Graduate Quantum Mechanics Reform

So I've written a bit on revamping the undergraduate physics laboratory. I believe that many, if not most, of the studies on better teaching and presentation methods have been directed at introductory college, undergraduates, and high school students. We don't hear much about graduate programs that need revamping. I suppose one assume that students at that advanced level can mostly learn on their own even with unequipped instructors and teaching methods that aren't well-developed.

So it is a breath of fresh air that I came across this preprint that actually talked about reforming how graduate level QM is taught.

Abstract: We address four main areas in which graduate quantum mechanics education in the U.S. can be improved: course content; textbook; teaching methods; and assessment tools. We report on a three year longitudinal study at the Colorado School of Mines using innovations in all four of these areas. In particular, we have modified the content of the course to reflect progress in the field in the last 50 years, use modern textbooks that include such content, incorporate a variety of teaching techniques based on physics education research, and used a variety of assessment tools to study the effectiveness of these reforms. We present a new assessment tool, the Graduate Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey, and further testing of a previously developed assessment tool, the Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey (QMCS). We find that graduate students respond well to research-based techniques that have previously been tested mainly in introductory courses, and that they learn a great deal of the new content introduced in each version of the course. We also find that students' ability to answer conceptual questions about graduate quantum mechanics is highly correlated with their ability to solve calculational problems on the same topics. On the other hand, we find that students' understanding of basic undergraduate quantum mechanics concepts at the modern physics level is not improved by instruction at the graduate level.

It's an interesting reading, and I've gone through it only quickly. I plan on reading it some more when I have the time. In the meantime, why don't you take a whack at it? :)

Zz.

Physics of a Crane Collapse

With all the recent crane collapse going on, especially in New York City, this issue is certainly quite relevant. The following report is basically a transcript of a discussion with an assistant professor at the University of Maryland on the physics surrounding a crane collapse.

Zz.

Can Real Life Physics Example Be Taken Too Far?

This news article reports on a physics question that does not sit well with a number of people.

In today’s Senior Physics exam, one of the problems is about a 'virtual' crime scene in which a victim is lying on the stage in the school auditorium with a gunshot wound to the head. There are four student suspects, and the problem has to do with calculating trajectory and other physics issues.

Many administrators are complaining.

Ruth Rosenfield President of the Montreal Teachers Association cannot believe how such an insensitive question could have been included in the exam, in light of the Dawson College shooting.

What do you think? Would a question like this be appropriate at Columbine high school, Virginia Tech, or Northern Illinois University? Or is there a better, less controversial way to test students about projectile motion without invoking such imagery?

Zz.

Peter Higgs on the Dawn of the LHC

I mentioned earlier of an article referring to Peter Higgs and the impetus for him to come up the Higgs mechanism. One doesn't hear much about Higgs since he's a very low-key individual. So it is rather nice to read about him and what he's up to nowadays, especially on his recent visit to CERN. This news article is basically an update on him especially with regards to the LHC about to be powered up.

Zz.

Fermilab Takes Stage in The Da Vinci Code-Like Physics Thriller

Physics thriller... hum.... when was the last time you see those 2 words together? :)

In any case, this article from Symmetry magazine is quite entertaining. It is a review and an interview with author Mark Alpert regarding his new novel "Final Theory". Most of the setting for this novel is set at Fermilab.

So hey, if Dan Brown can use CERN for "Angels and Demons", someone else certainly can use Fermilab for another thriller, no? :)

Zz.

GLAST to Blast Off Today!

All fingers crossed! GLAST is ready for lift off today!

In a final meeting of scientists, engineers, technicians and officials, NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) received the final "Ready to Go!" from all teams. GLAST is scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance's Delta II Heavy rocket with a launch window from 11:45 a.m. - 1:40 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 11.

You can read more about GLAST at its official website. More info from Physics World can be found here.

Zz.

Edit: Update - GLAST was successfully launched!


Photo credit: NASA/ULA

Physicists in Congress Calculate Their Influence

OK, let me first of all qualify myself by saying that I love, LOVE, reading this piece. I don't ever recall reading a report on this before, even though there have been previous articles on how physicists work in the US Congress. But this NY Times article on the 3 physicists in the US Congress is just plain delightful.

First of all, it highlights what I have argued earlier. What is important is not that one learned a specific issue, but that one is equipped to learn about things and think things through analytically, which is something that can be acquired as a skill in a science class.

There are 435 people in the House, Mr. Holt said, and “420 don’t know much about science and choose not to.” He recalled his exasperation when anthrax spores were discovered in the Capitol in 2001 and colleagues came to him and said, “You are a scientist, you must know about anthrax,” a subject ordinarily missing from the physics curriculum.

“The difference,” he said, “is we would be perfectly happy to pick up a copy of The New England Journal of Medicine and read about the etiology of anthrax.”

“In fact, we basically did that,” Mr. Ehlers said.

“We know more than our colleagues,” Mr. Holt said, “but not more than they could know.

But it is also sad to know that these lawmakers are saddled with the same level of ignorance that we have seen in the general public.

But sometimes, he said, the problem is just old-fashioned ignorance. Several times he has found himself “rushing to the floor” to head off colleagues ready to eliminate financing for endeavors whose importance they did not understand.

Once it was game theory. The person seeking the cut did not seem to realize that game theory had to do with interactions in economics, behavior and other social sciences, not sports, Mr. Ehlers recounted.

Then there was the time he rose to defend A.T.M. research against a colleague who thought it should be left to the banking industry. In this case the initials stood for asynchronous transfer mode, a protocol for fiber-optic data transfer.

One would think that if one is making such an important decision on something, that one would at least figure out what those things mean, especially when these lawmakers have staffers that can easily brief them on what they are.

It would be nice to have more people in power who have a more positive inclination towards science, and physics in particular. However, I'm skeptical that there will be significantly more.

Zz.

High-Tc Superconductors Are Very Kinky - Update 1

Since I last completed the essay on the "kink" that is observed in ARPES spectrum of high-Tc superconductors, I've made 2 updates on the list of references. There have been 2 preprints appearing on arXiv that argued for the phonon origin of this kink. It there does not seem to be any end to this issue in sight, at least for now.

I wonder how the ARPES spectrum for the FeAs-based superconductors are going to look at. I bet many people are scurrying to be the first to report on that, assuming of course that one has a sizable single-crystal sample that can be easily cleaved in vacuum.

Zz.

Physicist Debunks Cellphone Popcorn Viral Videos

It is really sad that we now have to address all kinds of crackpotteries that appear on YouTube. This is one such example.

YouTube videos that show a group of friends apparently cooking kernels of popcorn with their cellphones have been viewed more than a million times since they were uploaded last week.

The parlor trick (see embedded clip) looks amazing enough, but there's a hitch: It's not physically possible, according to University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield.

The problem here isn't these yoohoos who made the video. There will always be bored people like this who'd do one thing or another just to get attention. The problem is the people who view these things and would put some credibility into it. We then have to take some effort into debunking such crap. Even then, how many people who saw the video would actually see this response?

Zz.

ITER Faces Cost Hikes And Delays

ITER hasn't been built yet, but already planners are warning of additional costs and a possible 3-year delay. (Link may be available without subscription only for a limited time).

Construction has not even begun on the ITER fusion reactor, which has been beset by political wrangling since its inception. Now its seven international backers are to be told they will have to come up with an extra €1.2 billion–1.6 billion (US$1.9 billion–2.5 billion) on top of its current €5-billion construction budget if the project is to be realized.

A report from a group of scientific advisers says the additional money is needed for critical design changes and for coordinating between the participant nations. And the experiment, already delayed, will not be completed until anywhere from one to three years after its current 2018 due date.

I guess some of the added costs are understandable. They had to incorporate earthquake safety for the building at Cadarache, which was not included in the original estimates because that was done before a site selection. Still, this is approaching (if not already overtaking) the ILC cost.

Zz.

Making Sense of the Legendre Transform

I don't mind admitting that, while I was a graduate student, doing the Legendre transform in statistical mechanics was more of a "automatic" response rather than anything I actually understood. All I knew was that it got me from one place to the other, and that's that. Luckily, I don't quite use that piece of information, and that skill, in my everyday work. Unluckily, it means that, while I can still tackle such problems, I don't think I have that good of a grasp of it as I do with other aspects of physics.

That's why I was rather interested in reading this preprint on an effort to clearly introduce the Legendre transform. The authors used the standard, useful examples from classical mechanics and statistical mechanics, so physics majors should be well-familiar with the coverage. I've only looked through it rather quickly, with the intention of reading it more carefully later, but I think this could potentially be highly useful to many, especially if you are still in school learning this subject.

If you have read through this more carefully, and have some comments, please post them here. I'd like to hear them.

Zz.

Science Education for Everyone: Why and What?

This is a rather provocative and often insightful essay posted on RedOrbit. It discusses not just why a general science education for non-scientists/engineers is important (we all know that), but also how it should be done. There are certainly many points in this essay that I agree, and I certainly consider the general introductory course in Physics, for example, not quite as effective to non-science majors in terms of getting across the point. That's why I have tried to put down some suggestion on how to do this better from the perspective of the introductory laboratory exercises.

However, the essay goes a bit further than that and tackles the larger issue, which by and large, I agree with. However, I also think that the author may be missing an important point in all of this. For example:

When we take as our goal the production of students who are comfortable handling science-related issues that arise in public debate, two propositions follow immediately, both of which are profoundly out of tune with the current academic consensus: (1) the students need to know something about all areas of science, rather than a lot about a single area; and (2) the students do not need to be able to "do" science.

I have absolutely no problem with that one. But this one is where the author missed something important:

A common response to the notion of teaching all of the sciences is the claim that the standard type of courses really teach something called the "scientific method," and that this will magically give students the background they need to read the newspaper on the day they graduate. This argument is so silly that I scarcely know where to start commenting on it. If it were applied to any other field, its vacuity would be obvious; after all, no one argues that someone who wants to learn Chinese should study French, acquire the "language method," and learn Chinese on his or her own. If we expect our students to understand the basic principles of ecology or geology, we should teach those principles explicitly. To do otherwise is to indulge in what I call the "teach them relativity and they'll work out molecular biology on the way home" school of thought. Incidentally, the notion that there is a magical "scientific method" explains a bizarre feature of the modern scientific community. I am referring to the fact that, outside of their fields of specialty, professional scientists, as a group, are probably the most scientifically illiterate group in the United States. The reason is simpie: scientists are never required to study science outside of their own fields. The last time a working physicist saw a biology textbook, for example, was probably in high school. If you do not believe me, ask one of your scientific colleagues how he or she deals with public issues outside of his or her field. Chances are you'll get an answer like "I call a friend," a technique I refer to as having recourse to the Golden Rolodex.

There are 2 problems with the author's view on this:

1. Scientists, more than anyone else, I would think, know the limitation of what they know, and because of that, realize that that what they know about other fields are only at the superficial level. I can bet you that if you take someone off the street and another physicist, for example, evaluate carefully what each of them know about stem-cell, I will put my money that the physicist has a deeper technical understanding of what a stem-cell is. Yet, if you ask them casually about such issue, you can easily get the "I call a friend" answer. Why? Because most of us do not consider our knowledge to be on the expert level on such issues. Our "threshold" for considering that we have a valid understanding of something is SO HIGH, because we know what is meant to be an "expert" at something, that many of the important aspect of understanding something are in the DETAILS which one are not aware of by knowing something just superficially! So to deduce the fact that a scientist would rather rely on someone who is an expert in the other field as being "illiterate" in that area of study is bogus! This is where an "anecdotal" observation simply doesn't have enough substance to draw up such conclusion.

2. When we teach students science, or physics in particular, we are teaching them SKILLS, or more specifically, analytic skills. It is a systematic examination of the problems, looking at correlations via the relationships between various quantities and parameters, and then looking at the cause and effect. If one look closely, what I've mentioned here is totally INDEPENDENT of physics! You can apply such skill to any problem that one encounters in life! In fact, I just applied such skill in #1 to argue why the author's conclusion is faulty! When I did my series on the revamping of the undergraduate physics lab, the whole purpose of it is to make a CONSCIOUS effort to get the students to examine these aspects of the formation of knowledge. How do we accept something as being valid? When someone claims that "... scientifically illiterate group...", how do we judge that to be valid rather than just simply accepting it blindly just because someone writes it on a webpage? This is the whole essence of our ability to analyze a situation to make a valid conclusion, and thus, forming knowledge about something. While you do not study classical mechanics in introductory physics classes so that you can be able to understand the issues surrounding global warming, the SKILL that you acquire in thinking through a problem in classical mechanics is very much relevant in your effort to decipher the wide range of information that is contained in global warming.

But why can't we simply cut to the chase and just teach the kids about global warming, stem-cells, energy crisis, etc.. etc? Because there are an infinite number of scientific issues that can pop up! We simply can't cover ALL of these issues or even anticipate what's to come in the future. Nanotechnology is something that is fast emerging as something that could create quite a social issue soon. And who knows, there are those that could easily pop up anytime soon. Teaching specific subject matter rather than the skills that are subject independent is like giving a hunger person some fish, rather than teach that person how to fish. You can satisfy the immediate needs, but next time the same type problem crops up, you have to continue to provide more, rather than just give that person the skill to be able to solve it on his/her own.

I'm not saying covering these areas in a general science course is useless. They are not. However, they should be covered as ILLUSTRATIONS of the application of the analytical skills they learned in science classes. When someone mention "stem cell", a scientist wanting to know about it will first ask "OK, what is a stem cell? How is it defined? What does it do, and what are the properties?" Then the scientist will ask "OK, what are the social/cultural/moral issues? What are the points from each side? Do they make any valid ideas that are consistent with what stem cell is defined as? Are their conclusions unique, or can there be more than one conclusions based on the same set of data and understanding?" These are ALL the same type of questions a scientist asks in his/her own line of work, and the same skill applies when he/she tries to understand the same thing. I don't see any other way to evaluate something to be valid. This will allow someone to clearly know the boundary between something that is based on solid, physical evidence, versus something that has gone beyond that into the realm of moral decisions and social opinions.

The problem right now, as I see it, is that there isn't a conscious effort to tell these students that this is one of the main purpose of them enrolling in such science courses. Many, if not most, of the instructors are simply teaching the content, with little emphasis, even if they are aware of it, of the analytical skills that are being "accidentally taught" through such classes. So these students are encountering a very valuable skill without knowing it, and they lose it afterwards because it isn't something that was visible to them as being important. It is why, I think, that we can start with the revamping of the intro physics labs, because this is where science is right in front of their face, and where they see how we accept or understand something. Only through a conscious and deliberate effort of emphasizing such analytical skills can we generate a general population that can do their own self-evaluation of the information that they are being bombarded with.

Zz.

Advancing Research in Science and Engineering

A new report out of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences paints a discouraging picture for young researchers in light of funding situation here in the US. The white paper, titled "Advancing Research in Science and Engineering", boils down to two issues: "the need to foster early-career scientists and to encourage high-risk research", both of which are severely affected by the constant budget and funding problems.

The complete detail and the full report can be found here.

Zz.

Where Mathematics And Astrophysics Meet

This is a terrific article that, as the article mentioned, illustrates Wigner's proposition of the "unreasonable effectives of mathematics in the natural sciences". It describes an example on where research work in a fundamental theorem of algebra actually has a practical solution for a problem in astrophysics.

In their article "From the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra to Astrophysics: A `Harmonious' Path", which appears in the Notices of the AMS, mathematicians Dmitry Khavinson (University of South Florida) and Genevra Neumann (University of Northern Iowa) describe the mathematical work that surprisingly led them to questions in astrophysics.

Zz.

DOE Submits Yucca Mountain License Application

The Dept. of Energy submits a license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the federal nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

I will clearly qualify myself as someone who support nuclear power, be it in the form of fission reactors that we currently have, or development/research of fusion reactors (though not necessarily in the current trend). However, the central issue is still the waste generated by nuclear power plants, especially those in the US that are prohibited by law to be reprocessed, unlike those done in Europe and Japan. So baring a change in policy, having a safe place to store these nuclear waste is of utmost importance if support for that energy source is needed. That's why, after a lengthy study, the DOE is now able to apply to make the Yucca Mountain a repository site.

We'll see how it goes...

Zz.

Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel

It was reported earlier that the particle physics in the US is getting some "lifeline", based on the initial report to be submitted to the Dept. of Energy. The panel, known as P5, has now submitted its final report to the DOE.

Various reports on this seems to indicate a reason for optimism, even when the panel gave a lukewarm support for the ILC. Unless there's some serious infusion of cash, I can't see how anyone can be optimistic about the situation, especially when another continuing resolution is almost a certainty for the 2008 Fiscal Year, where science in the US will be saddled with continuing the most devastating budget in recent memory.

Zz.

A BCS-Like Gap for the New Iron-Arsenic Superconductor

This ought to throw a large wrench into any similarities between the copper-oxide superconductors and the newly-found iron-arsenic superconductors. A new measurement of the superconducting gap of the latter found that they behave very much like that predicted by the conventional, good-old BCS theory[1]. This means that, even though the crystal structure has similarities with the copper-oxide superconductor (and the notion that maybe the same theory might be applicable as well), the behavior so far rules out many of the exotic theories that have been set up for the copper-oxide superconductors. The authors argue that in light of this, new theories may be needed to describe the iron-arsenic superconductors.

Fasten your seatbelts, folks. It's going to be a long and bumpy ride here as more experimental data pour in.

Zz.

[1] T.Y. Chen et al., Nature v.453, p.761 (2008).

The Milky Way Gets a Facelift

Or rather, our understanding of the Milky Way gets a facelift!

This was reported in today's Science's daily news update.

Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that the Milky Way is missing two of the four spiral arms it was thought to have. The findings should force a significant rethinking about how the Milky Way evolved and how its stars formed.

Horrors! We live in a "deformed" galaxy? :)

Zz.

Dark, Perhaps Forever?

The New York Times has a lengthy piece on the current effort in the study of Dark Energy.

A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

But what I just don't quite understand is this kind of reaction:

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

Forget about the fact that I don't quite believe that such a thing is possible (i.e. "account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath") due to my view that the "TOE" is a fallacy. But why are they giving up so quickly? I mean, the discovery of dark energy has only been about 10 years old! This is a blink of an eye! Condensed matter physicists had dealt with the mysteries of high-Tc superconductors for 20 years already, and you don't hear them giving up! And they have more data and more discoveries to content with.

If the Dark Energy Survey really gets off the ground, there's a good chance that more evidence on the nature of dark energy will be revealed. Aren't people just salivating for that kind of information? I don't know what is there to be discouraged about. If I were in this field, I'd say that this might be some of the most exciting time to be alive!

Zz.

Accelerators And Dinosaurs

This is an old article in Physics Today written by Michael Turner, but it is still a good piece to read if you are not familiar with particle accelerator physics and are still confusing particle accelerator with high energy physics. I've written about this topic (and the popular misconception) before, but here, Turner has written this better than I could.

I remind my readers that only a handful of the more than 15 000 accelerators in operation around the world are used in particle-physics research. This fact would not surprise Ernest O. Lawrence, who saw an importance far beyond physics research. He and his brother John, a physician, pioneered the medical applications of accelerators at Berkeley. Today, one-third of all accelerators are involved in medical applications, such as cancer therapy, imaging, and the production of short-lived isotopes. The other two-thirds are used for industrial applications ranging from micro-machining to food sterilization and for national security applications, which include x-ray inspection of cargo containers and nuclear stockpile stewardship.

This data clearly show why the field of accelerator physics transcends beyond just what they are normally perceived as, which is particle-physics/colliders. This is a good article to read if you're bored.

:)

Zz.

Boffo Box Office for Science Festival

All early reports seem to indicate that the first ever World Science Festival is a resounding success. They have either sold out or virtually sold out almost all of their events.

“Despite the fact that we are programmed against ourselves,” he says, “with almost seven or eight of our events happening at the same time in some instances, we have sold more than 90 percent of our seats and may in fact sell out the entire event.”

But what I found amusing was the dimwit who wrote the first comment to that news article. He/she seems to have the impression that the whole point of having a science festival is to encourage kids to have a career in science! If that's the case, we should bar adults from going to such events, since they definitely are too late to change careers! Yes, stop that 60-year old grandpa from attending Alan Alda's "QED"!

I sometime think that the gene pool needs some chlorine.....

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.

US Particle Physics Spared the Axe?

Well, maybe for now.

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) that advises the Dept. of Energy, met this past week to make recommendations on future directions of high energy physics funding and projects in the US. This New Scientist article seems to be painting a "rosier" picture than it really is.

You can read the preliminary report of the P5 meeting here.

There's nothing here that indicates that the politicians (and the President, now and the one to be installed in 2009) pays any attention to such report. After all, they've been known to ignore previous recommendations.

And as a follow-up to the post from yesterday regarding the anonymous donor that gave $5 to help Fermilab, Wired has this dead-on article about the sad state of American particle physics funding.

Say what you will about the relative importance of particle physics in everyday life, but how is it that a government spending $16.8 $2.9 trillion a year can't scrounge up enough change in the cushions to properly fund its premiere particle physics lab?

In the scheme of this country, we're not talking huge amounts of money here. The Federal government's total budget for the lab is $320 million. That's as much as we spend on, say, two-and-a-half F-22 Raptors, and we've managed to build over a hundred of those. Even just the interest on our nation's collective credit card was more than 1,000 times the Fermilab's budget.

... which is essentially what I had said earlier. People have somehow lost perspective for the scale of things.

Zz.

Private Donor Gives Fermilab $5 Million

This is all over the Web already, but what the hey...

An anonymous donor gave $5 million to U. of Chicago to help with the financial debacle at Fermilab. This is reminiscent of the donation to RHIC a while ago to save it from being shut down temporarily due to similar budget constraints, although it wasn't from an anonymous donor.

The savings from the furlough allowed lab officials to keep the lab's particle smasher, the Tevatron Collider, running all out in its quest to spot the famed Higgs boson, the missing link in physicists' theory of the known fundamental bits of matter. Fermilab researchers hope to discover the Higgs before it's snagged by the more powerful Large Hadron Collider, which should turn on this summer at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. The donation, which will be funneled through the University of Chicago, will enable the lab to stop the furlough after two of four planned rounds of leave. The lab was able to scrape up another $1 million, in part because about 50 employees have already jumped ship, Oddone says.

This is the second time in recent years that philanthropists have bailed out a beleaguered DOE lab. In 2006, Congress gave Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, too little money to run its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which is used to study a type of nuclear physics. James Simons, a theoretical physicist and billionaire hedge-fund guru then donated $13 million to Brookhaven to run the machine.

It paints a very sad picture of science funding in the US. $5 million is PUNY in the scale of funding sizes. Many corporations burn that much in just 1-day. And we haven't gotten into what minuscule percentage that is out of the military spending. Yet, it saved the lab from the debilitating furloughs that, from all anecdotal accounts, have crippled the Fermilab.

But still, this is only a temporary band-aid on a bigger disease.

Although the donation ends the furlough, it does not solve Fermilab's problems. "The grain of salt is that it really does nothing to change the uncertainty with regard to the future," says Brendan Casey, a Fermilab particle physicist. "So there's some relief, but the underlying tension is still there." A DOE advisory panel will meet tomorrow and Friday to discuss the future of the lab and particle physics in the United States.

Both the US public and the politicians need to decide if they wish to continue supporting particle physics in the US. Scientists would rather hear that they do not, rather than giving mixed, wishy-washy signal. At the very least, the former will allow many to simply pull up roots and move on, knowing that a political decision was made to abandon an important field of physics. Years from now, at least, we know who to blame for such a debacle and let history judge the foolish mistake these people made.

Zz.

Wi-Fi Signals Causing Health Issues?

New reports are surfacing of certain people who are "electro-sensitive" and being affected by Wi-Fi signals, causing headaches and chest pains.

You'll understand if I read something like this with a large degree of skepticism. This is not new. I've reported this earlier with people who claim almost the same symptoms with cell-phone signals. Look at how credible those claims are.

I'm not saying these people didn't experience all this, and I'm not saying we shouldn't look into it. But considering the track record of such claims in the past (including claims about transmission power lines), we shouldn't enact bans and legislation just YET until there's clear evidence of a cause-and-effect. And let me tell ya, we are a LONG way off from that at this point.

Zz.

João Magueijo’s Big Bang

I don't normally highlight either fringe science or something that is still so highly controversial that it requires more "gestation" period. But since this thing is going to be on TV tonight, I might as well point it out. The Science channel will be airing a documentary presenting the highly controversial view of cosmology from the point of view of cosmologist João Magueijo. He, if you have followed this field closely, is a proponent of the idea that the intrinsic speed of light has been varying over time since the beginning of our universe. I'm guessing that he is justifying this view based on the still-controversial observation that the fine structure constant may have varied over time (see here and here).

Still, this NY Times review of the documentary isn't that flattering.

Not everyone will be charmed, however, by the extent to which he and his producers apparently thought it was necessary to dumb down and dress up the science in question. Everything is presented in classroom metaphors, and not very vivid ones: shots of static on a television screen represent cosmic radiation; a stretchy sweater with a lot of extra buttons stands in for the expanding universe. An inordinate amount of screen time is also devoted to shots of the dreamy Dr. Magueijo staring at models of the solar system or lying on a deck chair and gazing at the sky.

It doesn’t help when he brings his own bad-boy biography into the picture (a habit that began with his 2003 book, “Faster Than the Speed of Light”). We’re treated to the story of how he had his Einstein-was-wrong-about-the-speed-of-light breakthrough while fighting a hangover, and to the sight of him chuckling while watching what appear to be fake home movies, with an actor playing the young João.

Unfortunately, I have other commitments tonight that I won't be able to watch this show, and I didn't set anything to record it. If you did catch it, can you post something here and let me know what you think of it?

The article did get one thing rather accurate, though. I've seen his pictures several times already before this (haven't met him in person yet), and I might even go out on a limb and say that he is one of the most good-looking physicist that I've ever seen. :) I'm guessing that the camera loves him, and in many circles, that's good enough for a TV show.

Zz.

World Science Festival Debuts Tomorrow

If you are lucky enough to be in the New York city area, you can participate in the World Science Festival which will start tomorrow in Manhattan.

The festival website has more info and programs for this event.

Behind a Scientific Success, a Failed Texas Experiment

As the dawn of the LHC is upon us and the excitement growing by the day, a relic of what could have been the most powerful particle collider ever built sat decaying and gathering dusts in Texas. This article looks back at the debacle that was the Superconducting Supercollider what was supposed to be built just outside of Dallas.

The Tevatron ring measures about 4 miles in circumference. The SSC ring was to have been 54 miles in circumference, producing collisions 20 times more intense than the Tevatron.

The new European accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, will not be as powerful as the mighty SSC would have been. The Large Hadron Collider's ring, about 17 miles in circumference, should be capable of producing collisions about one-third as powerful.

The collapse of the SSC is also an example on how politics got into the way of a science project, especially in how Fermilab lost the opportunity to build it there. It also shows very clearly for the first time that physicists are not united behind such huge and horribly expensive machine. Phil Anderson, for example, testified on why he was opposed to such a facility.

The SSC would have made the LHC moot. However, the SSC collapse has also foreign partnerships with the US more weary about the US commitment to such endeavor. The recent budget cutbacks on the ILC and ITER only reinforced such point of view.

Zz.

Brookhaven's Summer Sundays

I have mentioned this whenever they have their yearly open Summer Sundays. If you are anywhere near Long Island, NY, you really shouldn't miss the opportunity to visit Brookhaven National Laboratory during one of their Summer Sundays. You get to visit not only the lab in general, but also get to tour the facility that's open for visitors for that day. Typically, the days highlighting the NSLS and RHIC are two of the more popular and tend to have the largest number of visitors, and understandably so.

This is one of the few opportunities one gets to tour a world class science facility and gets to ask questions to scientists working there.

Speaking of Brookhaven, it seems that people are still publishing erroneous rumors and accusation towards the lab that are amazingly wrong (and presumably getting away with it). The lab wisely decided to address the inaccuracies published in a book titled "SWelcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town", and included references to the affect of the lab on that two and the surrounding area on Long Island. It is amazing that someone would publish a book and yet, hardly do any homework on what they are writing on. Unfortunately, many of the book's readers would probably never see these counter points against the book and so, these inaccuracies (lies?) will be perpetuated. This is usually the "source" of information for the "public" and these accusations are taken as gospel by many.

Zz.

US National Compact Stellarator Experiment Cancelled

I suppose this is neither inevitable nor surprising. The National Compact Stellerator at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has been shut down, mainly due to cost overruns and delays.

"In late 2006, it became clear that NCSX construction project would not be able to meet its approved baseline total project cost of $102M or its completion date of July 2009," said Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach in a statement. Since then the DOE, Princeton University, and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have been reviewing their options for the project and PPPL. They concluded that "the budget increases, schedule delays and continuing uncertainties of the NCSX construction project necessitate its closure," said Orbach. The new proposed cost for NCSX was $170 million with an August 2013 start date, which would have put research at PPPL in peril said an April 2008 Office of Science report.

Zz.

Outsider Science

Hey, if you're an amateur scientist/physicist and think you have some earth-shattering theory that you want to share, you may want to read this article from Symmetry before you hound other physicists with it.

I have been the recipient of several of these unsolicited e-mail and "manuscripts", and let me tell you that other than providing a good few minutes of laughter, I some time feel rather sorry for these people because, most often, the mistakes or inconsistencies were quite obvious. This despite the fact that many of these "theories" are often rather difficult to decipher because they are written in non-standard terminology. The words being used are familiar, but the context they are used in are rather odd. Certainly, the advice given in that article is very pertinent here:

To merit their attention, professionals say, an outsider would have to show that he’s done his homework. Serious contenders have to understand the language of physics and get their math right. Most importantly, any new theory must agree with past experiments.

A theory could predict that hula hoops will come bouncing out of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, as long as it accounts for all the experimental data up to that point, Rizzo says. Too often, amateurs ignore that basic constraint.

I would say that the amateurs "ignore" that constraint because they tend to not be aware of all the experimental data, or are ignorant of the body of knowledge in that field of study. This is another example of what I categorize as "imagination without knowledge is ignorance waiting to happen". There's no substitute for doing one's homework, and claiming something that contradicts or inconsistent with existing data or observation without realizing such data exist reflects one's ignorance. No professional scientist wants to be shown to be in ignorance of the state of knowledge of the field he/she is in, but this is what many "amateur physicists" continue to exhibit without shame.

Zz.

Quantum All The Way

This is from a few weeks ago, but the issue is so important and interesting, I should still mention it on here. This was also the article I was reading on the plane while I was on my most-recent vacation. It was fascinating enough that it didn't put me to sleep and entertained me for several minutes.

This article was written by Phillip Ball in May 1st 2008 issue of Nature. I strongly suggest that, if you haven't read it and have access to it, that you take some time reading it. It deals with the issue of the "transition" or boundary or crossover or whatever between classical and quantum regimes.

To understand what the quantum–classical transition really means, consider that our familiar, classical world is an ‘either/or’ kind of place. A compass needle, say, can’t point both north and south at the same time. The quantum world, by contrast, is ‘both/and’: a magnetic atom, say, has no trouble at all pointing both directions at once. The same is true for other properties such as energy, location or speed; generally speaking, they can take on a range of values simultaneously, so that all you can say is that this value has that probability. When that is the case, physicists say that a quantum object is in a ‘superposition’
of states.

Thus, one of the key questions in understanding the quantum–classical transition is what happens to the superpositions as you go up that atoms-to-apples scale? Exactly when and how does ‘both/and’ become ‘either/or’?

Of course, there is a very good coverage of the leading candidate that tries to connect between the classical-quantum transition - decoherence. One of the important point of the article is the idea that it isn't the SIZE of the object that is important, but rather the time scale for when decoherence sets in.

Decoherence also predicts that the quantum–classical transition isn’t really a matter of size, but of time. The stronger a quantum object’s interactions are with its surroundings, the faster decoherence kicks in. So larger objects, which generally have more ways of interacting, decohere almost instantaneously, transforming their quantum character into classical behaviour just as quickly. For example, if a large molecule could be prepared in a superposition of two positions just 10 ångstroms apart, it would decohere because of collisions with the surrounding air molecules in about 10−17 seconds. Decoherence is unavoidable to some degree. Even in a perfect vacuum, particles will decohere through interactions with photons in the omnipresent cosmic microwave background.

So that's why we can still get interference pattern when particles as large as buckyballs are used, or that we can still see superposition effects in 10^11 particles, as in the SQUID experiments from Delft/Stony Brook.

The article also pointed out the alternative idea from Penrose that the coupling of the system to gravity (or gravitons to be exact) might be responsible for the emergence of our classical observation. I mentioned this earlier in another blog entry, including the upcoming tests being proposed Dirk Bouwmeester.

A great article, even if only for the wealth of the references given. A highly-recommended reading.

Zz.

PRST-AB Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary

The Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams journal celebrates its 10th Anniversary on May 14th, 2008. Here is the announcement from the Physical Review

On 14 May 2008, Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams is celebrating its 10th anniversary. PRST-AB was founded by Robert Siemann and the APS in 1998 to provide the accelerator community with its own journal, covering all aspects of accelerators from fundamental physics to technology. PRST-AB has also been an innovator in scientific publishing, with numerous advanced and novel features: It is an all-electronic journal, features conference or special editions, exhibits aspects of a virtual journal, and has pioneered open-access publication. PRST-AB is offered at no cost to both authors and readers, through the generous support of its sponsors.

Publications in PRST-AB have been growing steadily from initially 24 articles in 1998 to 130–140 articles published per year in 2006/7. In parallel, the number of sponsors has increased substantially from 8 original ones to presently 19, in North America and Europe. The wide sponsorship is recognition of 1) PRST-AB as the premier journal of accelerator physics and technology, and 2) the contributions PRST-AB is making to the international accelerator community.

To celebrate its 10-year milestone, PRST-AB is publishing a number of short essays on general topics of accelerator physics, written by well-known experts in the field. The anniversary essay series starts in May and will be continued throughout the remainder of this year.

Frank Zimmermann
Editor

Note that you can access articles from PRST-AB free of charge. With the announced publication of short essays on the general topics of accelerator physics, you might want to check out this journal during the remainder of the year for these articles. They might provide useful information and overview of the field if you're not familiar with the area of accelerator physics.

Zz.

A Historical Derivation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relation is Flawed

This is a rather interesting paper published in the current issue of AJP[1]. It narrates the historical account of the rigorous derivation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and claims that some of the derivation used after Heisenberg's presentation of it may have been flawed.

However, what caught my eye was the single author of this paper. It is John. H. Marburger III. When I checked his affiliation, I was correct. This is THE John Marburger who is currently the embattled "Science Adviser" to President's George W. Bush.

Immediately, 2 things came to my mind. First, at least he still gets to continue to explore scholarly topics, even in the historical sense, while he holds this position. But secondly, he must be bored in his current job to actually have some time to do such in-depth research. :) That last comment, of course, is purely speculative on my part.

Zz.

[1] J.H. Marburger III, Am. J. Phys. v.76, p.585 (2008).

At Ten, Dark Energy "Most Profound Problem" in Physics

I'm sure many people would argue with the "most profound problem" in physics tag here. But don't kill me, that's the title used in a rather good overview published by National Geographic of dark energy as it approaches its 10th year since discovery.

I've already mentioned other reviews and historical perspective on dark energy, which you may want to read here and here to supplement this article.

Zz.

Willis E. Lamb Jr., Died at Age of 94

Anyone who has studied quantum mechanics would have come across his name and the "Lamb shift" named after him. Willis Lamb died this past week at the age of 94.

A professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, Dr. Lamb received a 1955 Nobel Prize in physics for his experimental work on the fine structure of the hydrogen atom and for the discovery of what came to be called "the Lamb shift," a tiny deviation in the energy of an electron orbiting a hydrogen atom's nucleus. The discovery had enormous implications for the quantum theory of matter.

Zz.

Iron-Based High-Tc Superconductors - Follow-up

Actually, this is more of an in-depth review of what we know so far about this iron-based superconductors. Physics Today has quite a good article covering what has now become a rather "hot" material in condensed matter physics. It definitely appears that the spin-density wave has a major role in this family of material.

Zz.

Arsenic Poison Didn't Kill Napoleon

Another myth bites the dust.

A new study by physicists at INFN in Milano-Bicocca and Pavia, Italy, has shown that there's no difference in the arsenic level in Napoleon's hair during his last days when compared to when he was a child. This means that he wasn't deliberately poisoned by arsenic during his last days. Instead, it was more likely that it was due to a lifetime's worth of exposure to arsenic.

Zz.

On Vacation

Hello Folks,

I'm on an extended vacation right now till May 18th. So there will be little to no updates at all in this blog till I get back.

Cheers!

Zz.

Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks

I just want to say that I had a lot of fun reading this preprint by Joseph Kapusta. It is entertaining, insightful, and has a ton of information for both scientists and non-scientists alike. It reinforces the point that I've been trying to make, which is the constant miscommunication between scientists and non-scientists. The blame goes on both sides - scientists for not considering how what they say is being interpreted by the public, and the public for not self-educating themselves into trying to understand not just the science, but the vocabulary that science uses. Not being aware that there are discontinuity in the communications and understanding of the two parties is the first significant problem. This is also a very good opportunity to again highlights the wonderful essay written by Helen Quinn that I've mentioned a while back. Everyone should read it!

If you have some time, I'd recommend reading this article by Kapusta, even for just for its "storytelling" aspect.

Zz.

A Memristor?

Quick, before you read this, what do you think is a "memristor"?

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Give up? It's a resistor with a "memory"!! I didn't know that either!

The existence of the memristor, short for 'memory resistor', was first suggested in 1971, but only now have researchers succeeded in creating a real, working example. They hope that the new components could revolutionize computing, promising an end to frustrating waits for your computer to boot up.

"A memristor is essentially a resistor with memory," explains Stan Williams of HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, who reports the memristor's creation in this week's Nature. "The actual resistance of the memristor changes depending on the amount of voltage and the time for which that voltage has been applied to the device."

The reference to the paper is:

D.B. Strukov et al., Nature 453, 80–83 (2008).

Fascinating!

Zz.

Shaken But Not Stirred

Although it isn't designed to detect earthquakes, many synchrotron facilities around the world, especially the latest generation facilities, can actually detect when an earthquake is occuring, some time halfway around the world. The recent earthquake in Southern Illinois that occured a couple of weeks ago was certainly felt in various parts of Chicago, and it was certainly detected by the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne.

The magnitude 5.2 earthquake that shook southern Illinois was “detected” by the beam position monitors that keep the electron beam on course in the APS particle accelerator (see the accompanying figure), but the machine continued to orbit electrons at nearly the speed of light with no noticeable adverse effects. Other monitors (x-ray beam position monitors) assured that x-ray beams illuminated experiment samples as small as molecules.

There are of course many steps in place to either make sure the beam continues to be stable, or in the worst scenario, that it gets dumped safely if it goes too far off course. The same thing is in place in many other facilities around the world, especially the LCLS being constructed at SLAC in the earthquake-prone California, which has an even more stringent beam operating parameters to produce its FEL.

I was told by someone working at the APS that they even detected the huge earthquake in the Indian Ocean from a few years ago that caused the massive and deadly tsunami. So this is one very sensitive machine with very precise diagnostics ability.

Zz.

Revamping Intro Physics Laboratory - Part 6

{{Note: If you wish to follow what has transpired so far in this series, here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3-Follow-up, Part 4, and Part 5}

This may be a bit misleading because it is not strictly a "laboratory exercise". In fact, I think it might be more suitable to be presented during class. Still, it involves the students doing something, so that fits in with the spirit of a laboratory.

This exercise has 2 parts to it. The first is in class where the students are asked to think about a situation, and write down what they think should occur. Then, they get to go out and test it themselves and observe the situation. They then come back and write down what they observe, and compare it to what they wrote earlier of what they THINK should occur. Finally, they get to explain their observations, especially if what they wrote earlier is different than what actually occurred.

So what is the exercise? Here goes...

You are in a stationary vehicle (a train, bus, or a large vehicle). You have a helium balloon attached at the end of a length of string, so the balloon floats freely (without being confined or rubbing against other objects), while you hold the other end of the string. The vehicle then accelerates forward. What happens to the balloon?

The whole point here is to see the effect of the acceleration in a vehicle (on earth) on an object that is less dense than air. You first give this in a class (or a lab) towards the end of the session, and then ask the students to write down what they think they will observe. They don't have to give you any reason, just what they expect to happen.

Then, give them some way to get a helium balloon. This shouldn't be too expensive, should it? Maybe they can get on a train to go downtown, let's say, with a group of their friends. That would be a great way to observe the balloon. Advice them that maybe it would be a good idea to write down there and then some notes on what they observe, and any relevant circumstances surrounding the observation (i.e. was the train packed? Did the balloon float freely? Were the windows open? Was the air conditioning blasting right at them? etc.) Then when they come back, they need to write down exactly what they observed, and compare that to what they wrote earlier before they did the "experiment".

I would then suggest that everyone discussion what they have done. Who predicted an observation that is consistent with what they actually observed? Who didn't see what they thought would happen? Why?

Now, it would be OK to tell the students before they did this that they need to make sure that there are no significant moving air, because that would ruin any effects of the acceleration. But I'm even tempted not to say that. This is because if there are students who did not consider this effect, then there could easily be a discussion on the nature of the 'experiment', and why the result that these students get doesn't quite tell you the effects of the acceleration. The "observation" isn't valid as far as finding the effect of the acceleration in a vehicle on the balloon, because other external factors have intruded into the observation. If these students acknowledged this extra factor, then they have been observant, and understands the non-validity of their observation. If the students did not realize this, then hopefully, other students will point it out during the discussion.

I'm hoping that during the discussion session is where the students start "argue" about the validity of each other's observation, such as the possibility that the wind or other factors might affect some other's observations. I'm also hoping that they might try to come up with some physics on what exactly is the most valid observation for a balloon in an accelerating vehicle that isn't affected by any other external factors. As the instructors, I would suggest you simply stay out of the way, and see how the students are thinking and reasoning their way through this. You can certainly offer some guidance, but the "thinking process" may take awhile, especially if there are many students who observe things differently from each other. They need to weed out which observation is "faulty" as far as answering the question at hand. Once they figured out the valid observation, then they need to figure out why it happened that way. It is the students that need to make their own self-discovery.

BTW, the valid observation in this case is that the balloon will tilt FORWARD, in the direction of the motion of the vehicle. This is, at first, counter-intuitive, because when a vehicle accelerates, objects tend to get pushed back in the opposite direction of motion. So the first inclination is to expect the balloon to tilt backwards. However, a floating balloon is less dense than the air surrounding it. So when the vehicle accelerates, the air surrounding the balloon gets pushed to the back of the vehicle more than the balloon, and thus displacing the balloon forward.

Strangely enough, it observation shouldn't be THAT unusual, because there's an identical situation to this that we are quite familiar with. If we apply Einstein's equivalence of gravity to acceleration, then technically, we are accelerating "upwards" at 9.8 m/s^2. Now try letting go of a helium balloon. It floats UP, in the direction of our "motion". It's the same effect we see in the accelerating vehicle. Yet, I'm sure, for many people, the observation of the balloon tilting forward is non-intuitive. If you are lucky enough to have students who actually argue using this point, then you have one heck of a student! I consider the ability to see the similarities of something "new" with something that they are familiar with as a major accomplishment. It is how we can describe many things that appear to be "different", yet share almost the same type of description or phenomena. I would suggest that if no students realize this, that you bring it up at the end of the discussion.

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.

Symposium Focuses on Energy Challenges

If you're in Chicago or near the Northwestern University campus, this might be something interesting to attend.

Steve Chu, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, will deliver the keynote address at the Northwestern-Argonne Energy Symposium on Friday at Northwestern University.

The symposium, themed "Energy: The Challenge for the 21st Century," is free and open to the public. The program is from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Ryan Family Auditorium in the Technological Institute, 2145 Sheridan Rd., Evanston.

With the cost of gasoline here in the US rapidly approaching an average of $4 per gallon, this has become certainly a very hot topic.

Zz.

Just Because You Say It Is Based On Quantum Physics, Doesn't Make It So

So many pseudoscience are so damn quick to attach themselves to "quantum physics", as if they know what quantum physics is. I've already mentioned several instances of the bastardization of quantum mechanics by a few people who are using it to validate whatever it is that they are claiming. Well, count this one as one of them. It is the "ancient medical treatment" called Shirodhara.

I honestly don't care at all what people wish to do with their bodies. However, when they tried to justified it by saying some nonsense to the effect that it is verified by some aspects from physics, then that gets my goat.

Ayurveda, the primary health system in India, and western biomedicine, the primary system in North America, differ in their view of the body. "It needs to be emphasized that ayurveda is very much a science," Dr. Gupta stresses. "The foundation of ayurveda is based on quantum physics instead of molecules, cells and gross structure.

What the hell does that mean? And why is "molecules" different from quantum physics?

First of all, there's some inconsistencies here. This practice has been going on for "5,000 years". If it is true, how can it be "based on quantum physics", when quantum physics was only formulated in the early 20th century? Did someone from 5,000 years ago time-traveled to the time or Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. and got the knowledge about quantum physics and then got back to 5,000 years ago to form the Ayurveda medical treatment? Sure, I'll buy that!

OK, so maybe it isn't that. Does that mean that they realize that, like Chemistry, which came way before quantum physics, that what they are using can actually be "explained" by quantum physics? Really? Such as what? In Chemistry, many aspects of what is measured (as in QUANTITIVE MEASUREMENT), can be explained in terms of the formulation of quantum physics. The energy state of the hydrogen atom, the nature and strength of chemical bonds, the behavior of molecules, etc. In other words, a lot of things that were measured can be quantitatively derived from quantum mechanics.

Now I would bet you no such comparison has ever been made with this Ayurveda. Oh sure, they might bastardize various aspects of the superficial idea of "entanglement" (this seems to be a popular effect to be bastardized - refer to "The Secret"), but this is FAR from claiming that you have a foundation based on quantum physics.

What these crackpots do not realize is that to be able to say that something is based on quantum physics, one must DERIVE the effect for THAT PARTICULAR SYSTEM, using quantum physics. Start with the Hamiltonian, and use whatever means one has to drive both the QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE result that agrees with whatever it is one is trying to show an agreement of. One simply cannot use "superficial induction". Just because the phenomenon of entanglement has been shown to work in 2 photons does NOT mean that such phenomenon is valid for 2 apples! It isn't! But that is why these crackpots are doing.

I really don't know how the Edmonton Journal could have seriously published this with a straight face.

Zz.

The US Army Issues Polygraph To Soldiers In Afganistan and Iraq

Holy cow!

I didn't know about this until it was brought up by Bob Park in this week's column of What's New. So the US army thinks that they could improve security by using portable polygraphs.

The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We're not promising perfection — we've been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it's properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”

This is astounding, considering that the NAS study has concluded that such devices are useless. They must be desperate enough to make use of voodoo science (a nod to Bob Park) to ensure safety over there. I think it would have been cheaper to simply hire a psychic, or train an army personnel in the art of reading tarot card.

As Bob Park said, these portable devices should work as well as the non-portable versions.

Zz.

Leaps of Faith

Here's someone who understands the importance of basic, theoretical physics research - Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion (i.e. make of the Blackberry).

That's one reason why, in 1999, Lazaridis donated $100 million of his nascent fortune to seed the institute. Another, he says, is "because people take theoretical physics for granted." No kidding. This world of equations and chalk dust is about as far away as you can get from the world of commerce. Why anyone would hand over such a massive amount of money—at the time, close to one-fifth of Lazaridis's net worth—to a collection of wild-haired math freaks is lost on most of the folks on Bay Street. Sure, Lazaridis knows that quarterly earnings are important. (In its most recent quarter, RIM posted a higher-than-expected profit of $412.5 million and shipped 2.2 million new BlackBerrys, the first time in the company's history that it broke through the two-million-mark in a quarter.) But he also knows that without the kind of work being done at Perimeter, chances are slim that someone will develop another world-beating technology like RIM's 60 or 80 years down the line.

Many of the CEO's of major technological and electronics companies are aware of this. The question is, do the general public and the politicians know this?

Zz.

Physics In Action at Theme Parks

Summer is almost here (at least here as in the northern hemisphere). With that, many theme parks are gearing for their busiest time of the year. Taking advantage of this are several schools and programs that try to marry the fun of theme park rides with physics lessons.

There are two recent examples to this. The first one is the Physics Day for area students at the Six Flags theme park in Largo.

Barnabas Adekanye, Irving Delco, Frailen Ramirez, Ludwin Romero and Johnny Wilks, all sophomores at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville who study engineering, were somewhere in the middle. They had brought a 28-page workbook of problems to solve. It was complicated stuff with a lot of formulas.

"Compare the change in potential energy to the gain in kinetic energy," went one question about the Mind Eraser. "Within experimental error, was energy conserved? Explain your answer."

Johnny, 15, had an easier explanation for what they were learning: "Like how the gravity and force relates with the loops and stuff."

The second example is a trip to Ceder Point by students from Windsor, Canada. I think it is a valid concern to look at it closely and see if the students are learning something, rather than simply using it as an excuse for a trip to a theme park. There has to be a conscious program to clearly demonstrate the physics principle to the students, and that the students actually got something. I think most of these programs try do that.

Zz.

Death For Phonons In High-Tc Superconductors?

This is a highly interesting and certainly provocative result.

Remember I posted a while back on the "kink" observed in the angle-resolved photoemission spectra (ARPES) on high-Tc superconductors? There have been a continuing debate since the kink was observed on the origin of this observation. Two leading candidates are the coupling of the charge carrier to a spin fluctuation mode, and a coupling to the phonons.

Now two separate theoretical papers have calculated the coupling to the phonon modes and have arrived at the conclusion that such coupling cannot account for the strength of the kink observed in ARPES spectra.

In recent years, despite mounting experimental evidence against it, some physicists have clung on to this interpretation. But now teams from Germany and the US have performed calculations to suggest that lattice vibrations in cuprates can at best account for just a small fraction of the materials’ superconducting behaviour.
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Manske’s team found that the theoretical energy–momentum relationship produced by these calculations did contain a kink — but about a three to five times smaller than the 2001 observations (Phys. Rev. Lett. 100 137001). This is bad news for physicists who have been hoping phonons can account for all of the behaviour of high-temperature superconductors. “It is embarrassing for people to admit they have worked on something for 20 years if it is not true,” jokes Manske.

Meanwhile, Steven Louie and colleagues at the Univerisity of California in Berkeley have come to a similar conclusion with the cuprate LaSrCuO4. From their calculations, the phonon contribution is almost an order of magnitude too small for the observed kink (Nature 452 975).

This could be rather devastating to the phonon picture. If this is true, the two new results still cannot account for the origin of superconductivity, but at least they have eliminated a red herring. Still, all this could be moot if an earlier report is true about the absence of any kind of "glue" in the mechanism for high-Tc superconductors.

So stay tune. The story is by no means over, and the fat lady hasn't even warmed her vocal cords yet.

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.

Bubble Fusion Fiasco Just Won't Go Away

Reported in the new edition of Nature (23 April 2008), it appears that Purdue University has sent its final report to the Office of Naval Research that funded Taleyarkhan's work on the so-called bubble fusion that is being questioined. But that's not it. He himself plans to contact the ONR directly to dispute the report (which implies that the report isn't favorable towards him). And, get this, he also plans on suing certain people!

The engineer is also pursuing a defamation lawsuit, filed last month in Tippecanoe County in Indiana against scientists who questioned his claims of bubble fusion. The defendants include Purdue faculty members named in Nature articles, which helped trigger an institutional review. “The complaint filed is to clear up my reputation,” Taleyarkhan says.

Peachy!

Zz.

Can Buckyballs Make Flash Memory More Efficient?

The flash memory that is now very common in many devices may get a big boost if this report is correct. It seems that using buckyballs (C60 fullerenes) could operate at a lower voltage (link may be accessible only for a limited time for non subscribers) and thus, make the flash memory devices more efficient.

“We’re the first ones trying to borrow molecular electronics concepts and put them into non-volatile memory,” says electrical engineer Tuo-Hung Hou of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the research (T.-H. Hou et al. Appl. Phys. Lett. 92, 153109; 2008).

This is also another example of a possible wide-ranging application of physics.

Zz.

Towards A No-Loophole Bell-Type Experiment?

Looks like we are well on our way to achieving that and nailing the coffin shut on Local Realism..... or are we?

The paper published last week in PRL[1] seems to point to the possibility of a loophole-free Bell experiment. While entanglement experiments with photons have closed down the locality loophole, and experiments with "particles" such as protons, neutrons, etc... have closed down the detection loophole, no experiments have managed to close both of them simultaneously.

This experiment with Yb+ atoms is well on its way to getting there. While they have certainly closed the detection loophole, they have reduced the possibility of the locality loophole by separating the atoms by 1 m (previously, the spatial separation was of the order of microns). So this is a tremendous improvement.

Eventually, it will be convincing enough, if it isn't already.

Zz.

[1] D.N. Matsukevich et al., PRL v.100, p.150404 (2008).

Phenomenology of the Normal State In-Plane Transport Properties of High-Tc Cuprates

I always like it when authors upload their published papers. It gives those who do not have access to the various journals a chance to get a copy of a peer-reviewed, published papers, especially if they're in respectable journals.

This paper is more of a review of the current understanding of the anisotropic nature of the in-plane transport of the cuprate superconductors. The cuprate superconductors are well-known to have highly 2D nature in its charge transport, most probably due to the layered nature of the compound. It is believed that the transport occurs in the copper oxide planes, especially since the resistivity perpendicular to the planes is roughly 3 to 4 orders of magnitude higher. However, even within the copper oxide plane itself, there is a considerable anisotropy in the transport direction, as seen in various measurements.

The paper has a very good review of our state of knowledge on this issue so far, and also a good background info regarding the cuprates superconductor for those who need to get up to speed.

Zz.

Teaching Superfluidity at the Introductory Level

I've only glanced through briefly this preprint, but from what I can see, it might provide a useful intro to superfluidity to undergraduate students, and even to those with some physics background. This isn't a topic that is dealt with in extensive details at the modern physics intro level, so it might fill a gap (no pun intended).

If you have read this and have comments about it, I'd like to hear them, especially if my impression of it isn't accurate.

Zz.

Who or What is RVB?

In an earlier entry related to the "No glue for cuprate superconductors", I mentioned that Phil Anderson might be right after all since this could be consistent with what he has been pushing all along. Of course, what I had in mind was his Resonating Valence Bonds (RVB) theory as applied to the cuprate superconductors. I believe he has argued for the non-conventional (as in no boson coupling) origin of the superconductivity in the cuprates. So this result is certainly in favor of that picture.

In any case, not sure if it was deliberate or terrific timing, there is a start of at least a couple of columns on RVB in Physics Today. The first article appeared in the April 2008 issue, which you can read for free even if you're not an APS member. In this article, he describes basically the history of RVB theory. But I think I am more interested in the teaser that he gave at the very end, which is supposed to describe "... the rise and fall and rise again of RVB's relevance to high Tc and other superconductors..."

Now THAT, is a physics cliff-hanger!

:)

Zz.

A Case Study of Gender Bias

OK, this thing has the potential of becoming a rather big news especially when the popular media picks it up or the a coverage in Nature (whichever comes first). This arXiv preprint titled "A Case Study of Gender Bias at the Postdoctoral Level in Physics, and its Resulting Impact on the Academic Career Advancement of Females" is getting quite a bit of legs. You might want to also look at the trackback links to read more about it.

I'm not endorsing or disputing the report, simply pointing it out since the cat, obviously, is out of the bag. I'm guessing there's more to come on this.

Zz.

Looking Into Nuclear Power

Two different articles appeared almost at the same time discussing the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. So you might want to read them here and here.

I will fully admit that I am very much in favor of nuclear power. As with many aspects of physics/science policy in which ignorance and lack of knowledge have interfered with the decision-making process, nuclear power has suffered from the same fate. Both article addressed many of the issues involved currently when one talks about nuclear power.

Zz.

Saving Energy While Driving

So I don't remember which TV public service announcement that I heard this from. I think it was on one of the cable channels that was advising how you can make NY City more "green". In any case, that isn't relevant. What it did say was that you can save gas if you drive with your windows up, especially at high speed.

Of course, with everything being the equal, this is true. If you drive with your windows down, you create more drag, or air resistance, for your vehicle. Thus, you burn more fuel as you drive, especially when you're driving very fast.

HOWEVER (somehow, I think you were expecting that, weren't you? :)), let's consider the situation here of when you usually drive with your windows down. It is typically in the summer, or when the weather is warm. So, if you roll up your windows, you inevitably crank up the air-conditioning! So now, you've reduced air drag on your vehicles, but you're using up additional fuel due to the air conditioning.

So which one uses up more fuel - driving with the windows down but no air conditioning, or driving with the windows up but with air conditioning? I haven't looked into the calculations of how much power is used is a typical car air-conditioner, and I haven't looked into it yet on the amount of drag created when a car drives around at, say, 60 mph (yes, we still use mph here in the US). Does anyone have some rough estimates on what these might be? Off the top of my head, I would think that driving with the windows down instead of using air conditioning might be more energy efficient than the other alternative.

Of course, driving with the windows up and not using air conditioning is a no-brainer better option. But the PSA didn't say that. All they said was to drive with the windows up to save fuel. That is not the complete story.

Zz.

Physics for Sports Nuts

Highly unusual for the Wall Street Journal to review a book about the physics of sports, but here it is. The reviewed "Why a Curveball Curves: The Incredible Science of Sports", which was compiled by the editors of Popular Mechanics. To quote the reviewer's own words:

This book is quite possibly every sports nerd's dream.

So don't feel self-conscious if you go out and buy it at a bookstore near you. :)

Zz.

Quasar Tests General Relativity to the Limit

Wow. This is a rather impressive piece of work in terms of prediction and subsequent measurement. A group of astronomers have made what appears to be the most compelling evidence of the validity of General Relativity (GR) in strong gravitational field, and in the process, produced a more direct evidence of the existence of black holes, and an indirect evidence for gravitational waves.

The quasar pulse occurred right on schedule, strongly suggesting that OJ287 is a binary black hole system (Nature 452 851). In addition to verifying the enormous mass of the primary black hole, the result shows that the orbit of the secondary black hole precesses at a rate of 39 degrees per period. For comparison, the distorting effect of the Sun on the local space–time causes Mercury's orbit to precess by little more than 0.1 degrees per century.

Furthermore, the work suggests that the binary system is losing energy by emitting gravitational waves — a key prediction of Einstein's theory that is yet to be verified directly. When this emission is not included in the model, the quasar outburst is predicted to occur 20 days later, providing indirect support for gravitational waves.

Excellent!

Zz.

Analysing the Afterlife

I normally do not go after something like this, because, frankly, it's a no-win situation. You can't make any rational argument against something that is irrational. However, when someone invokes something out of physics or scientific process to justify their irrational belief, then it is then fair game to evaluate the fallacy of his/her argument.

This author is trying to argue that one simply cannot dismiss the idea of an 'afterlife', whatever that may be. His main arguments?

Scientific and psychological reasoning and scepticism have yet to firmly counter the notion that there is an afterlife.

and

experiential evidence from around this world points to some form of existence in ‘the next’.

The first one is silly and just plain lazy. He's arguing that you can't prove that it doesn't exist. This is nonsense because it is the burden of a person arguing for the existence of something to show that it exists, not the other way around. So while his argument is to counter a previous article that appears to argue why it this afterlife doesn't exist, to turn around and argue that it does based on the point that "you can't prove it doesn't" really is extremely weak.

But the second part is what is more fascinating in terms of proving my continuing point that the general public, or at least those not in science, do not have any clue on the difference between anecdotal and scientific evidence. He is actually touting this "experiential evidence" as if this is something that is reliable and valid. It is a FACT that our minds can play tricks on us. It is a FACT that has been shown many times how people can believe that they saw something that never occurred (see here, here, and here). Therefore, experiential evidence is NOT RELIABLE as valid evidence. It is certainly less reliable when a person is under medical/physiological duress that he/she is near death! So to use those as justification for anything is extremely dubious.

It is ironic that he said that "... The afterlife may go against common sense, but twentieth century physics has taught us that common sense is often a poor guide to truth...." yet, he somehow ignored the rest of what physics has taught us of the nature of scientific evidence and what is valid. You'll notice a common thread here when someone who doesn't know much about physics will pick and choose what he/she wants to take from physics. The author of "The Secret" wants to use quantum mechanics to justify various part of it, and ignores the rest that will render the argument false. The same thing is occurring here. If this person is so respectful of what "twentieth century physics" has to teach us, then take the whole thing, rather than just what's convenient for him.

The fact that something like this continues to be presented as valid argument, and published in popular media without any hesitation, shows that (i) such fallacy is not seen as problematic to be accepted, and (ii) the readers and the general public probably won't catch what I've just mentioned here. Try reading the papers or watching TV. You'll see many more arguments being made that is based on simply a matter of opinion, or based on non-existent evidence, or an incomplete understanding. In many cases, no one is asking for evidence or justification of the point being made. So these things are being said as if they are "facts".

The nature and validity of the evidence being presented to support an argument is something that has been emphasized very little in public discourse. That is what is so discouraging.

Zz.

Renewed Call for Science Debate

I mentioned earlier that the planned for the Science Debate 2008 among the US presidential candidates has been postponed due to lack of interest among those candidates. There is now a push for 3 possible dates in May.

While I think this is very important debate not just in terms of the issues, but in terms of a way we can judge how these candidates arrive at what they believe to be a valid opinion, I am not that optimistic that they will agree to this. Why? Because unlike most of the other debates, one actually need to have some knowledge of facts in this debate to be able to form an opinion. If you look closely at all the other debates, one can almost make things up as one goes along at answering the questions or discussing the issues. In those debates, style mattered more than substance. In a Science Debate, substance will take precedent over style. And for most politicians, that is very difficult to do.

So I am not going to hold my breath for this to happen...

Zz.

More On The Physics Of Baseball

I mentioned earlier of the talk and demonstration on the physics of baseball presented by Paul Doherty, senior scientist at the San Francisco's Exploratorium. Wouldn't you know it, there's a video on this very topic staring this scientist.

It's not that in-depth, but its still fun.

Zz.

RIP John Wheeler

John Wheeler, the legendary physicist that gave us the term "black hole", has died at the age of 96.

I am sure this will be mentioned during the APS April meeting going on right now. He certainly is a legend.

Zz.

April 14, 1932 : The Era of Accelerator-Based Particle Physics is Born

A good piece of history in this article on the historic occasion that happened today in 1932.

Zz.