Science
drorzel | July 31, 2009Yesterday's historical physics poll was about precision measurements. Who were those people, and why are they worth knowing about?
As usual, we'll do these in reverse order of popularity...
First up is Ole Rømer, a Danish astronomer who is no stranger to this blog, having been profiled as part of the Top Eleven series back in the early days of ScienceBlogs. Rømer's big accomplishment was the first really good measurement of the speed of light, which he did by timing the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io. These are seen to occur slightly sooner when Earth and Jupiter are on the same side of the…
pharyngula | July 31, 2009Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we're building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future.
Brace yourself. There are six hours of video there; I've only started wading into it, but what I've seen so far also looks like a lot of material that will be very useful for inspiring students about the future of their field. There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I'm sure…
drorzel | July 31, 2009I had a bit of a discussion via Twitter with Eric Weinstein yesterday, starting with his statement:
Ed Witten has no Nobel Prize. Now tell me again how this era's physics just feels different because we are too close to it.
Basically, he appears to feel that Witten is sufficiently smart that he ought to have a Nobel. My feeling is that if you look at the list of Nobel laureates in physics, you won't find any theorists who won before their theory had experimental confirmation. It's not an official rule, but it seems to be well established practice.
My attempt at an analogy was the late John…
drorzel | July 30, 2009Yesterday, I posted a silly poll about optical physicists. Who are those people, and why should you care about them?
In inverse order of popularity:
Bringing up the rear in this race is John William Strutt, who, even more than Lord Kelvin in the thermodynamics poll, is hurt by the fact that people know him by his title, Lord Rayleigh. His notable achievements in optics include a formalization of the resolution limits for optical devices, and the phenomenon known as "Rayleigh Scattering," which is the short answer to the question "Why is the sky blue?" (The long answer requires a whole book.)…
rallain | July 30, 2009Still moving stuff over from my last server. Here is one that keeps coming up.
Surprisingly, I STILL get comments and questions from students and teachers about Pluto. Questions such as:
"Why do scientists hate Pluto?"
"How did they discover that Pluto was not a planet"
"What will happen to our planet songs without Pluto?"
"Why does Goofey wear clothes, but Pluto doesn't even though they are BOTH dogs?"
Here is the explanation I like to give. I like to start with the following question:
Suppose you were outside and saw this (image from wikimedia):
What would you call it? Some might…
drorzel | July 30, 2009There's another paper about the Fermi Paradox highlighted on the arXiv blog today. This one describes extensive numerical simulations which purport to show that no more than 1,000 spacefaring civilizations can be exploring the galaxy with non-replicating slower-than-light robotic probes.
Of course, this is highly contingent on a bunch of assumptions about the behavior of these imagined aliens. Enough so that the numbers seem to be pulled out of the air-- why would you assume that robotic probes last 50 million years? What makes that a reasonable figure?
It's clear that the authors have put a…
drorzel | July 29, 2009The semi-nonymous Phillip H. at DC Dispatches liked the idea behind the Project for Non-Academic Science, but he didn't want to reveal his secret identity. So he wrote up and posted his own interview:
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm the National Program Coordinator for Protected Species at my Federal Agency. This means I work to bring together a whole host of offices, labs, programs, and people to conserve and recover marine species that are listed under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Go over there to read his answers to the rest of the questions.
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2009The remainder of my review of Mooney and Kirshenbaum on paper will have to wait a bit longer. You see, I now have Mooney and Kirshenbaum in real life to discuss.
Always happy to have an excuse to visit the big city, I stopped by the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC to see Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum speak about their book. I would estimate there were a little ove a hunred people there.
Mooney and Kirshenbaum tag-teamed their prepared remarks. These remarks were brief and mostly focused on the reasons for writing the book, and a brief summary of what was in it. The…
oracknows | July 29, 2009I realize this is well over a month old, and maybe some of you have seen it before, but I haven't. It's a fascinating look by surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr at the history of surgery and how it has evolved over the centuries.
One thing that talks like this remind me is just how much surgery has evolved just in the short span of my career thus far, since I went to medical school in the mid-1980s. Indeed, I undertook my surgical training right in the middle of the laparoscopic revolution and experienced some of the disconnect that older surgeons must have experienced. You see, I went…
drorzel | July 29, 2009In the same basic vein as yesterday's post about thermodynamics, the following poll contains a list of physicists who are not household names, but who made significant contributions to the science of optics. Which of them is the best?
Which of these physicists from the field of optics was the best?(polls)
drorzel | July 29, 2009The Corporate Masters have launched a "featured blogger" program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today.
The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling an Ordinary World, which starts out:
One of the most vexing things about studying quantum mechanics is how maddeningly classical the world is. Quantum physics features all sorts of marvelous things--particles behaving like waves,…
drorzel | July 29, 2009So, yesterday featured a silly poll about underappreciated old-timey physicists. Who are these people, and why should you know about them?
Taking them in reverse order of the voting:
Rudolf Clausius is the originator of the infamous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of any closed system will tend to increase. He was one of the most important figures in terms of systematizing the study of thermodynamics, pulling a lot of other people's work together, and showing how it all fit.
James Joule was a brewer as well as a physicist, making him a really good guy to know. He's…
drorzel | July 29, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Jon Moulton, a biologist working at a small biotech company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work for Gene Tools, LLC, manufacturers of Morpholino antisense oligos, as a molecular biologist and general-…
drorzel | July 28, 2009While I'm stealing post ideas from Twitter, here's another poll question, thanks to Eric Weinstein, who wrote earlier:
And @CameronNeylon, when you write "Good science means not having an (emotional) allegiance to any theory surely?" I must strongly disagree.
This position results from the luxury of living on the far side of an adaptive valley which long ago was crossed by others.
So, here's another poll:
Agree or disagree: "Good science means not having an (emotional) allegiance to any theory."(polls)
(This was in the context of a running series of ruminations about academic organization…
drorzel | July 28, 2009The question of who is the greatest physicist of the physicists who are household names-- Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, etc.-- has been debated thousands of times, and will undoubtedly be debated thousands of times in the future. What isn't as often discussed is the ranking of physicists who aren't in that rare group of household names-- people whose surnames are attached to equations that GRE takers struggle to memorize, but whose given names and life stories are mostly forgotten.
Well, this post is for them: The following poll presents a list of important figures from the history of…
drorzel | July 28, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Katherine Porter, an editor of textbooks and other educational materials.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work as a science content editor for Words & Numbers, an educational content developer. Our…
oracknows | July 28, 2009In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call "tooth fairy science," where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I've often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task. That's because Senator Harkin is undeniably the father of that misbegotten beast that has sucked down over $2.5 billion of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. It's…
drorzel | July 27, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Tim Johnson, a software engineer.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
In a nutshell, software engineering. Started off with C/C++, TCL/TK, and a sprinkling of perl. For the last few years, it has been Java…
drorzel | July 27, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Evie Marom, an honest-to-God rocket scientist at SpaceDev.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm an Aerospace Engineer at a rocket and satellite company called SpaceDev. The company was recently acquired by a…
drorzel | July 27, 2009Timothy Burke notes a controversy about an NEH program that some philosophers feel tramples their discipline. In talking about a hypothetical program that would do the same for his field of history, Burke suggests something that caught my eye:
f the NEH set up a course development grant called "Time and the Past" aimed at supporting interdisciplinary courses that examined change over time but framed the grant so that ordinary history courses didn't qualify, my first impulse would be to object. Why exclude the discipline that makes that question its central concern?
But hold on a moment. What…