Hawking, famous for his research on black holes and theoretical physics, steps down Wednesday but will continue to work for the university as before.
Tradition dictates that professors retire from the post the year they turn 67 and Hawking celebrated his 67th birthday in January.
In the new study, researchers used a microwave pulse to attempt to entangle the electrical currents of the two superconductors. If the currents were quantum-mechanically linked, one current would flow clockwise at the time of measurement (assigned a value of 0), while the other would flow counterclockwise when measured (assigned a value of 1), Martinis says. On the other hand, the currents’ directions would be completely independent of each other if everyday, classical physics were at work.
After attempting to entangle the superconducting circuits, Martinis and his team measured the directions of the currents 34.1 million times. When one current flowed clockwise (measured as a 0), the team found, the other flowed counterclockwise (measured as a 1) with very high probability. So the two were linked in a way that only quantum mechanics could explain.
But the eye betrays its evolutionary origin with a tell-tale flaw: The retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry signals from the retina’s light-sensing cells lie on top of those cells and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the eye’s blind spot. Any intelligent designer would be offended by such a clumsy arrangement. The human eye was not designed; it was inherited as the result of long-term evolutionary development. The eyes of all vertebrate animals are linked with our invertebrate relatives that have only simple eyes that detect light but can’t form an image. In fact, molecular studies have recently found a direct link between the genetic structures that control primitive invertebrate light sensors and those that control sophisticated mammalian lens structures.
Now that we have established that every element in the periodic table aside from hydrogen is essentially stardust, we have to determine how much of our body is made up of this stardust. If we know how many hydrogen atoms are in our body, then we can say that the rest is stardust. Our body is composed of roughly 7x1027 atoms. That is a lot of atoms! Try writing that number out on a piece of paper: 7 with 27 zeros behind it. We say roughly because if you pluck a hair or pick your nose there might be slightly less. Now it turns out that of those billion billion billion atoms, 4.2x1027 of them are hydrogen. Remember that hydrogen is bigbang dust and not stardust. This leaves 2.8x1027 atoms of stardust. Thus the amount of stardust atoms in our body is 40%.
Since stardust atoms are the heavier elements, the percentage of star mass in our body is much more impressive. Most of the hydrogen in our body floats around in the form of water. The human body is about 60% water and hydrogen only accounts for 11% of that water mass. Even though water consists of two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, hydrogen has much less mass. We can conclude that 93% of the mass in our body is stardust. Just think, long ago someone may have wished upon a star that you are made of.
But a new report claims the rise is accounted for, in part, by the growth in the number of 16-year-olds, while the proportion studying science A-levels has dropped since 1997.
At university level, big increases in the number of undergraduates studying science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects are also a "fiction", according to the study.
The Government now includes as "science", courses such as nutrition and complementary medicine, geography studies, sports science, nursing and psychology, even though in dozens of universities it is classed as an arts degree.
* Yakir Aharonov of Chapman University in Orange, California, Tel Aviv University, and the University of South Carolina, and Michael Berry of the University of Bristol in Britain for their discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect and the related Berry Phase. "It describes certain aspects of electromagnetics that violate classical descriptions of physics," Pendlebury said. "They are all in every physics text book now. It seems odd to me that they have not been recognized by the Nobel committee."
* John Pendry of Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, Sheldon Schultz of the University of California San Diego and David Smith of Duke University, whose prediction and discovery of negative refraction makes possible meta-materials, used to make "invisibility cloaks" to deflect various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.
* Juan Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and Peter Zoller of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, whose work on quantum switches has made possible quantum computers.
The show entertains by painfully exposing just how little of their elementary school education adults retain, so having a Nobel laureate on stage called for even more ridiculous FOX theatrics than usual. In the opening sequence, the announcer booms, "Will he blow it, and be the laughing-stock of Nobel prize-winners everywhere?" I wonder if any of Smoot's Berkeley colleagues started to sweat at that point. Would the show expose the shortcomings of science? Would Smoot remember how to spell the word "Mississippi?"
These findings are surprising, given the generality of the previous argument and the robustness of Luttinger-liquid physics. If the relation between η and ν would hold, the positive value of η would imply a very fast decay of the single-particle correlation function (i.e., a much larger exponent ν) than anticipated, or indeed directly measured. There could be several ways out of this predicament. The simplest one would be some experimental artifact or surface problem, but that hardly seems compatible with the good quality of the data, the observation of the momentum dependence, the observed scaling, and the agreement between the ARPES and STM measurements. Salvation could come from the theory side: the fact that the material is not a system that can be directly mapped to a single-chain one-dimensional system, but rather to a double-chain one—a ladder system. Those systems are known to develop gaps in their excitation spectrum, in contrast to single-chain ones. Such gaps would be compatible with rapid decay of the single-particle correlations. Of course this would not explain the measured value of ν, or the more severe catch: such gaps should normally be seen in both STM and ARPES, and none have been observed at the relevant energy scales here. Other routes, such as disorder, can be explored but, as of today, the question remains.
A synchrotron is a device that uses a magnetic field to accelerate particles (e.g. electrons) at faster and faster speeds by boosting their energies as they travel around the ring.
“It is appropriate that the speaker who will mark the milestone of our 25th anniversary is a renowned physicist and university leader who took on the challenge of managing the nation’s premier physical science research agency and serving as the conduit between the scientific community and the White House,” said Kevin Finneran, editor in chief of Issues in Science and Technology. “He has devoted most of his career to the same mission as Issues: applying the insights of the science and engineering community to help solve the world’s pressing problems and achieve society’s goals.”
It was the Jewish German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) who was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics for his theories on relativity. He is regarded as the father of modern physics.
for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect
Quantum mechanics states that an electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they match established quantum mechanical predictions.
A lecture last night, “A Study in Scarlet: The Spitzer Space Telescope View of the Triangulum Galaxy,” was presented by Dr. Joannah Hinz, senior research assistant in the infrared astronomy wing. The lecture focused on the Triangulum Galaxy, one of three spiral galaxies in our local galaxy group.
The program, its directors say, aims to give everyone from old and seasoned astronomers to young and eager students with their first telescopes, a view of the universe’s expanse. Steward Observatory has been hosting public, evening lectures on astronomy since 1922.
Steward Observatory is paid for with taxpayer money and the lecture series is one way in which astronomers can give back to the public by sharing the exciting research they conduct, said Thomas Fleming, associate astronomer and senior lecturer at the observatory.
“You really have no idea how big the universe is,” he said. “If you don’t look to the stars, you’re ignoring 99.9999 percent of the universe. Every other department deals with what happens on this planet, we have the whole rest of the universe.”
“I like being right,” Pye pye Zaw, a sophomore astronomy and physics major said about why she choose to study the stars. “It’s easy to be right in a field where no one knows the right answer … Also, I really like shiny things.”
Schiller and colleagues Christian Eisele and Alexander Nevsky gathered data as they rotated their experiment about 175,000 times over about 13 months, with each rotation taking 90 seconds. To investigate whether Lorentz symmetry had been violated, the team analysed their time series of beat frequency measurements in terms a simplified version of the Standard Model Extension (SME) – a mathematical framework that describes violations to Lorentz symmetry in terms of 19 measurable parameters.
Schiller's experiment is sensitive to eight of these parameters and the team was able to show that four are zero to about two parts in 10^17; one is zero to about one part in 10^16; and three are zero to about two parts in 10^13. According to Schiller, this represents a factor of more than 10 improvement over previous measurements of these parameters and a factor of about 100 million better than Michelson and Morley's original experiment.
There are two dramatically different perceptions of physics and thoughts on the way it should be presented to those who can ensure the subject’s future health - whether it’s to schoolchildren, their parents or politicians. One stems from the desire to spread the good news of physics; a cutting-edge discipline that underpins nearly all of our scientific advances in medicine, energy security, climate change and gadgetry. If you want to succeed in the world, whether it’s financially or as a world-changing scientist, physics is a sterling choice for A-level and degree-level studies.
On the other side, there is the purist’s view of physics. Physics is about the big questions – what is the origin of our universe, what are dark matter and dark energy, how many dimensions are there – and, to the purist, ‘leakage’ into what is, arguably, more socially useful sub-disciplines of physics is a cause for concern. Physics is the pursuit of pure and fundamental knowledge.
While the good news of physics is spreading and the number of young scientists staying on to do physics at A-level is moving up again, no one’s quite sure which of the two messages is having the biggest impact.
High-energy particle physicists around the world are collectively holding their breath waiting for the Large Hadron Collider to come online and start unlocking the most elusive secrets of the universe. It’s as if time is standing still until their shiny new toy is ready to play with.
But not at Fermilab. Here, physicists are in the scientific equivalent of an all-out sprint, still clinging to the ever-thinning hope that before the LHC ramps up to full power, their own 28-year old particle collider, the Tevatron, will catch the coveted Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is at the heart of the Standard Model of physics.
Although many professors talk about Peer Instruction and its implementation similarly in interviews, we have found that there are significant differences in professors’ classroom practices that combine over time to have significant pedagogical implications. We have identified observable and quantifiable aspects of practice which vary from classroom to classroom. Prior research has shown that faculty practices are constrained more by structural considerations such as expectations of content coverage, lack of instructor time, class size, or room layout than by their beliefs about productive educational practices.31 In this investigation, we find that instructors within similar structural or situational constraints are making different instructional decisions. These results suggest the need for a more detailed account of how instructors use their knowledge of educational innovations and situational constraints to arrive at practical decisions in the moment-to-moment demands of the classroom.
This is the place where you can watch intimate, engaging, and funny videos with accomplished scientists who happen to have extremely compelling secret lives. You’ll hear these scientists talk about their work and about their “secrets” – the unique parts of themselves that make them who they are and often help to fuel their science. You’ll also see them answer penetrating and insightful questions like “When was the last time you ate blood?” and “Have you ever been called ‘Doogie Howser’?” Finally, you’ll get to interact via this blog with many of these scientists, with us – the SLoS team – and with the other folks who will make up “The Secret Life of Scientists” community (and that includes Inga… she was pretty young when she dated Einstein).
It didn’t work out quite as I had anticipated. I didn’t know enough to participate in the exciting physics research that was going on at Cornell. I took German, in which the main thing I learned was that I have no head for foreign languages. My courses in philosophy left me puzzled about how ideas of Plato and Descartes that seemed to me absurd could have been so influential. I did not become wise.
Einstein's first paper on relativity appeared when the concept of speed-dependent electromagnetic mass had already become a topic of considerable interest. He accept this idea but changed his mind after being confronted by a far more compelling insight. We will show that after reading Planck's 1906 article in which the concept of relativistic momentum was introduced, Einstein came to realize that it was the relativistic equations for energy and momentum that were primary. From that perspective, it became clear that the inertial mass m was invariant, and he never again spoke of mass as being speed dependent.
"People have been looking for monopoles in cosmic rays and particle accelerators — even Moon rocks," says Jonathan Morris, a researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy in Berlin.
Now Morris and others have found the strongest evidence yet for magnetic monopoles, in small crystals about the size of an ear plug. When the crystals are chilled to near absolute zero, they seem to fill with tiny single points of north and south. The points are less than a nanometre apart, and cannot be measured directly. Nevertheless, Morris and other physicists believe they are there. They make their case in two papers published today in the journal Science, and other work published on the pre-print server arXiv.org.
In the US there is a movement inspired by physics education research (PER) to promote "active engagement" in the classroom. I applaud this – though it is hard for me to imagine any good teacher since Socrates who is not already practising it. But taken to extremes it can be destructive. When it is claimed, for example, that students learn nothing from lectures (because, apparently, they are not "actively engaged") I demur. It goes without saying that there are bad lectures, but there are also very good ones, in which students are totally engaged. Nobody's mind wandered during Coleman's lectures. In despair over the ineffectiveness and unpopularity of traditional methods, some PER people advocate "learning by discovery" in the lab. It is a nice idea, but stultifying slow and inefficient – how are we to rediscover 500 years of physics in a semester? I can explain the conservation of momentum in 15 minutes, but three hours in the lab would only convince an honest student that the law is false.
The Harvard University physicist Eric Mazur and others have introduced flash cards (now – inevitably – replaced by electronic "clickers") to enforce student engagement at lectures. They can be powerfully effective in the hands of an inspired expert like Mazur, but I have seen them reduced to distracting gimmicks by less-capable instructors. What concerns me, however, is the unspoken message reliance on such devices may convey: (1) this stuff is boring; and (2) I cannot rely on you to pay attention. Now, point (2) may be valid, but point (1) is so utterly and perniciously false that one should, in my view, avoid anything that is even remotely open to such an interpretation.
I have been lucky. I spent most of my career at an institution where the students are reasonably bright and extraordinarily motivated, where effective teaching is genuinely encouraged and appreciated, and where I have enjoyed the freedom to pursue whatever strikes me as interesting and important. I have never suffered the interference of a brainless dean concerned only with grants and publications, and as a consequence I have been more productive than would have been possible in the usual academic straitjacket. I do not know what makes good teaching, beyond the obvious things: absolute command of the subject; organization; preparation (I write out every lecture verbatim the night before, though I never bring my notes to the lecture hall); clarity; enthusiasm; and a story-teller's instinct for structure, pacing and drama. I personally never use transparencies or PowerPoint – these things are fine for scientific talks, but not in the classroom. I want my students to know that something is happening in real time: I am thinking through each argument as I present it, not merely reciting something they might just as well have read in a book.
In 1877, English physicist Lord Rayleigh observed that when two almost identical organ pipes are played side by side, something strange happens. Rather than each blaring their own tone, the two pipes will barely make a whisper. But put a barrier between them, and they sing loud and clear.
As science and technology becomes more important in the health and well-being of our nation, Washington, D.C. is important in advocating for a more scientifically informed public. Join C²ST for a discussion with local representatives from Washington on how to maintain healthy and stable levels of funding for basic and applied scientific research and the impact of working to strengthen our countries’ basic scientific research facilities.
