Super Kamiokande and Extremly Pure Water

This is a rather nice overview of Super Kamiokande, a neutrino detector in Japan. It has produced numerous ground-breaking discoveries, including the confirmation of neutrino oscillation many years ago. Unfortunately, the article omitted an important incident at Super-K several years ago when there was a massive implosion of the phototubes.

The article has an interesting information that many people might not know about extremely pure water, the type that is used to fill up the detector tank.

In order for the light from these shockwaves to reach the sensors, the water has to be cleaner than you can possibly imagine. Super-K is constantly filtering and re-purifying it, and even blasts it with UV light to kill off any bacteria.

Which actually makes it pretty creepy.

"Water that's ultra-pure is waiting to dissolve stuff into it," said Dr Uchida. "Pure water is very, very nasty stuff. It has the features of an acid and an alkaline."
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Another tale comes from Dr Wascko, who heard that in 2000 when the tank had been fully drained, researchers found the outline of a wrench at the bottom of it. "Apparently somebody had left a wrench there when they filled it in 1995," he said. "When they drained it in 2000 the wrench had dissolved." 

In other words, such pure, deionized water is not something that you want to drink.

And this leads me to comment on this silly commercial of PUR drinking water filter. It showed an ignorant public complaining about lead in the drinking water, even though he was told that the amount is below the safety level.



A drinking water contains a lot of other dissolved minerals, any one of which, above a certain limit, can be dangerous. Even that PUR commercial can only claim that it can REDUCE the amount of lead in the drinking water, not completely removed it. It will not be zero. So that guy should continue complaining about lead even with PUR filter.

If this person in the commercial is representing the general public, then the general public needs to be told that (i) you'll never be able to get rid completely of all contaminants in drinking water and (ii) pure water will dissolve your guts! This is why we set safety levels in many things (360 mrem of radiation per year, for example, is our acceptable, normal background radiation that we receive).

Zz.

General Relativity Passes Its First Galactic Test

Ethan Siegel is reporting the latest result of a test of General Relativity at the galactic scale.[1]

This effect of gravitational lensing, which occurs in both strong and weak variants, represents the greatest hope we have of testing General Relativity on scales larger than the Solar System. For the first time, a team of scientists led by Tom Collett performed a precise extragalactic test of General Relativity, and Einstein's theory passed with flying colors.

This new result also puts a strong damper on alternative theories of gravity, such as MOND.

For the first time, we've been able to perform a direct test of General Relativity outside of our Solar System and get solid, informative results. The ratio of the Newtonian potential to the curvature potential, which relativity demands be equal to one but where alternatives differ, confirms what General Relativity predicts. Large deviations from Einstein's gravity, therefore, cannot happen on scales smaller than a few thousand light years, or for masses the scale of an individual galaxy. If you want to explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe, you can't simply say you don't like dark energy and throw Einstein's gravity away. For the first time, if we want to modify Einstein's gravity on galactic-or-larger scales, we have an important constraint to reckon with.

This is definitely a big deal of a result.

Zz.

[1] T.E. Collett et al., Science v.360, p.1342 (2018).

Is Theoretical Physics Wasting Our Best Minds?

Before you continue reading this, let me be very clear right off the bat that there are TWO separate issues here that I will be discussing, and they are thinly connected simply by the over-general reference of "theoretical physics" made by the author of the article that I will be citing.

In this Forbes article, Ethan Siegel highlights the main point made by Sabine Hossenfelder in her book "Lost In Math". Siegel not only pointed this out, but also did an in-depth description leading up to the "naturalness" philosophy that is prevalent in the esoteric fields of physics such as string, etc.

If you are a theoretical particle physicist, a string theorist, or a phenomenologist — particularly if you suffer from cognitive dissonance — you will not like this book. If you are a true believer in naturalness as the guiding light of theoretical physics, this book will irritate you tremendously. But if you're someone who isn't afraid to ask that big question of "are we doing it all wrong," the answer might be a big, uncomfortable "yes." Those of us who are intellectually honest physicists have been living with this discomfort for many decades now. In Sabine's book, Lost In Math, this discomfort is now made accessible to the rest of us.

Certainly this is thought-provoking, and it isn't something I disagree about. For science to give up on empirical evidence, and simply pursue something that looks "natural" or "beautiful" is dangerous and verging on being a religion. So my feelings are consistent with what has been said in the article.

Now comes the other part of the issue. It has always been my pet peeve when someone over-generalize physics as being predominantly being "high-energy physics, astrophysics, string theory, etc...", i.e. the esoteric fields of study. In this case, "theoretical physics" certainly is NOT dominated by those fields. There are theoretical studies in condensed matter physics, atomic/molecular physics, medical physics, accelerator physics, etc... etc., i.e. fields of studies that are certainly not esoteric, have lots of practical applications, etc.

In fact, I would argue that the esoteric fields of physics represents the MINORITY in terms of the number of practicing physicists that we have around the world. As a zeroth-order approximation of this claim, I decided to look at the members of the APS. The APS Divisions correspond to the number of members who declared themselves to be in a certain field within physics. Note that not all members made the declaration, and it is also not uncommon for a member to declare more than one division.

First of all, 79% of APS members are accounted for in this chart for the 2018 membership. Now, what is the percentage of members within the so-called esoteric fields of Astrophysics, Gravitation, and Particles and Fields? 14.9%. Even if you include Nuclear Physics into this, it will come up to 19.8%

Now, forget about theoretical or experimental. Can 19.8% represents ALL of physics? The fields of studies that a lot of people associate physics with are done by ONLY 19.8% of physicists! Using them, one will get a severely inaccurate representation of physics and physicists.

In fact, if you look at the fields more commonly associated with the physics of materials (condensed matter physics and Materials Physics), we get 18.2%, almost as big as Astrophysics, Gravitation, Particles and Fields, and Nuclear Physics combined! Condensed matter physics alone dwarfs other fields, being almost twice as big as the next division, which is Particles and Fields.

But what is more important here is that outside of the 19.8% of physicists in these esoteric fields, an overwhelming percentage of physicists (59.2%) are in fields of studies that are associated with practical applications of physics. So if you were to bump randomly into a physicist, chances are, you will find someone who works in a field related to something of practical importance and NOT a high-energy physicist, a nuclear physicist, etc.

This is my round-about way of complaining that Ethan Siegel article should not be a damnation of "theoretical physics" in general, because the overwhelming percentage of theoretical physics is NOT about these esoteric topics that have been mentioned in his article. Rather, theories in other parts of physics rely very heavily on empirical observations and verification, i.e. the good and tested way of doing science. In those areas, we are definitely NOT wasting our best minds!

A while back, I said that physics is not just the LHC. It is also your iPhone. Even that requires modification. We should say that physics is predominantly your iPhone, with only a smidgen of LHC added as garnishing. That is a more accurate representation of the field as a whole.

Zz.

MinutePhysics Special Relativity Chapter 6

If you missed Chapter 5 of this series, check it out here.

Here's Chapter 6 of the Minute Physics series on Special Relativity. This time, they are tackling a topic that I see being asked numerous times : velocity addition. ("If I'm traveling close to the speed of light and I turn on my flashlight.....").

I know that this topic has been covered here many times, but it is worth repeating, especially since someone may have missed the earlier ones.



Zz.

Work Begins On FACET II at SLAC

The upgrade to FACET facility at SLAC promises to improve the beam electron beam quality at the accelerator facility. One of the direct benefits of this upgrade is further advancement in the plasma wakefield accelerator technique. This technique has previously shown to be capable of producing very high accelerating gradient and thus, has the potential to produce accelerating structures that can accelerate charged particles to higher energies over shorter distances.

Now, when you read the press release that I linked above, make sure you are very clear on what it said. The FACET II facility is NOT a facility that operates using this "plasma wakefield" technique. It is a facility that produces an improved electron beam quality, both in energy and emittance, among other things. This electron beam (which is produced via conventional means) is THEN will be used in the study of this wakefield accelerator technique.

The project is an upgrade to the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET), a DOE Office of Science user facility that operated from 2011 to 2016. FACET-II will produce beams of highly energetic electrons like its predecessor, but with even better quality. These beams will primarily be used to develop plasma acceleration techniques, which could lead to next-generation particle colliders that enhance our understanding of nature’s fundamental particles and forces and novel X-ray lasers that provide us with unparalleled views of ultrafast processes in the atomic world around us.

So read carefully the "sequence of events" here and not get too highly distracted by thinking that FACET II is a "novel X-ray laser, etc..." facility. It isn't. It is a facility, an important facility, to develop the machines that will give us more knowledge to make all these other capabilities.

Consider this as my public service to you to clarify a press release! :)

Zz.