Scientific papers

"...this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data." -Steven Weinberg One of the most fundamental questions we could ever ask about all of existence is "What makes up the Universe?" Image credit: Misti Mountain Observatory. I don't mean "stars and galaxies," like you see above. That might make up the Universe on the largest scales, but that's taking a look at the question of what the fundamental constituents of the Universe compose themselves into. The other side of the…
"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we've learned that normal matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons and the like -- make up only 4% of the total energy in the Universe. Image credit: Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) simulation; Vanderbilt. The galaxies and clusters of galaxies lighting up…
"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again." -Abraham Pais, physicist You've been in graduate school for many years now, and you've come a long way. You've completed all of your coursework, formed your Ph.D. thesis committee, passed your preliminary/oral/qualifying examinations, and have done an awful lot of research along the way. There's a glimmer of hope in your heart that maybe -- just maybe -- this will be…
"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think. Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of http://blog.deepskycolors.com/about.html. Although the scales differ by some 50 orders of magnitude, the laws that govern the grandest scales of the cosmos are the very same laws that govern the tiniest particles and their interactions with one another on the…
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes; everybody knows." -Leonard Cohen As you know, last week I took my first week off of the year, and went on a trip to Glacier National Park, which was my very first time there. Although I've spent a lot of time in the mountains, including some pretty icy and snowy places, I'd never walked on an actual glacier before. All of that was about to change…
"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." -Neil Armstrong Here on our little wet rock in our Solar System, we often remind ourselves what a small world Earth actually is. The farther out in space we reach, the more this appears to be true. Image credit: NASA / Apollo 11, taken by Command module pilot Michael Collins. The Earth is the largest of the four inner, rocky planets in our Solar System, at more than 12,000 km in…
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally been discovered at both detectors -- CMS and ATLAS -- at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Image credit: CERN / Particle Physics for Scottish Schools. For a little more on this, check out the earlier posts here celebrating Higgs week: The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs How the Higgs…
"The saying 'It's not over 'til the fat lady sings' is erroneous, because women who are fat are never listened to." -Margaret Cho Last year, the OPERA collaboration made worldwide headlines when they announced the results of a remarkable experiment. Image credit: OPERA / CERN. From over 730 kilometers away, in another country, neutrinos were created by one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the world. Protons at over 99.999% the speed of light were smashed into matter, creating a highly collimated beam of neutrinos, which was launched through the Earth at, presumably, speeds…
"Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things...well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds...Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true." -Terry Pratchett We all like to think that our opinions are the result of…
"Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls." -Louise Brown You know the stereotype, perpetrated throughout the United States (and well beyond) for generations: girls aren't as good at math as boys are. For a long time, people pointed towards the long list of (almost exclusively male) mathematicians and scientists as support for this idea. Image credit: Image Source/Getty Images, retrieved from…
"After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, 'Lies - damned lies - and statistics,' still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of." -Leonard Courtney, 1895 "The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself." -Philip James Bailey In the study of any scientific field, there are two great perils that you have to be careful to avoid: fraud and incompetence. Incompetence could be as innocuous as making a simple mistake in your analysis, a contamination of your data…
"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements." -Orison Swett Marden One of the greatest assumptions we make in our study of the laws of nature is, well, that they're laws of nature, not particularly special to where or when we happen to be looking at them. Image credit: NASA & ESA. Whether we look on our home planet, within our own galaxy, at a relatively nearby galaxy (like NGC 4522, above), or at galaxies extremely far away (faintly visible in the background), we always tend to assume that the…
"They credited us with the birth of that sort of heavy metal thing. Well, if that's the case, there should be an immediate abortion." -Ginger Baker As hard as it may be to believe, take a look outside. I don't mean a glance, I mean to take a real look. At all the things there are to see -- the rocks, trees, mountains, skies, clouds, Sun, water, and everything alive -- all of it. Image credit: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, under the GFDL. Now ask yourself, "what's it made of?" At a fundamental level -- like everything else you know of -- everything on Earth is made of atoms. Oxygen, Hydrogen,…
"If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew." -Albert Einstein One of the most famous scientific developments in the 20th century was the revelation that the Universe had a speed limit: the speed of light. Image credit: United Visual Artists / Tom Oldham. Clocking in at exactly 299,792,458 m/s, Einstein's theory of relativity states that any particle with mass can only approach -- but can…
[The Big Bang] is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms ... [nor] challenged by an appeal to observation. -Fred Hoyle Contrary to popular public opinion, the Big Bang is one of the most sound, well-tested and verified scientific models of all time. It's right up there with Evolution, General Relativity, and the Standard Model. In fact, it's sometimes known as the Standard Cosmological Model. Image credit: grandunificationtheory.com, and as always, click for full-size where available. Let's remember, however, that unlike Evolution and General Relativity, the Big…
Note: I'm on vacation this week, so here's one from the vault. This article first appeared on my old website, back in February of 2009. Some days the questions I get are easy, and some days I get questions from our longtime reader, Ben. This past week, there have been reports all over the news that our world may be a giant hologram. Let's take a look at what's going on. In Hanover, Germany, there's an experiment called GEO600. These are two perpendicular lasers, and they shoot out for thousands of feet, get reflected, and come back to their original location to make an interference pattern…
Before you ask yourself, "what kind of incendiary title is that," let me put this in perspective. In 2001, I started graduate school at the University of Florida, and in 2002, I took one of the most difficult year-long courses a physics student can take: Quantum Field Theory. This was both the best and worst course I've ever taken. I worked harder for it than I ever have for any other course, I learned more for doing it than I had at any other time, it was the most difficult time I've ever had in a course, and it was superbly taught by one Richard Woodard. Quantum field theory is possibly the…
Electric charges come in two types, positive and negative. Magnetic poles also come in two types, North and South. In both cases, like charges/poles repel, and opposites attract. The big difference? Electric charges can exist in isolation; you can have just a positive or negative charge by itself. Whereas in a magnet, you always need both a North pole and a South pole; you can't have a magnetic monopole. Magnetic monopoles have always been a curiosity for physicists, and many of us think that they ought to exist. In the 1970s, there were searches going on for them, and the most famous one…
New technology has led to breakthroughs in practically every aspect of our lives since the dawn of the industrial revolution. In nearly every case, it's for the betterment, in some way, of society. (And yet, I like my music best when it's acoustic, unprocessed, and barely produced at all.) Take a listen to Song for Roy by the amazing Sam Bush (with help from Emmylou Harris) about his late bass player, Roy Huskey, Jr. One of the more memorable technological advances in my lifetime came in the mid-1990s, when DNA testing/evidence became a very controversial part of our culture with a…
One of the greatest challenges in all of evolutionary science is to figure out which species evolved into which over time. From our perspective, we would love to know how humans came to be, who our ancestors were, and what simpler animals gave rise to us. Well, we don't know this right now. We know a good portion of the fossil records, but -- like anything that relies on fossils -- there are gaps, referred to colloquially as missing links. One of the fun things to track is cranial capacity over time, and we find that Homo Sapiens' huge brains are recent developments. And, as you can also…