Stephen Hawking Doesn't Understand Donald Trump

When interviewed by Good Morning Britain, Stephen Hawking professed his lack of understanding of the popularity of Donald Trump in the US.

World-renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking may understand the many mysteries of the universe, but even he's having a hard time grasping Donald Trump's meteoric rise in popularity.

In an interview with ITV's “Good Morning Britain” today, Hawking called Trump a "demagogue" who seemed to attract the "lowest common denominator."

I would go even lower than that, all the way back to single-cell amoeba! :)

Zz.

The Curse Of Being A Physicist

When do you speak up in a social setting and set someone straight?

I think I've mentioned a few times on here of being in a social setting, and then being found out that I'm a physicist. Most of the time, this was a good thing, because I get curious questions about what was on the news related to physics (the LHC was a major story for months).

But what if you hear something, and clearly it wasn't quite right. Do you speak up and possibly might cause an embarrassment to the other person?

I attended the annual Members Night at the Adler Planetarium last night here in Chicago. It was a very enjoyable evening. Their new show that is about to open on "Planet Nine" was very, VERY informative and entertaining. I highly recommend it. We got to be among the first to see it before it is opened to the public.

Well, anyway, towards the end of the evening, before we left, we decided to walk around the back of the facility and visit the Doane Observatory. The telescope was looking at Jupiter which was prominent in the night sky last night. There was a line, so we waited in the line for our turn.

As we progressed up, I and my companions heard these two gentlemen chatting away with the visitors, and then to each other about their enthusiasm about astronomy and science, etc. This is always good to know, especially at an event like this. As I got closer to them, it turned out that they were either volunteers, or were working for Adler Planetarium, because they were wearing either name tags or something. One of them identified himself as an astronomer, which wasn't surprising considering the event and the location.

But then, things got a bit sour, at least for me. In trying to pump up their enthusiasm about astronomy and science, they started quoting Carl Sagan's famous phrase that we are all made up of star stuff. This wasn't the bad part, but then they took it further by claiming that hydrogen is the "lego blocks" of the universe, and that everything can be thought of as being built out of hydrogen. One of them started giving an example by saying that you take two hydrogen and put them together, and you get helium!

OK, by then, I was no longer amused by these two guys, and was tempted to say something. I wanted to say that hydrogen is not the "lego blocks" of our universe, not if the Standard Model of Particle Physics has anything to say about that. And secondly, you don't get helium when you put two hydrogen atoms together. After all, where will the extra 2 neutrons in helium come from?

But I stopped myself from saying anything. These people were working pretty hard for  this event, they were trying to show their enthusiasm about the subject matter, and we were surrounded by other people, the general public, who obviously were also interested in this topic. Anything that I would have said to correct these two men would not have looked good, at least that was my assessment at that moment. It might easily led to an awkward, embarrassing moment.

I get that when we try to talk to the public about science, we might overextend ourselves. I used to give tours and participated in outreach programs, so I've been in this type of situation before. While I tried to make sure everything I say was accurate, there were always possibilities that someone in the audience may know more about something I said and may find certain aspects of it not entirely accurate. I get that.

So that was why I didn't say anything to these two gentlemen. I think that what they just told to the people who were within ear shot of them were wrong. Maybe their enthusiasms made them forget some basic facts. That might be forgivable. Still, it is obvious that I'm still thinking about this the next morning, and second guessing if maybe I should have told them quietly that what they said wasn't quite right. Maybe it might stop them from saying it out loud next time?

On the other hand, how many of these people who heard what was said actually (i) understood it and (ii) remembered it?

Zz.

Still No Sterile Neutrinos

IceCube has not found any indication of the presence of sterile neutrinos after looking for it for 2 years, at least not in the energy range that it was expected.

In the latest research, the IceCube collaboration performed independent analysis on two sets of data from the observatory, looking for sterile neutrinos in the energy range between approximately 320 GeV and 20 TeV. If present, light sterile neutrinos with a mass of around 1 eV/C² would cause a significant disappearance in the total number of muon neutrinos that are produced by cosmic-ray showers in the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere and then travel through the Earth to reach IceCube. The first set of data included more than 20,000 muon-neutrino events detected between 2011 and 2012, while the second covered almost 22,000 events observed between 2009 and 2010. 

I think there are other facilities that are looking for them as well. But this result certainly excludes a large portion of the "search area".

Zz.

Grandfather Paradox - Resolved?

This Minute Physics video claims to have "resolved" the infamous grandfather paradox. Well, OK, they don't actually say that, but they basically indicated why this might be a never-ending loop.



Still, let's think about it this way instead. During your grandfather's time, presumably, ALL the atoms or energy that will make you are already there, only they are all not together to form you. This only happens later on. But they are all there!

But here you come along from another time, popping into existence in your grandfather's time. Aren't you violating conservation of energy by adding MORE energy to the universe that are not accounted for? Now, unless there is a quid pro quo, where an equal amount of energy in your grandfather's time was siphoned to the future where you came from, this violation of conservation of energy is hard to explain away, especially if you invoke Noether's theorem.

I haven't come across a popular account of this issue.

Zz.

"... in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math...."

OK, I'm going to get a bit political here, but with some math! So if this is not something you care to read, skip this.

I've been accused many times of being an "elitist", as if giving someone a label like that is a sufficient argument against what I had presented (it isn't!). But you see, it is hard not to be an "elitist" when you read something like this.

Prominent Guido Menzio, who is Italian, was pulled out of a plane because his seatmate thought he was writing something suspicious while they waited for their plane to take off. She couldn't understand the letters and probably it was "Arabic" or something (what if it is?), and since Menzio looks suspiciously "foreign", she reported him to the crew.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

You can't make this up! But what hits home is what Menzio said later in the news article, and what the article writer ended with.

Rising xenophobia stoked by the presidential campaign, he suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a little other-ish.

“What might prevent an epidemic of paranoia? It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of [Donald] Trump’s voting base,” he wrote.

In this true parable of 2016 I see another worrisome lesson, albeit one also possibly relevant to Trump’s appeal: That in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math.

During this summer months, many of us travel to conferences all over the place. So, if you look remotely exotic, have a slightly darker skin, don't risk it by doing math on an airplane. That ignorant passenger sitting next to you just might rat on you! If by being an "elitist" means that I can recognize the difference between "math" and "arabic", then I'd rather be an elitist than someone who is proud of his/her aggressive ignorance.

How's that? Are you still with me?

Zz.

Scanning Probe Microscopy

The Physical Review is marking the 35th Anniversary of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) and 30 years of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) with free access to notable papers from the Physical Review journals in these two experimental techniques.

So check them out!

Zz.

Walter Kohn

Walter Kohn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has passed away on April 19.

He is considered as the father of Density Functional Theory (DFT). If you have done any computational chemistry or band structure calculation in solid state physics, you will have seen DFT in one form or another. It has become an indispensable technique to be able to accurately arrive at a theoretical description of many systems.

Zz.

ITER Is Getting More Expensive And More Delayed

This news report details the cost overruns and the more-and-a-decade delay of ITER.

ITER chief Bernard Bigot said the experimental fusion reactor under construction in Cadarache, France, would not see the first test of its super-heated plasma before 2025 and its first full-power fusion not before 2035.

The biggest lesson from this is how NOT to run a major international collaboration. Any more large science projects like this, and the politicians and the public will understandably be reluctant to support science projects of that scale. The rest of us will suffer for it.

Zz.