The number of physics bachelor’s granted continues to climb, with 5,908 degrees in the class of 2009. As physics undergraduate enrollments continue to increase, bachelor’s production will also see increases. PhD’s are also on the rise with 1,554 conferred in the class of 2009.
The black holes that could be created in a particle accelerator would be far smaller: tiny masses squeezed into incredibly tiny volumes. But because of gravity's negative energy, it doesn't matter how small such holes are: they still have the potential to inflate and expand in their own dimensions (rather than gobbling up our own). Such expansion was precisely what our universe did in the Big Bang, when it suddenly exploded from a tiny clump of matter into a fully-fledged cosmos.
At work, Debbie Berebichez is a quantitative risk analyst. On her own time, she's the Science Babe. She's also an inspiration to young women interested in righted-brained careers, including finance.
In this second of two public service announcements, award-winning recording artist Mary J. Blige appears with veteran NASA space shuttle astronaut Leland Melvin to encourage young women to expand their career choices by studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Both PSAs are now on NASA TV and the agency's website at: http://www.nasa.gov. NASA's Summer of Innovation (SoI) project and Blige's Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now (FFAWN) both show students the many possibilities available if they follow their dreams and reach for the stars
(a) On the pretest (post-test), 47% (20%) of the students showed, at least once, a belief that under no net force, an object slows down. However, only 1% (0%) maintained that belief across similar tasks.
(b) About 66% (54%) of the students held, at least once, the belief that under a constant force an object moves at constant speed. However, only 2% (1%) held that belief consistently.
(c) About 65% (44%) of the students exhibited, at least once, the belief that an impetus is required to maintain the motion of an object. About 40% (24%) were consistent in that belief. About 37% (15%) maintained, at least once, that the trajectory of an object depends on an impressed impetus, but only 3% (1%) were consistent in this belief. Students with quasi-Newtonian beliefs were far more consistent than the other students.
During the interviews with several of the students, typical classroom demonstrations were given of the physical situations described in a few of the talks on the diagnostic test. The demonstrations appeared to have no more effect on their opinions than mere discussions of the phenomena. As a rule, students held firm to mistaken beliefs even when confronted with phenomena that contradicted those beliefs. When a contradiction was recognized or pointed out, they tended at first not to question their own beliefs, but to argue that the observed instance was governed by some other law or principle and the principle they were using applied to a slightly different case.
The markets are not physical systems. They are systems based on creating an informational advantage, on gaming, on action and strategic reaction, in a space that is not structured with defined rules and possibilities. There is feedback to undo whatever is put in place, to neutralize whatever information comes in.
The natural reply of the physicist to this observation is, “Not to worry. I will build a physics-based model that includes feedback. I do that all the time”. The problem is that the feedback in the markets is designed specifically not to fit into a model, to be obscure, stealthy, coming from a direction where no one is looking. That is, the Knightian uncertainty is endogenous. You can’t build in a feedback or reactive model, because you don’t know what to model. And if you do know – by the time you know – the odds are the market has changed. That is the whole point of what makes a trader successful – he can see things in ways most others do not, anticipate in ways others cannot, and then change his behavior when he starts to see others catching on.
Both have ubiquitous entities that permeate everything. In religion it is called a god, in science a force. If one wants to know the entity, in religion one prays to find out the "will" of god, while in science, one does experiments to discover the "properties" of the force.When I read this, I scrolled to the bottom of the page to see if it listed the credential of the writer, and it did. "Wolfgang Baer teaches graduate-level courses in Monterey and received his doctorate in physics from the UC Berkeley...." No! He has a Ph.D in physics and still thinks that science cares more about discovering the properties of "the force"? What force? In QM, there's no "force". In fact, in classical mechanics, one can use the Hamiltonian/Lagrangian approach and not deal with forces at all!
Both have the nasty habit of defending embarrassing facts by turning them into features.
This is puzzling. The fact that we have particle accelerators clearly shows that we CAN predict the trajectory of an individual electron. That's how we can design such accelerators. But if the writer is invoking QM and the superposition principle that's inherent in phenomena such as the double slit, then he has it all wrong. This is NOT a matter of physics not being able to predict such a trajectory. It is rather that this is what nature is! Unless he is claiming that there is an underlying description of the physical world that physics either does not understand or have no access to, then he is making an a priori assumption that is based on no physical evidence.
How embarrassing is Mary's conception until it is turned into further proof of God's divine intervention? How embarrassing is our inability to predict the trajectory of an individual electron until uncertainty is elevated to become the cornerstone of modern physics by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
In religion, a divine intervention is called a miracle; in science it is called a singularity or an emergent property.
The logic of science and religion have opposite starting points, but neither is right nor wrong. The differing starting points are tailored to serve specific domains of applicability. Science has clear advantages in supporting engineers to build and control machines, while religion has advantages when dealing with the human experience of feelings and emotions.
When we apply these belief systems beyond their domain of applicability we run into trouble. Few would seriously pray to God to direct the trajectory of a bullet instead of taking careful aim along the sights. Science clearly dominates in this application.
However, consider a priest who is called to the bedside of a dying patient to provide comfort and hope with a tale of everlasting life. Compare this with a medical establishment that plasters the patients with tubes, needles, and an irrational fear of dying when there is not a shred of scientific evidence that the "first person I" ceases to exist simply because body functions stop. This is like concluding the radio station is dead because one's receiver box quit.
In astronomy, that source can be a star that emits electromagnetic waves; from our vantage point, Doppler shifts occur as the star orbits around its own center of mass and moves toward or away from Earth. These wavelength shifts can be seen in the form of subtle changes in its spectrum, the rainbow of colors emitted in light. When a star moves toward us, its wavelengths get compressed, and its spectrum becomes slightly bluer. When the star moves away from us, its spectrum looks slightly redder.
A team of physicists including some from MIT has found surprising differences between the flavor-switching behavior of neutrinos and antineutrinos. If confirmed, the finding could help explain why matter, and not antimatter, dominates our universe.This would be very exciting indeed.
“People are very excited about it because it suggests that there are differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos,” says Georgia Karagiorgi, an MIT graduate student and one of the leaders of the analysis of experimental data produced by the Booster Neutrino Experiment (MiniBooNE) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Neutrinos, elementary particles generated by nuclear reactions in the sun, suffer from an identity crisis as they cross the universe, morphing between three different “flavors.” Their antimatter counterparts (which are identical in mass but opposite in charge and spin) do the same thing.If you read this carefully, you'll get the impression that antineutrinos are counterpart to neutrinos (which is true), and have opposite charge and spin. Of course, this would be in error because neutrinos are neutral. The passage is describing "antimatter" in general, but the way it is written makes it sound as if this is a description of antineutrinos. If someone who didn't know any better understood it that way, then he/she will become confused later on when the article gets it right:
In an effort to help nail down the number of neutrinos, MiniBooNE physicists send beams of neutrinos or antineutrinos down a 500-meter tunnel, at the end of which sits a 250,000-gallon tank of mineral oil. When neutrinos or antineutrinos collide with a carbon atom in the mineral oil, the energy traces left behind allow physicists to identify what flavor of neutrino took part in the collision. Neutrinos, which have no charge, rarely interact with other matter, so such collisions are rare.Communicating to the public is a very tough task where our words and how we convey the message can make a difference. Hopefully, this apparent contradiction doesn't diminish the message. This comment is not really a criticism of the article. It is easy to do such a thing, and I know I've done it myself where I know what I intended to write, but it came out differently after I've written it.
The influence of BCS theory on the broader discipline of theoretical physics has been no less profound. Two key ideas abstracted from BCS theory, that have been widely transplanted and borne abundant fruit, are pairing and dynamical symmetry breaking. Pairing was an essentially new idea, introduced by Cooper and brought to fruition by BCS. The symmetry breaking aspect was mostly implicit in the original BCS work, and in earlier ideas of Fritz London and Landau-Ginzburg; but the depth and success of the BCS theory seized the imagination the theoretical physics community, and catalyzed an intellectual ferment. The concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking was promptly made explicit, generalized, and put to use by several physicists including Anderson, Josephson, Nambu, and Goldstone. The flexibility and transformative power of these ideas revealed itself gradually, in applications to phenomena that at first sight appear to have little or nothing in common with superconductivity.
And we are all governed by the prevailing laws of physics that relate matter and energy. Calories are a measure of energy, and matter cannot be created without energy input. Arguments against the fundamental role of energy balance in weight regulation -- against calories in versus calories out -- are arguments with Isaac Newton. Folks, nobody wins an argument with Isaac Newton!
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There are, once we are done growing up, three ways we burn calories: physical activity, the generation of heat and just existing. There are technical terms for the second and third: thermogenesis, and resting energy expenditure (sometimes referred to as basal metabolic rate). What should be noteworthy right away is that you are not in charge of two out of the three!
You can choose how much exercise to do. But you don't get to choose how thermogenic you tend to be, and that can matter quite a lot. Like exercise, thermogenesis accounts for roughly 15 percent of total energy expenditure on average, but there is lots of variation on the theme of average. People who generate more heat from calories have fewer available with which to make fat. They tend to be people who can eat a bit more, and stay thin anyway.
When I graduated high school, I had speed. I was going somewhere, just not sure which direction. By and large my relationships were similar, going somewhere but concentrated on self. In college, I like to think I got a little direction vector going in both my professional life and my personal life. I was learning about angular momentum but I just didn’t realize it. Instead of revolving around my own center of mass, I began to revolve around another.
So just what is this angular momentum? Momentum has a specific physics definition involving an equation I’d like to gloss over. We can usefully think of it as energy in a direction. A vector direction. The angular part comes in when this energy in a direction is going around and around another object. Even if it travels at a constant speed it’s always accelerating since the direction vector is always changing.
An example is the moon going around the earth. The moon has acceleration (both speed and direction), and it has the magic property of changing its vector of motion second by second as it curls around the earth. Because of the big difference in mass, the moon “feels” the earth more than the earth “feels” the moon, but both do feel each other. That’s angular momentum without an equation.
I think in some relationships, both people may share the same velocity vector. Rushing through life in the same general direction. They are going parallel. But if they don’t start revolving around each other they never get to feel the angular momentum of each other. These relationships often fail since neither partner gets to feel the other’s angular force.
Another example of a relationship has one person unconditionally revolving around the other while the other simply continues in a straight line. Particularly damaging for the revolving partner, he or she never gets to feel the others angular force. These relationships often end in failure too.
We have to do one quick math review. Remember in geometry and algebra we use Cartesian coordinates X, Y and Z. These were named after René Descartes, who is credited with inventing them in the 17th century. (he also founded analytic geometry, and is credited with the quote “Cogito ergo sum” — I think, therefore I am.) You might recall the X, Y and Z axis used to chart or plot equations in math class. Make a picture in your mind.
Lets pretend the woman has the X axis (appropriate chromosomally) and the man has the Y axis (also appropriate chromosomally). What happens when each revolves around the other? A new, magic force vector is produced, and it comes out their Z axis! If you want to see one of the Z axis products, observe closely the next little baby you see (ask permission). They are magic.
But you don’t have to be married or have a child to share your angular momentum. Examples of the Z vector force are the products of any loving relationship that involves shared angular momentum. The foundation and volunteer folks are familiar with these feelings. The hospice workers I know are chuck full of angular momentum. That’s how they can do such a difficult job. Magic.
Physics is concerned with observing and understanding the natural universe. However, studying the subject will help you gain skills useful to many employers, not just in the science sector. You will be highly proficient at problem solving and have demonstrated your ability to solve challenges by thinking creatively. A physics degree will also give you a grounding in advanced mathematics. The practical skills gained through planning experiments will also be appreciated by recruiters.
When discussing failed attempts to understand superconductivity, we must keep in mind that they are a natural and healthy part of the scientific discourse. They are an important part of the process of finding the right answers. These notes are not written to taunt those who tried and did not succeed. On the contrary, it is the greatness that comes with names like Joseph John Thompson, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Léon Brillouin, Ralph Kronig, Felix Bloch, Lev Landau, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Richard Feynman that demonstrates the dimension of the endeavor undertaken by John Bardeen, Leon N Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer. Formulating the theory of superconductivity was one of the hardest problems in physics of the 20th century.
Late last year, the research team purchased three low-cost green laser pointers advertised to have a power output of 10 milliwatts (mW). Measurements showed that one unit emitted dim green light but delivered infrared levels of nearly 20 mW—powerful enough to cause retinal damage to an individual before he or she is aware of the invisible light. NIST’s Jemellie Galang and her colleagues repeated the tests with several other laser pointers and found similarly intense infrared emissions in some but not all units.
The problem stems from inadequate procedures in manufacturing quality assurance, according to the research team. Inside a green laser pointer, infrared light from a semiconductor diode laser pumps infrared light at a wavelength of 808 nm into a transparent crystal of yttrium orthovanadate doped with neodymium atoms (Nd:YVO4), causing the crystal to lase even deeper in the infrared, at 1064 nm. This light passes through a crystal of potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP), which emits light of half the wavelength: 532 nm, the familiar color of the green laser pointer.
However, if the KTP crystal is misaligned, little of the 1064 nm light is converted into green light, and most of it comes out as infrared. Excess infrared leakage can also occur if the coatings at both ends of the crystal that act as mirrors for the infrared laser light are too thin.
One culprit here is the Web, which was invented to foster better communication among physicists in the first place, but has proved equally adept at spreading disinformation. But another, it seems to me, is the desire for some fundamental discovery about the nature of the universe — the yearning to wake up in a new world — and a growing feeling among astronomers and physicists that we are in fact creeping up on enormous changes with the advent of things like the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva and the Kepler spacecraft.
Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.
Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed” (that is, affected in any way by something else), “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons . . . and so on.
In reality, the gap between quantum effects and the world of ordinary events is too large to bridge. In his 1995 book The Unconscious Quantum, the University of Colorado particle physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described in terms of quantum mechanics, its typical mass m, speed v, and distance d must be on the order of Planck’s constant h. “If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically,” that is, according to the physical laws discovered by Newton. Stenger computed the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of a synapse, and he concluded that both are about three orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. It is important to note one very common practice with physicists, and scientists/engineers in general. When one makes off-the-cuff supposition, one can make quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out not if something is possible, but if something can be ruled out immediately simply based on what we know. So such a thing that Vic Stenger did in calculating the mass and speed of a neural transmitter may not be accurate, but it is of the order-of-magnitude value that clearly shows that quantum effects are just not significant. This is part of science. This is something people like Chopra can't do and have no skill to do. They typically make handwaving argument with no quantitative analysis to back what they say. Yet, they claim to base their speculation on science/physics.
