells Maxwell's Demon to respect Emmy's authoritah!:
But in the end, it came down to two pictures: Tristan Croll's take on the famous chalkboard photo:
It's a little-known fact that not…
drorzel | February 13, 2012I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items:
Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00
This will be a section from the forthcoming book, probably involving Emmy and particle physics. Or possibly William Butler Yeats.
How to Wreck Your Career with Social Media (Special Interest Group)
(M), Sat 16:00 - 17:00
What are the new opportunities for public humiliation opened by the
Internet? Join this entertaining discussion about authors getting
into nasty public spats with…
drorzel | February 8, 2012Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class.
In the approximately chronological ordering of the course, we're now up to the late 1800's, and the next book we're talking about is Einstein's Clocks, Poincar$eacute;'s Maps, which talks about how Einstein and Henri Poincaré were (arguably) influenced by developments in timekeeping as they looked for the…
drorzel | February 8, 2012I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in handy from time to time, though, such as this morning, when it coughed up a whole bunch of pages linking to the Polish edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Finally, dogs in the ancestral homeland of my father's family can learn all about quantum physics. I'm a little surprised to learn…
drorzel | February 7, 2012A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics. Like this:
(See the transcript here for the source of this comment.)
The deadline for entering is this Friday. We've already got some quality entries, but the more the merrier.
drorzel | February 5, 2012Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new particle, and certainly enough to justify the generation of a press release.
Of course, there are two problems with Sean's analysis, one classical and one quantum. The classical objection is that what we have a record of is one team winning the toss every time, which does not mean that the coin is doing…
drorzel | February 3, 2012It's been a little while since I wrote up what I've been doing in my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has already appeared here, though, so I can hopefully catch up a lot of stuff in one post.
The material that will be most interesting to random readers of the blog is the "How to" section, from a couple of weeks ago, which were the lecture form of the How to Read a Scientific Paper and How to Present Scientific Data posts here. The paper-reading class was on Monday and the data-presentation…