The Laws Of Physics Do Not Apply Here?

I was casually reading this article, which started out to be rather amusing. But then, it got VERY annoying especially when the ignorant judge started to give out his opinion.

A couple in England was contesting a speeding ticket when the wife was caught using a speed camera. Her husband, who happened to be a physicist, challenged the speeding ticket because the speed camera wasn't used according to instruction.

Now I have no idea who's right or who's wrong here, and this isn't really the focus of this blog post. However, what caused my jaw to drop was what the judge then said.

West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership spokesman, Philip Gwynne, said Mr Fielden appeared to be "defending his wife's honour" by "using the laws of physics."

He said: "However, the judge has ruled that in speeding cases it is the law of the land that matters – not the law of physics.

"Maybe it's time that we left physics in the classroom and allowed cameras to get on with their job which is to reduce injury and death on our roads and encourage people to drive within the speed limits," he continued.

Er... hello? Didn't the camera actually used physics to measure a vehicle's speed in the first place? And what's with confining physics to only "in the classroom" nonsense? Is he out of his mind making such a silly statement like that?

I hate to say this, but I shouldn't be shocked by such stupidity anymore. However, it also a reflection on those in physics to evaluate on whether we have done enough to emphasize the relevance of physics in our world today. Too often, big news on physics have come from very esoteric areas of physics. This includes high energy physics (the LHC is in the new a lot lately), astrophysics, etc., all of which are definitely important, but have a major disconnect between the subject area and what the general public are familiar with. They don't see how such things are applicable in their daily lives, and so have the impression that physics only deals with things that they don't use. They forget that their basic electronics, and most of their modern conveniences, came out of discoveries in physics, especially solid state/condensed matter physics.

Confining physics to the classroom is the last thing we want to do.

Zz.

EDIT/UPDATE: There's a bit of confusion on my part on who said that idiotic passage that I quoted from the news article. From this report, it appears that it is the person by the name of

Philip Gwynne, a spokesman for West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership, which runs the camera, said: "Maybe it's time we left the physics in the classroom. The cameras are there to encourage people to drive safely."

If this is true, than I apologize to the presiding judge, and this Philip Gwynne character has a serious problem. The "West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership" can't possibly want someone this ignorant to be their spokesman..... can they?

Zz.

Who Is the Anonymous Author of the Web's Best Physics Blog?

Sadly, no, it is not Yours Truly or this blog!

:)

Wired is trying to find out (and trying to contact) the person who is running what it called "the Web's Best Physics Blog", which is the arXiv blog. In fact, they are obsessed with him/her.

We love the blog and want to work with its creators, but they have not responded to Wired.com's emails. So, we're turning to you, readers, for a crowdsourced investigation. If you help us determine the real identity of this blogger, there might be even be a prize in it for you.

Does anyone know who this Kentucky FC is and how we could contact him/her/them? Is she a famous physicist? An undiscovered Einstein? A graduate student dithering away another year hoping to delay having to settle for a tenure-track position in some cold, inhospitable clime?

So what competition did it enter to win the "Web's Best Physics Blog" title? :)

Zz.

Physicists Quantify the 'Coefficient of Inefficiency'

One of the skill one learns as a physicist is to tackle a problem systematically, and to quantify it, if possible, by making an effective, accurate model of the system. This problem doesn't have to be in physics. It can be anything. I mentioned earlier of someone who tried to find the most optimum way to load an airplane, simply because he became curious after observing how an airplane is typically boarded. Well, this is a similar problem.

Three physicists from the University of Vienna examines the efficiency of committees in making a decision in terms of the number of people that makes up the committee.

To understand why, Thurner and fellow physicists Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel turned to the British historian C Northcote Parkinson, who studied how the British Navy was once administered. Parkinson, who died in 1993, discovered a strong correlation between a committee’s ability to make a good decision, and its size. In particular, Parkinson found that committees with more than about 20 members are much more ineffectual at making decisions than smaller groups — something he dubbed the “coefficient of inefficiency”.

You can read the preprint of the paper from a link given in that article. It is a clever way to quantify and model this problem. Now if only people who form such committees would pay attention to it.

Zz.

Non Sequitur

Thanks to Jim McNamara at PF for pointing this out. I thought it was a hilarious cartoon.

I don't know if that is a permanent link, unfortunately, for this cartoon.

Update: Thanks to Tom for the permanent url to the cartoon.

Zz.

Unfortunate Acronym

First of all, this is not an attempt at being politically correct. I'm not criticising anything or asking for something to change. It is just that I find it a bit "amusing" some time, and wonder if anyone else spotted it, especially those who came up with it.

Often people come up with very cute acronym for many things. I can think of WIMP and MACHO, etc. in physics. These are catchy acronym that many people, including the general public, catch on. However, sometime, they come up with rather unfortunate acronym. I came across this one several years ago, and somehow, after reading an article this morning, it popped up again. The acronym is "FFAG", for Fixed-Field Alternating Gradient accelerator. I'm sure that most people reading this can guess what is unfortunate about this acronym (remove one of the "F"s and it becomes a short form of a derogatory word).

Of course, the first thing that came to mind is if the people who came up with the acronym actually realized this. The second thing that came to mind is on how this acronym is pronounced. Usually, acronym that can form a "name" that can be pronounced is usually refered to by that pronounciation. One would refer to WIMP as "wimp", not "W - I - M - P". So do people refer to "FFAG" as "F - F - A - G" or "F-fag"? I don't know about you, but I would feel rather uncomfortable to say the latter, even if nothing bad is intended.

I haven't had the opportunity yet to be in the circle of people that actually discussed this subject area yet, so I'm a bit curious on their view on this, or how they go about mentioning this word. Of course, I certainly wouldn't discount the fact that most of the people who do use this acronym aren't even aware of this angle, especially since there are many non-native English speakers involved in this field of study and the social/cultural connotation involved in that word doesn't mean anything to them.

Have you come across any similar acronym in physics/science that has the same unfortunate connotation?

Zz.

Bush to Science: "Let's be friends"

Holy Cow! This must be an April Fools joke!

Bush also plans to relax his stem cell policy. Although he has twice blocked congressional bills that would have expanded federal research on embryonic stem cells (ScienceNOW, 20 June 2007), he said today that such vetoes were a mistake. Bush said he now regrets having placed more value on a destined-to-be-discarded embryo than on a 30-year-old mother with multiple sclerosis--not to mention Michael J. Fox. "Why wait for a new president?" said Bush. "Let's get these embryos into the hands of scientists who can use them for good."

In a final concession, Bush promised to be a better steward of the planet. "I haven't always been clear about the threat global warming poses," he said. "In retrospect, having oil industry lobbyists edit our climate reports was probably a bad idea." He also admitted that initiatives such as "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies" had led to excess logging and air pollution, respectively. To make amends, he has appointed former rival and Nobel laureate Al Gore to head his new conservation initiative, which calls for mandatory cuts on greenhouse gas emissions and rigorous protection for species classified as threatened or endangered. "We're calling it 'Pristine Planet,' " said Bush. "And this time we mean it."

I would say that that last part kinda gave it away, really. Who would believe such a thing? :)

Zz.

Gyroball - A "Nothing Ball"?

The controversy surrounding the existence of a "gyroball" in the sports of baseball continues. Recall that I reported on this a while ago of the skepticism that such a ball can be thrown. Now there's a new follow up to this issue where even more people are simply questioning why this is such a big deal.

Adair said it actually mimics a pitch in cricket that "probably goes back 100 years," its odd-duck spin more useful in that sport because the ball is bounced to the batsman. "It had various names," Adair said. "The 'googly' and the 'Chinaman,' because a British bowler of Chinese extraction threw it.'

"Properly thrown through the air, the gyroball does nothing. It's a 'nothing ball!'"

Or as University of Illinois physics professor Alan Nathan amended, "A 'qualified nothing ball.' Because if the batter is expecting a 'something ball' [with a break or a dip], that makes a 'nothing ball' effective."

Sort of a reverse psychology? :)

I wish they just play ball!

Zz.

Lawsuit: Huge Atom Smasher Could Destroy World

This news has been making the rounds around various blogs and news wires. A couple of wackos have decided to file a lawsuit against the US Dept. of Energy (DOE) and CERN to stop them from building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

I debated on whether I want to dignify this stupidity by reporting it on here. But then again, it is going to be reported anyway. This news report has some brief description of the background of the yoohoos that filed the lawsuit.

Not included among the documents is Wagner's own indictment last month on identity-theft charges tied to an ongoing legal battle over a botanical garden on the Big Island of Hawaii, but you can read about that here.

Most physicists say Wagner's worries are unfounded. Micro black holes would evaporate nearly instantly instead of combining to form larger ones, they say, and the "strangelet" particles he frets would freeze the world would in fact fall apart quickly.

Wagner's own background is a bit fuzzy. He claims to have minored in physics at U.C. Berkeley, gone to law school, taught elementary-school science and worked in nuclear medicine at health facilities — but he doesn't appear to have an advanced degree in science.

Sancho's qualifications are even murkier, but the lawsuit identifies him as a Spanish citizen residing in the U.S., even if his presence makes the entire case a bit, um, quixotic.

And before someone accuse me of simply trying to attack the credibility of the wackos rather than address the "physics", let me point one very glaring and important observation here. There are already extremely energetic particles colliding with other particles in our universe. For example, the recent Auger Observatory results studied the origin of the these cosmic particles, that have energies in the 100's of TeV, something that CERN cannot even come close to. These particles have been around for million (even billions) of years, and have made gazillions of collisions. If such high energy collisions can create blackholes, we would have been swallowed and destroy by them already by now. Hello? Is this not obvious?

It looks like the crackpots are now getting a bit more daring. But now, rather than just being an internet nuisance, they are now being a pain-in-the-rear-end with their frivolous lawsuits. So anyone who thinks that these crackpots are just a "harmless" bunch of losers, think again. They're still losers, but they're definitely not always harmless.

Zz.

Dark Matter Music From CDMS

This is a bit out of the ordinary.

This is taken from Fermilab Today newsletter for March 13, 2008:

Karl Ramberg sometimes incorporates music into his artwork. But a trip with his brother, Fermilab physicist Erik Ramberg, added science to his palette. Karl, with the help of scientists, produced a full-scale, plastic model of a dark matter detector that translates its data into light and sound.

"The end result is that you get an experience, aurally and visually, of subatomic affects," Karl said. "You get a better understanding of what the data is saying."

The musical detector, a YouTube sensation, is modeled after the real Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, an underground experiment searching for dark matter particles. The actual CDMS experiment detects and records the energies of particles that strike its five towers. The model takes that one step further, expressing the data in color and tone according to particles and their properties. The idea for the model was inspired by a trip to the Soudan, Minn. mine that houses the CDMS experiment, where Erik, a CDMS collaborator, took shifts.

So this is essentially data translated into music.



It could pass for a New Age music, I would think. :)

Zz.

Einstein’s Taxing Time at Oxford

It's amazing that after all these years after this man's death, there are still plenty of new discoveries about his life that keep popping up. Case in point is this newly published account of his encounter with the British tax law.

You would have needed to be Einstein to understand the Inland Revenue’s thinking when one of its more zealous inspectors wanted to tax the great German physicist on a fellowship granted by an Oxford college.

It was not until a personal intervention by the chairman of the board of the Revenue that a £400 ($787) annual stipend awarded to Albert Einstein by Christ Church in 1932 was ruled exempt from British taxation.

I have a feeling that for a very long time, there will be new discovery like this about Einstein's life.

Zz.

Another Reason Not To Use Yahoo Search

So Yahoo is laying off more people as it loses even more grounds to Google. I guess in my case, I very seldom use Yahoo search anymore. But once in a while, I do. However, this latest "incident" simply reinforced the reason why I don't use it that often.

We all know that all these search engines try to make money off advertisements. They all use some "contextual" advertisement that is relevant to what you were searching for. So of course, if you do a search for "physics", websites that have relevance to that topic will come up as in the advertisement area of your search page. That's nothing new. However, when you do a search for "physics" on Yahoo, you tend to get not only physics-related websites, but also psychic-related websites!

Now I now fully well that (i) this also some time occurs when you do a Google search and (ii) the "intelligent" software is trying to make account for possible misspelling of the word. Since "physics" and "psychic" is close enough, I can see why they would both come up together (I won't go into the advertisement for crackpot websites, which both Yahoo and Google are guilty of). Still, Yahoo is notorious for putting up a lot of these psychic websites after such search, way more than what you would find using Google. And heaven forbid if you go to one of the physics-related Yahoo groups. There's plenty of psychic website advertisement.

This is a screen snapshot that I got after one of my recent excursion to do a Yahoo search on "physics".



As you can see, the whole list of web advertisement is for psychic websites! I mean, c'mon!

It is sad that while their spelling may be similar, these two can't be more further apart. It is a night-and-day difference in what they do, how they go about their business, etc. In other words, these advertisement for psychic websites are highly annoying, at least to me. But then again, I've been know to not have a lot of patience for such nonsense.

I wrote earlier on how we some time we get people who can't spell very well coming into the IRC physics chat channel. They were looking for some "reading" in the physics channel, when, of course, they were looking for the "psychic" channel. We had a lot of fun at their expense, I'm sorry to say. :) Maybe Yahoo is trying to cater for these people who can't spell very well. Now, it would only be fair that they also get physics websites when they do a search on "psychics". But then again, how are they to know that they're reading a legitimate webpage and not some crackpottery? Maybe they'll like the crackpottery more! Oy vey!

Zz.

The Physics of Christmas

With Santa expecting to arrive tonight, here's a recap of something I posted last year at this time of the year.

The Physics of Santa discusses how the jolly old guy will complete his task tonight. There is also another article that discusses this, so you can compare them. On a newer front, this website on About.com has all the physics you want to know associated with Christmas. And here's another article on the physics of santa, including the aerodynamics question on how he could fly.

Plenty of stuff to read if you are bored with the holidays. :)

Happy Holidays everyone!

Zz.

Instead of Celebrating Christmas, Would You Celebrate Newtonmas?

This is a rather amusing article on Wired Blog. While Dec. 25th is more popularly associated with Christmas, it is also the date that Isaac Newton was born. The author puts forth a suggestion that we should take this opportunity to teach the kids some basic physics to celebrate Newton's birthday.

I think it's a great idea!

Zz.

The Physics of Magic Carpet

Just when you thought you've read everything....

It seems that physicists at Harvard, no less, have found an aerodynamics solution in which one can make a "carpet" fly.

The researchers have studied1 the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid, and find that it should be possible to make one that will stay aloft in air.

No such carpet is going to ferry people around, though. The researchers say that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with an amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres. Making a heavier carpet 'fly' is not forbidden by the laws of physics. But the researchers say that their "computations and scaling laws suggest it will remain in the magical, mystical and virtual realm", as the engine driving the necessary vibrations would need to be so powerful.

I will stick to commercial airlines, though. Just think how difficult it is to eat powdered doughnuts during an open-air magic carpet ride? :)

Zz.

Don't Throw Your Physics Experiment Out In The Trash!

Here's a hint: don't simply throw out your physics experiment out in the trash can! You could cause a lot of problems, such as the one that happened at the University of San Diego.

The “device” – six glass root beer bottles with rubber stoppers linked by wires – alarmed a security guard, who called authorities just before noon, fire department spokesman Maurice Luque said.

Luque said bomb investigators with the Metro Arson Strike Team took photographs of the contraption and showed them to a physics professor on campus, who confirmed it was a student experiment.

Never a dull moment... :)

Zz.

Erykah Badu Dabbling In Quantum Physics?

I'm not making this up!

Erykah Badu, for those of you who are not up-to-speed with contemporary music, is a well-respected, grammy-winning, hip-hop artist. So she isn't Britney Spears, thankyouverymuch! Still, I'm taken aback a little bit when I read in this interview that she has been dabbling in "studying" quantum physics, and that has somehow influenced her in her upcoming album.

This album is special to me because I went deep into my Hip-Hop purse to pull out some of the most creative, scientific, mathematical producers that I could find, because that’s what I was feelin’ at the time. I had been starting to dabble in the studying of quantum physics and wanting to really, I don’t know, participate in the changing of frequencies in different areas of music. And I said, “Okay, the most likely candidate would be Dilla.” So I’m searching through my Jay Dilla mixtapes and pulling things out. [Other producers include] Madlib, Kareem Riggins, 9th Wonder, Sa-Ra, my comrade Jah Born, who did “On and On,” Frequency, my production crew - that’s Rashad Smith, James Poyser, ?uestlove. Am I leaving anybody out?

I'm guessing by what she meant as studying is that she's reading pop-science books on quantum physics. That wouldn't be so bad. I just hope that she's NOT learning about it by reading books such as "The Secret" or something worse than that.

Next, I fully expect to hear that Mariah Carey is studying Special Relativity.

:)

Zz.

The Emergence of Science Cafe

I didn't know that this is getting to be as popular as being reported here. It seems that throughout the country, small cafes and bars are having "meetings" on science that are getting to be quite an event.

Science groups for young professionals who don’t wear white coats, like the year-old Secret Science Club at Union Hall, are cropping up in bars and bookstores all over the country, from Massachusetts to Montana.

“If you have a certain type of job, after a while that part of your brain starts to deteriorate,” said Amy Lee, 25, who works at an Internet startup and was attending her second Secret Science Club meeting. “You want to use it again. Plus, there’s alcohol.”

Ah!!! So that's the secret! :)

It does make sense, and it's different.

Zz.

The Adventures of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Sometime, I'm thoroughly amazed (not to mention, highly amused) at the things that a physics student can get into. I will admit that I wasn't aware of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster till I read this news report. However, it appears that the creation of one physics student at the Oregon State University by the name of Bobby Henderson will now be the subject of a discussion at the upcoming American Academy of Religion annual meeting.

You have got to read the news article to get up to speed here. It's too hilarious and, I would say, an effective means to illustrate the absurdity of forcing Intelligent Design into a science class.

So, whether you intentionally planned this or not, well done Bobby!

Zz.

Dr. Atomic at Lyric Opera of Chicago

Doctor Atomic will be performed at the Lyric Opera of Chicago from Dec. 14, 2007 through Jan. 19, 2008. This is a critically-acclaimed opera based on the events surrounding the first detonation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

Not into opera, you say? Well, look at it this way, at least it is in English! :)

Zz.

Einstein Earned $18 Million Last Year

I'm not making this up! Forbes has compiled the list of top earning dead celebrities, and Albert Einstein landed at #5 with $18 million last year!

Rounding out the top five on this year's list were George Harrison from the Beatles, who died in 2001, with $22 million, and German-born physicist Albert Einstein with $18 million.

Einstein has become a key trademark in child education due to the Disney-owned Baby Einstein brand of videos and toys.

Wonder if he gets any other royalties from the use of his likeness, etc.?

Zz.