Did I Expect Too Much?

In one of my exam questions, I gave the students the average radius of Earth's orbit around the Sun at 150 million km. I told them that we can assume that the orbit is circular. I even gave them the formula for the circumference of a circle.

The question then asked them to find the speed of the Earth as it moves around the Sun.

After the exam and after the results were published, a number of students told me that I did not give them enough information to solve the problem. They said that they could figure out the circumference of the circle to correspond with the distance that the Earth has traveled, but they don't have any information on the time of travel and thus, can't find the speed.

I argued that they should know this because it is common knowledge.

Did I expect too much? Did I make the wrong assumption that everyone (especially 1st and 2nd year university students) knows that it takes the Earth one year to make one complete orbit around the Sun? Was this something I should have given them?

Zz.

5 Physics Equations Everyone Should Know

Rhett Allain posted this article on Wired on the 5 physics equation that "everyone" should know. They are, in the order that was presented:

1. Newton's 2nd Law of motion
2. The wave equation
3. Maxwell's equations (he cheated a bit because this is a set of 4 equations)
4. Schrodinger's equation (natch!)
5. Einsten's energy-mass equivalence equation
   

You can read the article to see what he has to say about each. I'm going to show this article to my students and see what they think, or maybe ask the how many of these do they think we will encounter in the course.

Zz.

What's In A Physics Word?

This is a rather fun article in this week's Nature. It reveals some of the fascinating origin of words used in Physics and how they may not match the more common usage of the word.

All of us in physics (and in science) know of this, where we may use the same words that are used in everyday language, but they have very different meanings in physics. Unfortunately, for many people outside of physics, this can lead to a lot of confusion or misuse if they do not investigate or understand the meanings of those words as used in the context of physics. The word "spin" comes to mind when talking about the quantum spin of elementary particles.

Z.

Since When Does A "Proposal" Become "Evidence"?

It's one of the reasons why I groan at popular media's reporting of science.

This article is reporting on a paper that proposes a possibility of finding evidence of large-scale symmetry breaking from the  data ".. in current and upcoming surveys such as those undertaken by Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the Euclid satellite, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.... ". Yet, the article is trumpeting the "Incredible new evidence...." as if it has been found. This is similar to accepting speculation as the truth.

Over-selling and over-hyping science does no one any good, other than making it a click-bait.

Z.

Impact of Physics on the Economy

 It is not know if the public is aware of the economic impact of physics, not just in terms of industry to support the workings of physics, but also how new ideas and technologies have sprung new innovations and devices that made our world the way it is today. Of course, the most obvious example would be the invention of the solid state transistor, which is the heart of every modern electronic devices that we have now.

This Swiss study tries to quantify the impact of physics on the Swiss economy. One can clearly see the breath of the impact across many different disciplines and sector of the economy.

This is not that much different than the previous similar studies that were done for the US economy and for Europe. The significant conclusion one can draw out of these data is that one gets a lot of returns for the initial investment. But it is not just that. If one looks at the nature of the returns, many of them are vital to the advancement of our civilization, so these investments are important not merely for financial reasons.

BTW, I still encounter people (a few of them my students) who are surprised that physics has anything to do with their smarphones.

Zz.

Three Ways You Use Quantum Physics Everyday

Most of you know this already, but it is always helpful to remind people on how quantum physics, as esoteric of a subject as it is, is the key to understanding many of the devices that we use everyday and take for granted.

The only drawback here is that the article listed only three, when there could be plenty more.

Zz.

Gender Differences in Test Anxiety and Self-Efficacy

It's interesting how something things come in clumps. I had just posted a paper on the effect of sharing tasks during lab work on student's interest and self-efficacy in physics. Now comes a study on gender differences in test anxiety and self-efficacy in general physics courses.

Now, to be clear, a large part of this paper clearly indicates that this is not something that physics educator can solve. This is because the issue of self-efficacy starts when a student is very young, and it has more to do with societal and cultural influences.

Performance differences between male and female students in physics courses are often due to sociocultural stereotypes and biases pertaining to who belongs in physics and who can excel in it, and insufficient efforts to counter them in order to make the learning environment more equitable and inclusive. For example, girls are less likely than boys to have parents who believe they can excel in the sciences so parents are less likely to encourage them to pursue related courses and activities from early on [5, 31]. This, combined with societal stereotypes that success in physics requires particular brilliance and brilliance is associated with men, in part explains the low numbers of women in the field [32]. Women are less likely than men to take physics in high school [10], so they are less likely to have prior experience if they are required to take physics in college. Once women are enrolled in physics courses, they tend to have lower SE, which is an important predictor of physics performance, even when controlling for prior academic preparation [19–21, 23, 24].

So already from this, this issue of test anxiety and self-efficacy among girls can't simply be swept away. Instead, this paper proposes how to handle such a thing by emphasizing more on assessment that are low-stakes (i.e. less stressful) and less on higher states assessments, such as exams.

This is definitely something to think about. It is already something that I am doing after we went remote when I consider how easily exams can be compromised. I shifted more emphasis on synchronous and asynchronous engagements that can assess a student's understanding of the material. In fact, in one of my general physics courses that ran synchronously, the total percentage of all the exams for the semester came up to less than 50% of the course grade.

Of course, I was doing this not for the reasons emphasized in this paper. I was unaware of such an effect until I came across this paper a week ago.

Zz.

Battling The Flat-Earthers

A while ago, I read this article on battling those who believe that the Earth is flat but forgot to highlight it here. I won't say much more about it other than have you read it for yourself.

But one quote stood out with me, because it sums up not just the way it describes why flat-earthers believe in what they believe in, but also a reflection on the issues of vaccines, face masks, etc. that we have been facing with during this pandemic and these fake-news stupidity. The quote is attributed to Lee McIntyre of Boston University:

Flat-Earthers seem to have a very low standard of evidence for what they want to believe but an impossibly high standard of evidence for what they don’t want to believe.

Replace "Flat-Earthers" in the quote above with any of the conspiracy theory believers and you have the gist of why they believe in the crackpottery. 

But the question that I have is, has anyone ever mention THIS to the flat-earthers themselves? Are they self-aware that this is what they are doing?

Zz.

Is 1/3 smaller than 1/4?

I'm sorry if this is old new, but I just found out about this recently.

I read a rather amusing account on why A&W 1/3 pounder lost out to McDonald's quarter pounder, even though they were both at the same price.

Confused why A&W's burgers weren't able to compete even though the burgers were priced the same as their competitors, Taubuman brought in a market research firm. 

The firm eventually conducted a focus group to discover the truth: participants were concerned about the price of the burger. "Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?" they asked. 

It turns out the majority of participants incorrectly believed one-third of a pound was actually smaller than a quarter of a pound. 

I hate to say it, but this is no longer surprising to me. I look back on my take on the public's understanding and perception of science, technology, and math, and the dismal state seems to have persisted. Nothing has changed. In fact, when I said this back in 2010 .... 

As scientists, we cannot forget this, because it explains the fickleness in the support that we get. That overwhelming support that is there one day can easily go away the next day, and not because of some scientific evidence, but possibly because someone else has better bells and whistles.

... I just never expected it to be illustrated so glaringly during the past few years. Many in the public do not have the ability evaluate the validity of a claim or evidence, and science can easily lose its support because someone else has a more attractive message, even without any valid evidence.

What are the odds that this is the root cause of our debacle today?

Zz.

10 Scientfic Evidence In Support Of Airborne Transmission of SAR-CoV-2 Virus

The ridiculous battle during the pandemic on wearing masks, social distancing, and other restrictions reveals the lack of understanding among many in the general public on how science works, on what is considered as valid scientific evidence, and how our knowledge progresses as more and more evidence and data accumulates. I continue to be amazed at the reasons why some people still resist wearing proper face masks. I can understand if they find it uncomfortable (who does?) and that it is inconvenient (who thinks otherwise?). However, if the reason given is that masks doesn't do anything or isn't effective in reducing the chances of the virus being spread, then I want evidence to back that up.

This is where the public lack the understanding of (i) the nature of valid, scientific evidence, versus simply something you read on Facebook, news websites, or even from talking heads on TV, (ii) where to find such evidence or what should you pay more serious attention to versus those other sources that I mentioned. Here, I want to contrast the type of information that is contained in a scientific paper versus what you find in news article or many public online websites.

(1) When you read something in the news on a typical mass media source, you are told the content, but very seldom are you given proper, exact citation. At best, the type of citation that would be mentioned would be something to the effect that this was published in such-and-such journal or book, etc. Worse still, often times the sources are not even cited, so many of these things are stated as if they are facts, and facts that many of us are unable to verify on our own, if we wish to.

In contrast, scientific publications require exact citation. If you say that this result is in agreement or support by recent discoveries, you must give bibliographical references to those sources, i.e. name of author/s, name of journal where it was published, what page/volume number, date it was published, etc. These details are crucial in someone else verifying the sources of the claim. This is what is often missing in many general public articles, and unfortunately, this is often the source of Fake News, because exact evidence and sources to back the claims are either bogus, unreported, or unrevealed, which prevented anyone from double-checking their validity.

(2) News report and online articles often ignore contradicting evidence. When someone claims that he/she got sick after receiving a vaccine shot, why doesn't he/she consider why a lot of other people didn't get sick? Of if receiving a vaccine shot makes one "magnetic", how come other people aren't? This can also be applied to a lot of "news" programs that reports on certain occurrences that was due to something, but ignore other instances where those occurrences do not happen.

In scientific papers, this is a no-no. In fact, as a referee for several physics journals, I often will check if the authors are ignoring contradicting experimental evidence, or other papers that may be in the opposite to what the authors observed or claiming. These contradictions MUST BE ADDRESSED, i.e. they are not swept under the carpet or just ignored. And they must be addressed in terms of scientific reason, not simply by claiming that the contradicting results were made by Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, Jews, liberals, conservatives, etc. Look at how many so-called discussions or reports attached labels as a means to dismiss something. Such flimsy tactics do not wash in scientific papers.

(3) General public articles and news lacks details and clarity. I read a news article last year where a family decided to go to Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL, and when they got home, they tested positive for COVID-19 and immediately blamed their presence at the theme park for being infected. The news article didn't mentioned any other details about their trip. It did not say if they took a plane, didn't not say how long they stayed, whether they only went to the Disney theme park or did they also went elsewhere, and if they drove there, did they stop anywhere along the way, etc. There was a huge amount of information here that was missing even for a casual reader to be able to clearly analyze the validity of what the family was claiming.

If this claim is to be analyzed scientifically, then an epidemiologist would need to do really detailed tracing of every activity that the family did. Casual and speculative connection between A and B are usually insufficient to draw up valid conclusions.

In a scientific publication, every detailed of a calculation, every detail of the experiment, and every detail of how the analysis was done, must be clearly revealed. Often times, the experimental setup and equipment may had already been published elsewhere, and those will be cited as a reference. Similarly with the calculation and analysis. These details allow for an independent investigator to not only double-check what was done, but also to duplicate the experiment if necessary to see if the results are reproducible, which is a pillar of all scientific experiments (and why the Fleishmann and Pons cold fusion claim failed).

(4) Scientific papers are permanently recorded. They are not like Twitter feed that can be deleted, or news article that may be difficult to find anymore, or Facebook postings that have disappeared. This allows for future citations by other papers, and allows for continuing evaluations, advancements, refinements, rebuttals, contradictions, etc. There is a clear paper trail of who said what and when, which means that it is hard to deny or lie about something, or claim that someone didn't say that or didn't do that.

The whole point in all of this is not to force you to read scientific papers. It is ridiculous to insist that because many of them are not easy to read and are written for other experts. Rather, it is to distinguish on the nature of the evidence, and that if something is backed by proper scientific sources, then the evidence has a greater degree of validity and support than something that someone just rattled off on a TV talk show or on some Facebook post. It is unfortunate that many people, especially politicians, give equal credence to someone testifying that their bodies became magnetized without bothering to invite an expert to debunk such silliness. It seems that whole topics in physics, biology, and physiology were ignored to give air to this craziness.

It is the inability to evaluate the validity of the so-called evidence is one of the fundamental reasons why we are in the state that we are in today.

"But ZapperZ, the topic is about the scientific evidence for airborne transmission of the COVID virus.  Where is it?", you asked.

Good question. I guess this is the long, circuital route to point you to this Lancet article that contains the evidence, and the references to the scientific papers, that support the claim. Compare the types of research that were done, the analysis that were performed, and how the conclusions were drawn, and compare that with the types of "evidence" presented in the popular media and TV news programs.

Have fun reading!

Zz.

Wonders of Physics Competition

I mentioned about this more than 10 years ago in this thread. I went to UW-Madison and attended the early incarnation of this lecture-room demonstration that became a huge hit with the public. I also had Clint Sprott as an instructor in one of my courses.

Due to COVID-19, the Wonders of Physics show couldn't be held, and probably not in the near future either. To their credit, they are creating a contest instead, where you can submit a 2-minute video of an original demonstration of a physics concept.

So maybe one of you are creative enough to enter this contest. :)

Zz.

Far-UVC Light Kills Airborne Viruses, And Safe To Humans Too?

First, let me give you the link to the paper that was published in Nature recently.

I actually have 3 separate topics to discuss here all based on this single paper.

The first is the science. UVC is used to kill viruses and sterilized stuff. We know that already. But it is also unsafe to human and we do not want to be exposed to it. But it turns out that far-UVC, having wavelengths in the range of 207-222 nm, is not totally harmful to human. In fact, ...

a regulatory limit as to the amount of 222 nm light to which the public can be exposed, which is 23 mJ/cm^2 per 8-hour exposure

means that humans can be exposed to this range of UVC for a limited amount of time. This is the basis of that research, i.e. using that wavelength and intensity of far-UVC, and see whether it can greatly "inactivate" the amount of viruses carried in airborne aerosols. They found that an exposure of just 25 minutes, very much below the regulatory limit. So there is a way to kill off viruses in airborne aerosols in the same space that human beings are around!

Certainly the implication of this research can be quite important, considering that airborne transmission of the COVID-19 virus is a strong possibility, which is why we are all wearing masks in public. There is now a way to greatly reduce such mode of transmission if this research is verified. The only thing I'm a bit weary about is the health and safety aspect. I know that they cited several sources that seems to show that the far-UVC is harmless to human, and the regulatory limits that have been imposed. Still, I'd like to have this one to be more well-established before I get really excited about it. For example, although the exposure limit is given in per 8-hour doses, how often can someone be exposed to that limit, say, in a month? Is that 8-hour dose limit per day? And certainly, long-term effect needs to be considered in anything of this sort.

But still, I find this result to be very promising, and it certainly is a new piece of information to me that far-UVC is actually not that harmful to humans.

The second aspect of this paper that I want to highlight is to the general public who often do not quite understand the nature of scientific publication. The main reason for scientists to properly publish their work is so that the rest of the community, especially those experts within the same field of study as the work, can scrutinize the work and evaluate its validity. So having something published does not automatically makes it valid. This is important to remember and understand. It requires scrutiny and verification by other experts in the field, and can sometime takes years. Think of how long of a time period from the moment the Higgs mechanism was proposed till its experimental verification at the LHC.

Therefore, it is imperative that a paper contains all the relevant information used to arrive at its conclusion or result. In this case, it is an experimental paper that produces a result. For it to be evaluated by other experts, it must contain all the necessary information. If you look closely at the end, the authors included their methodology, the exact equipment that they used, the experimental setup, the nature of the data analysis used, etc... etc. In other words, everything is as transparent as possible. It allows for someone else to repeat the experiment, and that is a crucial aspect of experimental science - REPRODUCIBILITY. It is something pseudoscience cannot do!

The third and final aspect of this paper is educational. I'm excited at the various values that they used in this paper, because I can already see myself using them in my general physics lessons. I'm already planning on using many of these numbers and asking my students to calculate (i) the amount of power per unit area based on the exposure time, (ii) the energy per photon of 222 nm light, (iii) the number of photons that impinges on a unit area during the exposure time, etc... etc. This will be perfect especially for the general physics course that I have taught that is aimed at life-science/pre-med majors. I always like taking something current, and very relevant to our times, to use as a material in our lessons. The students can immediately see first-hand that what they are learning is, in fact, very useful and has a direct effect on them beyond just wanting a good grade at the end of the semester.

So yes, I'll be holding on to this paper for quite some time.

Zz.

Possible Discovery Of A New Type of Tetraquark, And Possibly Misleading Reporting Article

We have had reports of the discovery of possible tetraquarks and pentaquarks before (i.e. particles with 4 quarks and particles with 5 quarks, respectively). There is an extensive overview of the experiment and theory in this article. So the announcement out of LHCb is not that new. What is new is that this could possibly be a new type of tetraquark made up of 4 heavy quarks.

“Particles made up of four quarks are already exotic, and the one we have just discovered is the first to be made up of four heavy quarks of the same type, specifically two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks,” says the outgoing spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration, Giovanni Passaleva. “Up until now, LHCb and other experiments had only observed tetraquarks with two heavy quarks at most and none with more than two quarks of the same type.”

You may read the preprint here.

That should clear up very much of what the brouhaha is. I probably would have glanced over this had it not be the fact that I stumbled onto another news reports of this discovery, but with a different tone that could be misleading.

First of all, let's look at how CERN produced its news release. The first paragraph read like this:

The LHCb collaboration has observed a type of four-quark particle never seen before. The discovery, presented at a recent seminar at CERN and described in a paper posted today on the arXiv preprint server, is likely to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles.

Notice that it says "... a type of four-quark particle ...". This means that there are already other four-quark particles, and that this discover is for a new type that has not been observed before.

Now, compare that to the reporting done by two (count 'em) particle physicists on The Conversation (a place that I go to regularly) on the same discovery. Here is what they wrote:

The LHCb collaboration at CERN has announced the discovery of a new exotic particle: a so-called “tetraquark”. The paper by more than 800 authors is yet to be evaluated by other scientists in a process called “peer review”, but has been presented at a seminar. It also meets the usual statistical threshold for claiming the discovery of a new particle.

If you don't know any better, by reading the first sentence alone, you'd think that this is the first ever discovery of a tetraquark, which would be false.

Certainly, if you read the article further, you'd come across the passage that clarifies what this discovery is:

All tetraquarks and pentaquarks that have been discovered so far contain two charm quarks, which are relatively heavy, and two or three light quarks – up, down or strange. This particular configuration is indeed the easiest to discover in experiments.

But the latest tetraquark discovered by LHCb, which has been dubbed X(6900), is composed of four charm quarks. Produced in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the new tetraquark was observed via its decay into pairs of well-known particles called J/psi mesons, each made of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. This makes it particularly interesting as it is not only composed entirely of heavy quarks, but also four quarks of the same kind – making it a unique specimen to test our understanding on how quarks bind together.

So this is not the first discovery of a tetraquark, but rather a discovery of a type of tetraquark, which is what the CERN article implied.

I know I'm being picky, but I've always said that communication between scientists and the general public is extremely tedious. Often times, what you wrote is not what they understood! And once something or some impression has stuck into their heads, it is very difficult to change that. Having a misleading idea immediately imprinted at the very beginning of an article is a horrible thing to do, even if the rest of the article is accurate. At worse, the reader holds on to the original misleading idea, and at best, the reader becomes confused with conflicting understanding. In the world where a lot of people have attention deficit and all they care about are quick bites of news, the message conveyed in the very first paragraph, or even the very first line, is all that they read and get.

Zz.

Simple, Basic, COVID-19 Math

This is highly elementary for most of you. But I've learned a long time ago that what I consider to be obvious and trivial, is not the case for many members of the public. This is one such case because I've heard this uttered in the media, in print, and among some people.

There is a large increase in the number of positive COVID-19 cases being reported in many states in the US. A lot of people, who shall remain nameless, make the excuse that this is due to the increase in testing, and that it shouldn't be alarming. The more you test, the more you find, they argued.

So I'll illustrate this with simple, basic math.

Let's say you have a population of 1000 people. And let's say that 200 of them has COVID-19. This means that 20% of the population has the virus.

If you randomly test 100 people, you'll get 20 people who is positive.

If you randomly test 200 people, you'll get 40 people who is positive.

If you randomly test 300 people, you'll get 60 people who is positive.

So yes, in terms of absolute numbers, the more people you test, the more number of positive results that you will get. HOWEVER, look at the percentage of positive test. No matter how many people you test, the percentage will still be 20%. The absolute number will increase with increasing number of tests, but the percentage (some people call it positive rate) does not change considerably. This is what a lot of people appear to not fully comprehend.

Of course, in real life, the percentage won't be exact, but if we keep having these tests, it will hover around some value and not change systematically or monotonically over time if there is no change in the number of people infected. So what you need is not the absolute number but also the overall percentage of positive result per day, let's say. That is of more importance if you are trying to see if things are getting better, or worse.

The situation, of course, is more complex than this. But the point in all of this is that you simply can't dismiss the increase in numbers by claiming that it is due to an increase in the number of testing. That is not the whole picture. What if you do the above exercise again and instead, you get 50 out of 200 being positive one week, and 90 out of 300 being positive the week after that? Can you still attribute that to increase in testing only?

Zz.

Making Physics Funny

Although Tom Gauld's cartoons do not actually focus on physics, he has included topics related to physics before. This NY Times article gives a brief interview and background on him, someone you would know if you read New Scientist frequently.

I decided to mention it here because the article included one of his cartoons that made me chuckle. I decided to include it here and make sure everyone is aware that this is credited to him. If he or his publisher object to this, I'll remove it.

It's pretty funny, though, because if you are involved in any kind of science forum or discussion online, this happens more often than you think.

And considering that our current President of the US thinks he's an expert in many different fields as well, I feel that I'm living in that Science Hell right now.

Zz.

When Condensed Matter Physics Became King

If you are one of those, or know one of those, who think Physics is only the LHC and high-energy physics, and String Theory, etc., you need to read this excellent article.

When I first read it in my hard-copy version of Physics Today, the first thing that came across my mind after I put it down is that this should be a must-read for the general public, but especially to high-school students and all of those bushy-tailed and bright-eyed incoming undergraduate student in physics. This is because the need to be introduced to a field of study in physics that has become the "king" in physics. Luckily, someone pointed out to me that this article is available online.

Reading the article, it was hard, but understandable, to imagine the resistance that was there in incorporating the "applied" side of physics into a physics professional organization. But it was at a time when physics was still seen as something esoteric with the grandiose idea of "understanding our world" in a very narrow sense.

Solid state’s odd constitution reflected changing attitudes about physics, especially with respect to applied and industrial research. A widespread notion in the physics community held that “physics” referred to natural phenomena and “physicist” to someone who deduced the rules governing them—making applied or industrial researchers nonphysicists almost by definition. But suspicion of that view grew around midcentury. Stanford University’s William Hansen, whose own applied work led to the development of the klystron (a microwave-amplifying vacuum tube), reacted to his colleague David Webster’s suggestion in 1943 that physics was defined by the pursuit of natural physical laws: “It would seem that your criterion sets the sights terribly high. How many physicists do you know who have discovered a law of nature? … It seems to me, this privilege is given only to a very few of us. Nevertheless the work of the rest is of value.”

Luckily, the APS did form the Division of Solid State Physics, and it quickly exploded from there.

By the early 1960s, the DSSP had become—and has remained since—the largest division of APS. By 1970, following a membership drive at APS meetings, the DSSP enrolled more than 10% of the society’s members. It would reach a maximum of just shy of 25% in 1989. Membership in the DSSP has regularly outstripped the division of particles and fields, the next largest every year since 1974, by factors of between 1.5 and 2.

This is a point that many people outside of physics do not realize. They, and the media, often make broad statements about physics and physicists based on what is happening in, say, elementary particle physics, or String, or many of those other fields, when in reality, those areas of physics are not even an valid representation of the field of physics because they are not the majority. Using, say, what is going on in high-energy physics to represent the whole field of physics is similar to using the city of Los Angeles as a valid representation of the United States. It is neither correct nor accurate!

This field, that has now morphed into Condensed Matter Physics, is vibrant, and encompassed such a huge variety of studies, that the amount of work coming out of it each week or each month is mindboggling. It is the only field of physics that has two separate section on Physical Review Letters, The Physical Review B comes out four (FOUR) times a month. Only Phys. Rev. D has more than one edition per month (twice a month). The APS March Meeting, where the Division of Condensed Matter Physics participatesin, continues to be the biggest giant of annual physics conference in the world.

Everything about this field of study is big, important, high-impact, wide-ranging, and fundamental. But of course, as I've said multiple times on here, it isn't sexy for most of the public and the media. So it never because the poster boy for physics, even if they make up the largest percentage of practicing physicist. Doug Natelson said it as much in commenting about condensed matter physics's image problem:

Condensed matter also faces a perceived shortfall in inherent excitement. Black holes sound like science fiction. The pursuit of the ultimate reductionist building blocks, whether through string theory, loop quantum gravity, or enormous particle accelerators, carries obvious profundity. Those topics are also connected historically to the birth of quantum mechanics and the revelation of the power of the atom, when physicists released primal forces that altered both our intellectual place in the world and the global balance of power.

Compared with this heady stuff, condensed matter can sound like weak sauce: “Sure, they study the first instants after the Big Bang, but we can tell you why copper is shiny.” The inferiority complex that this can engender leads to that old standby: claims of technological relevance (for example, “this advance will eventually let us make better computers”). A trajectory toward applications is fine, but that tends not to move the needle for most of the public, especially when many breathless media claims of technological advances don’t seem to pan out.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to present condensed-matter physics as interesting, compelling, and even inspiring. Emergence, universality, and symmetry are powerful, amazing ideas. The same essential physics that holds up a white dwarf star is a key ingredient in what makes solids solid, whether we’re talking about a diamond or a block of plastic. Individual electrons seem simple, but put many of them together with a magnetic field in the right 2D environment and presto: excitations with fractional charges. Want electrons to act like ultrarelativistic particles, or act like their own antiparticles, or act like spinning tops pointing in the direction of their motion, or pair up and act together coherently? No problem, with the right crystal lattice. This isn’t dirt physics, and it isn’t squalid.

It is why I keep harping to the historical fact of Phil Anderson's work on a condensed matter system that became the impetus for the Higgs mechanism in elementary particle, and how some of the most exotic consequences of QFT are found in complex material (Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, etc...etc.).

So if your view of physics has been just the String theory, the LHC, etc... well, keep them, but include its BIG and more influential brother, the condensed matter physics, that not only has quite a number of important, fundamental stuff, but also has a direct impact on your everyday lives. It truly is the "King" of physics.

Zz.

Tommaso Dorigo's "False Claims In Particle Physics"

Hey, you should read this blog post by Tommaso Dorigo. It touches upon many of the myths regarding particle physics, especially the hype surrounding the name "god particle", as if that means something.

I've touched upon some of the issues he brought up. I think many of us who are active online and deal with the media and the public tend to see and observe the same thing, the same mistakes, and misinformation that are being put in print. One can only hope that by repeatedly pointing out such myths and why they are wrong, the message will slowly seep into the public consciousness.

I just wish it is seeping through faster.

Zz.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Chad Orzel has posted a fun piece that really tries to clarified all the brouhaha in many circles about a "crisis" that many are presuming to be widespread. The crisis in question is the lack of "beyond the standard model" discovery in elementary particle physics, and the issue that many elementary particle theorists seem to think that a theory that is based on solid foundation and elegance are sufficient to be taken seriously.

I find this very frustrating, because physics as a whole is not in crisis. The "crisis" being described is real, but it affects only the subset of physics that deals with fundamental particles and fields, particularly on the theory side. (Experimental physicists in those areas aren't making dramatic discoveries, but they are generating data and pushing their experiments forward, so they're a little happier than their theoretical colleagues...)

The problems of theoretical high energy physics, though, do not greatly afflict physicists working in much of the rest of the discipline. While this might be a time of crisis for particle theorists, it's arguably never been a better time to be a physicist in most of the rest of the field. There are exciting discoveries being made, and new technologies pushing the frontiers of physics forward in a wide range of subfields.

This is a common frustration, because elementary particle physics is not even the biggest subfield of physics (condensed matter physics is), but yet, it makes a lot of noise, and the media+public seem to pay more attention to such noises. So whenever something rocks this field, people often tend to think that this permeates through the entire field of physics. This is utterly false!

Orzel has listed several outstanding and amazing discoveries and advancements in condensed matter. There are more! The study of topological insulators continues to be extremely hot and appear to be not only interesting for application, but also as a "playground" for exotic quantum field theory scenarios.

I've said it many times, and I'll say it again. Physics isn't just the Higgs or the LHC. It is also your iphone, your MRI, your WiFi, your CT scan, etc....etc.

Zz.

University Research Made Your Smartphone

A lot of people are ignorant of the fact that a smartphone, or any device, for that matter, is a result of research work done by many people and organization and over a very long time. The iPhone was not solely the work of Apple. Apple benefited from all the scientific and technological progress and accumulation of knowledge to be able to produce such a device. These knowledge and progress are often done many years ago by researchers who work on a particular topic that eventually found an application in a smartphone.

I found this interesting website that highlights how research that originated out of universities under various funding agencies, resulted in the smartphone that we currently have. It lists one aspect of each of the major component of a smartphone that had it initial incubation in university research. A lot of these research work is physics-related. It is why I continue to say that physics isn't just the LHC or the Higgs or the blackhole. It is also your MRI, your iPhone, your GPS, etc...

If you need more background info on this, check out this page.

Zz.

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.