A Century of Bose-Einstein Condensation

Nature has published a wonderful review of the discovery and progress that we have made in understanding BE condensation since its discovery. It is an open access article and you can download the full article. I definitely like the figure that shows the major milestone in its development, but it would be nice if that is expanded even more to include references, or at least citation numbers so that I don't have to go hunting for them. 

Scanning through the article, I actually did a quick headcount on how many of the names mentioned in the article that I had met personally: Schrieffer, Leggett, Anderson, and Abrikosov. I believe Leggett is the only one still around as of this writing.

I didn't get too much into BE condensation even though I was working in superconductivity at that time. I was transitioning out of that field of study when the big BEC-BCS connection was experimentally established. Still, it was, and still, an exciting field to follow even on the peripheral.

Zz. 

Reviews of "The Quantum Labyrinth"

Paul Halpern's story of "when Feynman met Wheeler" in his book "The Quantum Labyrinth" has two interesting reviews that you can read (here and here). In the history of physics and human civilization, the meeting of the minds of these two giants in the world of physics must be rank up there with other partnerships, such as Lennon and McCartney, Hewlett and Packard, peanut butter and jelly, etc....

I have not read the book yet, and probably won't get to it till some time next year. But if you have read it, I'd like to hear what you think of it.

Zz.

Simple Physics?

I'm all for explaining things in simple terms that the general public can understand. I do that frequently, especially when I'm doing an outreach project or hosting visitors to the facility.

So when I read a review of this book, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff In Simple Words by Randall Munroe, it sounds like something that can be recommended to a lot of people who are curious about how various things around them work.

However, this author, and the reviewer of this book, fall into the same cliche trap that is one of my pet peeve.

There’s a nice quote attributed to the physicist Ernest Rutherford (or is it Einstein?): “If you can’t explain your physics to a barmaid, it is probably not very good physics.” There are variations of the theme, such as, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother”. In essence, keep it as simple as possible.

I had already addressed the fallacy of this statement (and yes, I am challenging Rutherford or Einstein if they actually said such a silly thing). I have plenty of evidence to point to the contrary. I wish people who keep repeating this would actually read my counter point, but hey, what are the odds?

Zz.

More On Neutrinos

People seem to want to learn more about neutrinos! With the latest Nobel prize being awarded to the discovery of neutrino mixing, it is a good time to have some general article on what we know about neutrinos. John Beacom has written a rather nice article here that should give you an idea of the physics of neutrinos and why it is an important study.

It just struck me as a rather interesting development. When SNO and Super-K were discovering all this, there was hardly any neutrino experiment in the US. Oh, there was plenty of US participation, but neutrino experiments were not big or a priority. This is understandable because, back then, the Tevatron was still going strong and LHC hasn't completely come into force yet. Now, how things have changed considerably. With the Tevatron gone and the center of high energy physics collider having shifted to CERN, the US is now trying to be a major player in neutrino studies, with MINOS, NOvA, and the proposed LBNE. In DOE/funding lingo, the US has abandoned the "Energy Frontier" and has gone into the "Intensity Frontier".

I believe there are still huge amount of amazing physics to be discovered from neutrinos. So it will be interesting how all these new generation of neutrino detectors will pan out.

Zz.

Review of Leonard Mlodinow's "Upright Tinkers"

This is a review of physicist's Leonard Mlodinow's new book "Upright Tinkers: : The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos."

In it, he debunks the myths about famous scientists and how major discoveries and ideas came about.

With it, he hopes to correct the record on a number of counts. For instance, in order to hash out his theory of evolution, Darwin spent years post-Galapagos shifting through research and churning out nearly 700 pages on barnacles before his big idea began to emerge. Rather than divine inspiration, Mlodinow says, achieving real innovation takes true grit, and a willingness to court failure, a lesson we’d all be wise to heed.

“People use science in their daily lives all the time whether or not its what we think of as ‘science,’” he continues. “Data comes in that you have to understand. Life’s not simple. It require patience to solve problems, and I think science can teach you that if you know what it really is.”

Scientists would agree. Recently, psychologist Angela Duckworth has begun overturning fundamental conventional wisdom about the role intelligence plays in our life trajectories with research illustrating that, no matter the arena, it’s often not the smartest kids in the room who become the most successful; it’s the most determined ones.

As I've said many times on here, there is a lot of value in learning science, even for non-scientists, IF there is a conscious effort to reveal and convey the process of analytic, systematic thinking. We all live in a world where we try to find correlations among many things, and then try to figure out the cause-and-effect. This is the only way we make sense of our surrounding, and how we acquire knowledge of things. Science allows us to teach this skill to students, and letting them be aware of how we consider something to be valid.

This is what is sadly lacking today, especially in the world of politics and social policies.

Zz.

Topological Insulators

In case you missed it and are interested in this area, this is a review article, which happens to be a chapter in a book, on "Topological Insulators, Topological Crystalline Insulators, and Topological Kondo Insulators". This is not meant for non-experts because it reviews the current understanding of this family of material.

Zz.

The Story Of Neutrinos

If you still need another exposition on neutrinos and why they are so important, then you might want to listen to this podcast by astronomer Ray Jayawardhana.

If already supplied several resources at various levels in this blog for those of you who need more info on these elusive particles. So just do a search.

Zz.

Slowing Down Sound So That You May Hear It?

Sometime you just have to shake your head at how badly science is mangled.

This is a "verdict" on the latest Godzilla movie. Of course, one doesn't expect accurate science reporting when it is an article on such a movie. Still, read this passage at the very end and tell me if you can't find, in this single paragraph, a couple of really glaring and puzzling errors.

But what you think you are hearing with that Godzilla roar may be deceiving. The roar is actually a decibel beyond the human range of hearing, so the design duo used special Japanese microphones to slow the sound so it falls within audience's hearing range.

REALLY!

A "decibel" measures the sound "loudness" or intensity. A sound may be too loud for a human being to hear comfortably, but it certainly isn't outside a human range. So to say that the roar is "a decibel beyond the human range of hearing" is rather puzzling.

But the kicker comes next where you can actually use these "Japanese microphones" to slow the sound, and thus, make it fall within the hearing range! I can understand the microphones picking up these ultra or sub-sonic sounds and then alter the frequency so that it falls within the hearing range. But slowing down the sound so that you can hear it?

I suppose if the microphone itself is filled with some dense medium that actually changes the speed of the incoming sound. But if we use our understanding of light going from one medium to the next, we see that the frequency remains constant even when its group velocity and wavelength change from one medium to the next. So I don't see even via such a picture, how one would "slow down" sound and make it fall within the hearing range.

After the earlier mistake being made on what a "decibel" is, I suppose it is hard to take anything written down after that seriously. So I am definitely making a big deal out of a mole hill.

Zz.

The Ghost Particle

No, not the often-used "god particle" that was designated to the Higgs, but rather the "ghostly" particle being used to describe neutrinos.

This NPR review of Ray Jayawardhana's book "Neutrino Hunters" has some basic intro to the history and mysteries of neutrinos if you are not familiar with it. And it is certainly true that, unlike the Higgs, the study of neutrinos has not received the same amount of publicity that it should have.

Neutrinos rarely get the press they deserve. Writers love to wax breathless about Higgs Bosons, antimatter, hypothetical thingies like tachyons (faster-than-light particles) and, of course, whatever makes up Dark Matter. But the ghostly neutrino turns out to be essential to everything from the physics of the early universe to the fusion reactions that keep the sun burning to the supernovas that light up the cosmos.

But as important, while the US has completely closed down all high energy collider physics, neutrino physics is the one area in which it still has a lot of involvement, both within the US and outside. Current projects within the US such as MINOS, NOvA, etc. are pushing our knowledge in neutrino physics, and future projects such as LBNE should ensure, if it gets continued funding, that the US will have a strong involvement in neutrino physics study.

BTW, if there's any crackpot out there who thinks that by calling neutrinos as "ghost particle" allows them the poetic license of justifying the existence of "ghosts", then they'd better read an earlier blog entry I made on this. Don't laugh! You'd be surprised at the extent these crackpots will go to simply to justify their incoherent and faulty logic.

Zz.

Highlights Of The Year

APS Physics lists the highlights of the year from papers published in the APS family of journals. I'm glad to say that I mentioned many of them on this blog when they first appeared.

Zz.

5 Reasons Physics Is Still Interesting

I suppose this article was in response to the widely-published news article about Hawking's disappointment at the discovery of the Higgs. He argued that physics would have been a lot more interesting had we NOT found the Higgs.

Well laa dee daa!

This article tries to debunk that by pointing out five current interesting topic in physics. They may not be of much interest to Hawking, but they certainly are a lot of interest to a lot of people.

I don't know whether this is a backhanded compliment or not, but for someone who is a "bioinformatician", this is well-covered, especially the insight to include magnetism/superconductivity in the list, something that many people often overlook.

Zz.

When Belief Trumps Scholarship

The most significant argument against Creationism/Intelligent Design is that the proponents of these beliefs tends to try to find faults in existing concept of evolution, but without providing evidence of their own in support of their beliefs. The most often line of attack by these people is what we often normally refer to using the concept of "god of the gaps", where one tries to find some evidence or observations that defies current scientific explanation.

The problem with this, of course, is that these "gaps" often continue to shrink over time, and as our understanding of the world around us expand and improve. The ancient civilization used to think that the moving clouds, the eclipses, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, etc., were all due to some act of gods, because they didn't have any knowledge of what caused them. Now, we know better and these events are no longer mysterious or mystical.

And that's where we come back to the ID crowd. More often than not, they lack the necessary scientific evidence to strengthen their arguments. And when they try, the only people they could convince are people who really are not well-equipped to actually decipher the science. This appears to be the case of the latest book titled "Darwin's Doubt" written by Stephen Meyer, who runs the Discovery Institute. He's a non-biologist, who is trying to argue that the rapid explosion of animal phylia in the Cambrian period cannot be explained via the slow and tedious process of evolution, and thus, via invoking the god-of-the-gaps, points to evidence of an intelligent designer.

Whenever someone brings up a scientific point, it must be countered with equivalent scientific point. And this is exactly what has been done in this case. A review of this book written by UC Berkeley's Charles Marshall in this week's issue of Science (Science, v.341, p.1344 (2013)) did just that. In this review, Marshall pointed out several flaws in the biological/scientific points presented in Meyer's book.

However, my hope soon dissipated into disappointment. His case against current scientific explanations of the relatively rapid appearance of the animal phyla rests on the claim that the origin of new animal body plans requires vast amounts of novel genetic information coupled with the unsubstantiated assertion that this new genetic information must include many new protein folds. In fact, our present understanding of morphogenesis indicates that new phyla were not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes (1). Now Meyer does touch on this: He notes that manipulation of such networks is typically lethal, thus dismissing their role in explaining the Cambrian explosion. But today's GRNs have been overlain with half a billion years of evolutionary innovation (which accounts for their resistance to modification), whereas GRNs at the time of the emergence of the phyla were not so encumbered. The reason for Meyer's idiosyncratic fixation with new protein folds is that one of his Discovery Institute colleagues has claimed that those are mathematically impossibly hard to evolve on the timescale of the Cambrian explosion.

In other words, this scientific argument doesn't hold water.

Unfortunately, and I can see this happening often, the counter argument to this book will not reach those who should be aware of it. The same with the perpetual argument that evolution violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, those who belief in ID will use this as the scientific argument against the evolution of life on Earth, without being aware of the holes in Meyer's book.

But at least now, you know that there is a scientific counter argument to what Meyer has brought up, and you can point to this Science review article.

Zz.

Superconductivity And The Environment - A Roadmap

A rather interesting and unusual review article. It describes how superconductivity and superconductors can actually help in improving our environment. As stated in this PhysicsWorld blog, it is an unusual assertion because "... superconductors only work at very low temperatures and lots of energy is needed to cool them.. "

Still, you might want to check out the list of things that have been argued that superconductors can do to help with the environment. The review paper is available for free.

Zz.

It's About Time

One of the most common arguments that I've seen online is the question on whether time is "real" or is it an "illusion" or doesn't exist. I've addressed this before quite a while back. In fact, that blog entry actually became a "reference" in a Wikipedia entry!

Last week's issue of Science had an interesting article. It is actually a review of Smolin's book "Time Reborn", with the review written by Huw Price (Science v.341, p.960 (2013)). What is interesting about the review here is the impression that I got that, even in philosophical circles, there is really no serious argument on the question on whether time exists or not (it does!). Rather, the question is really on the nature of time.

The differences between the two camps on the nature of time is described in the article:

I’ll come back to that question, but first to the dispute itself, which is one of philosophy’s oldest feuds. One team thinks of time as we seem to experience it, a locus of flow and change, centered on the present moment-“All is flux,” as Heraclitus asserted around 500 BCE. The other, my clan, is loyal instead to Heraclitus’s near contemporary, Parmenides of Elea. We think of time as it is described in history: simply a series or block of events, lined up in a particular order, with no distinguished present moment. For us, now is like here—it marks where we ourselves happen to stand but has no significance at all from the universe’s point of view.

And it brings me to the main point in which the differences really is not about the question whether time exists, or if it is real.

To Parmenideans such as Williams and myself, this attitude is just linguistic imperialism, cheeky and rather uncharitable. Of course we believe that time is real, we insist. (It is as real as space is, the two being simply different aspects of the same fourdimensional manifold.) What we deny is just that time comes carved up into past, present, and future.

You'll notice that the argument that time is as real as space is the same argument that I used in that earlier post that I linked above.

So really, enough of this nonsense on whether time exists or not, or if it is real or not.

Zz.

"The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics"

One of the questions I get asked a lot online by members of the public is "what do I need to know if I want to be an amateur physicist?" There are many people who obviously are interested in "doing physics" without making a career out of it. While I am not quite sure what an "amateur physicist" actually do, or what they can accomplish, I can certainly understand why those who have a keen interest in physics but with an already-established career, might want to know that they need to be equipped with to continue trying to understand physics. This is especially true if one wants to know beyond the superficial level all the interesting discoveries and news from the world of physics.

So it is with that in mind that I'm highlighting a new book written by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky that attempts to address that very issue. A review of this book appears in this month's issue of Physics Today.

Enjoyable it was, but its utility is narrower than I might have hoped. In fairness, it seems to be excellent for its stated purpose: as a first textbook for the “ardent amateur” who is perhaps taking a continuing education course or seeking to learn about physics at a level a bit higher than in the usual gee-whiz, calculus-free course. I, however, was eager to analyze the book as a supporting resource for mechanics courses for two different classes of amateurs: life-science students taking physics as a premedical requirement and engineering or physics students with a comparatively weak background. There is a chronic need for a clearly written “theoretical minimum” textbook to help the many students who try to learn physics but cannot remember, or who never properly learned, the necessary elementary math skills—not to mention students whose high school physics course was so poor it actually obstructed their conceptual understanding.

A few minor issues notwithstanding, it does sound as if this is a worthwhile book to have especially if one is a physicist in academia.

Zz.

Review of "Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe"

Here's another name that is a giant among physicists, yet it isn't a household name for the general public. This is a book review of of a recent biography of Hans Bethe published in this month's issue of Physics Today.

Of course, my admiration for Bethe can be summed up in this paragraph of the review:

Among the most pervasive features of Bethe’s emerging style was his fundamental criterion that theory must be grounded in real-world observation—a view he shared with other young physicists in his circle, including Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, Nevill Mott, Enrico Fermi, and later Richard Feynman. Bethe’s physics would not be aimed at formulating radically new ideas, but rather at critically analyzing and extending theories and formulating models that could test their validity.

This is probably a good book to read about Bethe. I plan on getting it, but if you have read it, I'd like to hear your views on it.

Zz.

Measurement Of The Neutrino Oscillation Angle Theta13

This is a very good review article on neutrino oscillation and also the measurement of Theta13, which has been a very active investigation area lately. The article is aimed at "non-HEP Physicists", meaning you have to remember quite a bit of your quantum mechanics to decipher all those matrices. You get to see, quite early on, why the detection of the change in flavor of neutrinos allows not only the measurement of the mixing angle, but also implies that neutrinos must have mass.

Zz.

"From Aether Theory To Special Relativity"

This could easily be a condensed intro to Special Relativity. If you are not familiar with it, or want a quick historical overview, you might want to check out this article.

Zz

FFAG Review

I wrote quite a while back about this Fixed Field Alternating Gradient accelerator, including the unfortunate acronym that it has adopted. This document provides a good review of this area. It was presented at a 2011 CERN Accelerator school.

Zz.

The Emergence Of QCD

This is a nice review of how QCD came about and its role in the Standard Model, written by Nobel Laureates David Gross and Franck Wilczek.

Zz.