Scientific Reasoning Abilities of Nonscience Majors in Physics-Based Courses

One of the things that I've tried to advocate is physics education to students at all level. The primary reason for this is NOT to get more students majoring in physics. I think that the most valuable aspect of a physics education/classes is the problem-solving/analytical ability that a student can acquire. This skill transcends the physics class itself, and is useful for the student in all aspect of life. It is certainly useful in how we gain knowledge and how we analyze something to be valid. This is the reason why, in my suggestion to revamp undergraduate physics labs, I gave several exercises in which the students discover for themselves what causes what, and how two different parameters are correlated and connected.

The importance of a physics education can't be overly-stressed, especially based on this new paper (free access) that analyzed a student's analytical ability. The authors of this paper studied the scientific reasoning ability of non-STEM students when compared to STEM students. The latter, obviously, tend to have a higher scientific reasoning ability because of their inclination towards science/math/engineering topics. However, it is still surprising to see the disparity between the scientific reasoning ability between the two groups that was measured in this study.

That students in STEM majors demonstrate stronger scientific reasoning ability is not surprising, since most students typically choose their major based on their strengths. However, such a dramatic difference in reasoning ability between STEM and non-STEM students may contribute to disparities in effectiveness of reformed physics pedagogies. What works in calculus-based physics courses with natural and physical science students may not work in the general education, conceptual physics course.

The authors earlier in the paper stated why a physics course is important for these non-STEM students, besides the fact that these are the larger population of the student body:

Since most students enrolled in conceptual physics or astronomy will never take another formal science course, our student learning objectives should incorporate broader reasoning skills. Scientific reasoning and metacognitive development are often required for effective decision making and problem solving far outside the typical scientific context Furthermore, it has been shown that gains in physics content knowledge are strongly correlated to scientific reasoning . In particular, reasoning and metacognition development are essential for problem solving, understanding and applying abstract concepts, and shifting between multiple representations.

Considering that these are the same people that will enter the general population and also decide who they will elect and what they wish to fund, one can already see that without any kind of skill to think things through, we could be in serious problem (if we aren't already). One can now start to understand why the public in general can't tell the difference between anecdotal evidence versus scientific evidence, on why many still believe in superstition/astrology/other pseudosciences, etc.

It wasn't clear from the paper if they show any improvement in the students' scientific reasoning ability after they have taken such an intro physics class. They stated some discussion on "normalized gain", but I wish they would just present clearly a "before and after" comparison of the same test.

The ability to think things analytically should be the main aim of any education. It is the foundation of a civilized population. A physics course, if done properly,  could be the most important class these students took, without them knowing it.

Zz.

Measuring The Speed Of Light - Using Chocolates!

Those fun folk at JLab are at it again. This time, they'll demonstrate how you can measure the speed of light using a microwave, a ruler, and a LARGE bar of chocolate!




OK, I love them! There, I admitted it! It's the chocolate that pushed me over. :)

Zz.

Women In Physics - A Tale Of Limits

I have not had a chance to read this report carefully, but that's no reason not to highlight it on here. So if you haven't read this Physics Today article yet, you might want to spend some time on it, especially if you care about women's representation in the field of physics. You should be able to get the whole article, even in PDF format, for free.

Zz.

Cold Fusion? Not So Fast!

I mentioned earlier of an upcoming colloquium to be held at CERN to decipher and sort through all the claims of the so-called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), which is basically cold fusion in sheep's clothing. Today, a skeptical review of the Rossi's e-CAT claims is presented, along with issues surrounding that cold fusion claim.

They claimed their device produced 12,400 Watts of heat power with an input of just 400 W. In a move that raised eyebrows among research physicists, Rossi and Focardi initially declined to publish their results in a peer-reviewed science journal and instead took their discovery directly to the public. They also claimed that they would be starting mass production of their cold fusion devices by the end of last year; that failed to happen, and the chorus of skeptics has grown louder.

Among the most prominent skeptics is Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith, who has offered $200,000 for proof that the Rossi "energy catalyzer" (e-CAT) actually works.

 Is this similar to the long-standing award from James Randi to give away $1 million for a clear demonstration of psychic/supernatural phenomenon?

It's a bit tiresome that many of these people who claim such cold fusion discovery appear to be a bunch of characters who simply refuses to reveal what they have, what they did, and more importantly, to have an independent test done to verify their claim. And these people all wonder why we keep finding their claim to be highly dubious!

Zz.

Entanglement of 8 Photons

8! Count 'em!

If anyone has seen or know quite well this type of experiment, one can truly appreciate what a feat this is. It appears that physicists in China has managed to entangle 8 photons and set a new record. Ars Technica has a good coverage of this accomplishment, in case you missed it. It even listed the "straightforward" steps in achieving the 8 entangled photons. But don't be fooled by such a simple-sounding list. It isn't easy!

Zz.

Fermilab - A Plan For Discovery

Fermilab has released this report on what it intends to do during the next two decades. It certainly is an ambitious program, as it should be.

It will be interesting to see how it will fare, considering that the budget submitted by the President for FY2013 calls for a cut in spending for High Energy Physics, which could be devastating to Fermilab.

Zz.

Are Mammals Ferroelectric?

Back in the 70's (and I'm going to date myself here), Gary Neuman and his Tubeaway Army had a big hit (at least in the UK) with the song "Are Friends Electric". So when I came across this review article on the study of mammals tissue that are ferroelectric, that tune came back into my head.

This is a rather interesting study because it leads to question on why and to what purpose is the ferroelectricity in such tissues.

The above discovery poses interesting questions regarding the purpose of ferroelectricity in aorta walls, where the blood pressure is highest and most pulsatile. Could the engineering principles of ferroelectricity, only mastered in modern times by mankind, have already been implemented in nature for millions of years? For example, could ferroelectricity function as a critical component in a local integrated memorylike structure, together with nerves within the aorta? Could it help sense very small temperature changes in our blood flow to help maintain temperature homeostasis? Could it also be a force sensor and play a role in blood pressure homeostasis? Or could it help dissipate the mechanical work into thermal energy when the aorta walls are subjected to strong transient shear flows in the blood? While these questions may stir up curiosity and further investigations from a fundamental standpoint, another important question is, how can we benefit from this finding through engineering? For example, can the change of ferroelectricity due to the local damage in the aorta walls be probed as a damage reporter? Can it guide effective drug delivery to local damaged zones in the aorta, and can ferroelectricity in the aortal walls be manipulated to prevent cholesterol from depositing onto the aorta walls, or help clean the deposited cholesterol, which may also possess ferroelectricity?

And again, this is another example where knowledge and advances in physics (in this case, condensed matter physics) have direct impact in other fields such as biology.

Zz.

Severe Blows To US Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics Funding

The current President Obama's 2013 budget proposal for the Department of Energy appears to be devastating for Nuclear/Fusion physics and High Energy Physics funding.

Overall, the budget numbers for the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, the single largest funder of physical sciences research in the United States, look reasonably good. The office would see its budget climb by 2.4% to $4.992 billion. Three of the office's six major research programs, however, are slated for potentially devastating cuts. While programs with connections to clean energy technologies come out ahead, the fusion energy science, nuclear physics, and high-energy physics programs suffer.

While this is severe, it isn't surprising. The US appears to have "shut down" and freely relinquish any kind of initiative to reclaim its powers in high energy physics. And let's be clear about this, the economic impact will be felt soon enough, not just in terms of the direct scientific benefits, but also the technological side effects that typically accompany a major accelerator facility. Somehow, people still do not see how advances in experimental high energy physics have trickled down into devices that are now being used in material science, medicine, etc. Advances that we make for particle detectors will be the high resolution detectors in medical physics of tomorrow. That type of benefits have somehow been lost completely.

And again, as in the past, it appears that the burden of trying to "cut spending" falls onto the small guys, the ones with the small budgets, rather than on the big boys.

Zz.

LHC To Run At 4 TeV Per Beam In 2012

Latest press release from CERN about the upcoming LHC run.

Geneva, 13 February 2012. CERN today announced that the LHC will run with a beam energy of 4 TeV this year, 0.5 TeV higher than in 2010 and 2011. This decision was taken by CERN management following the annual performance workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the external CERN Machine Advisory Committee (CMAC). It is accompanied by a strategy to optimise LHC running to deliver the maximum possible amount of data in 2012 before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running. The data target for 2012 is 15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS and CMS, three times higher than in 2011. Bunch spacing in the LHC will remain at 50 nanoseconds.

“When we started operating the LHC for physics in 2010, we chose the lowest safe beam energy consistent with the physics we wanted to do,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “Two good years of operational experience with beam and many additional measurements made during 2011 give us the confidence to safely move up a notch, and thereby extend the physics reach of the experiments before we go into the LHC’s first long shutdown.”

The LHC’s excellent performance in 2010 and 2011 has brought tantalising hints of new physics, notably narrowing the range of masses available to the Higgs particle to a window of just 16 GeV. Within this window, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments have seen hints that a Higgs might exist in the mass range 124-126 GeV. However, to turn those hints into a discovery, or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether, requires one more year’s worth of data. The LHC is scheduled to enter a long technical stop at the end of this year to prepare for running at its full design energy of around 7 TeV per beam.

“By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,” said CERN’s Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. “Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

The schedule announced today foresees beams back in the LHC next month, and running through to November. There will then be a long technical stop of around 20 months, with the LHC restarting close to its full design energy late in 2014 and operating for physics at the new high energy in early 2015.

So it'll be 8 TeV collision. Hopefully, we have more data to confirm (or not) the hint on the Higgs.

Zz.

Fermi Gasses And Superfluids

This is a concise review of the physics of Fermi gasses and BE condensate, and how they are related to each other in light of the BE-BCS crossover discovery from a few years ago. Note that this review is highly technical and probably meant for condensed matter physicists. But it still provides ample overview of the theory and experiments that we have so far.

Zz.

Cold Fusion Colloquium At CERN

At CERN, you asked? Yes, CERN, the same place that houses this little facility known at the LHC.

Not sure what to make of this, but a colloquium is being organized at CERN to look into the theoretical and "experimental" progress in Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), or what we used to call cold fusion.

An overview will be given on the main progress made –since March 1989- through experimental/theoretical studies on thermal/nuclear anomalies observed in forced interactions of Hydrogen isotopes (H, D), in non-equilibrium conditions, with pure or alloyed materials (mainly Palladium, Nickel).

Most of the experiments used electrolytic environments at moderate temperatures (20-50°C). More recently, gas environments have been used at higher temperatures (between 200-400°C and even temperatures between 500-900°C have been employed).

Specific nanostructures have begun to play a crucial role both in basic studies as well as in, recently claimed, technological/industrial applications.

A plethora of theoretical models have been proposed to explain several experimental anomalies in LENR. A brief description of a weak interaction model shall be presented that claims to explain almost ALL of the anomalous effects found so far.

There's even going to be a live webcast of the event!

This will be interesting, especially the cast of characters that will attend or invited to attend this colloquium. I am also curious at what the outcome of it will be. Presumably, this phenomenon will be looked at carefully where the emphasis is purely on the physics.

Zz.

The Physics Of Ponytails

I kid you not! They even came up with something called the "Rapunzel Number"!

It turns out that there is an important-enough research being done on the physics of ponytails that it warrants a publication in the Physical Review Letters, no less!

He and two other physicists have been trying to determine whether the shape of a ponytail can be deduced from the properties of a single hair. After all, a head with 100,000 strands is a complex physical system, as anyone with a copious coiffure can attest. 

And it turns out that there is a simple theory. The crucial characteristics are elasticity, density and curliness, which essentially tell how springy a piece of hair is, plus the length of the ponytail. The researchers came up with a simple formula that describes the ponytail shape when the hair is bundled together.

They called it the Rapunzel number. “We couldn’t resist,” Dr. Goldstein said. 

Oh dear!

I'll try to find the exact reference to this one when it appears and post it here. I wish they explain why this is important and what other implications this involved. Maybe it's written in the actual paper. The only thing I can find in the news article is the sentence "...  Dr. Goldstein said the findings could also be applied to bundles of other long filaments, including fiberglass and wool...", which doesn't say much.

Another news report on this story mention quite a bit more, but it is still unclear what properties actually that is so important.

Scientists said the work has implications for understanding the structure of materials made up of random fibers, such as wool and fur and will have resonance with the computer graphics and animation industry, where the representation of hair has been a challenging problem.

"Our findings extend some central paradigms in statistical physics and show how they can be used to solve a problem that has puzzled scientists and artists ever since Leonardo da Vinci remarked on the fluid-like streamlines of hair in his notebooks 500 years ago," Goldstein said.

So maybe this won't be nominated for an Ig Nobel after all! :)

Edit: the Ponytail physics is getting a Synopsis coverage! Click that link for the exact reference.

Zz.

Hysterical Physics In Motion Demo

I was rolling all over the floor watching this video, because not only is it kinda amateurish (nothing wrong with that, really), but it is hysterically funny, and they didn't intend it to be! :)



This video is a demo of the 2 Newton Laws of motion, which is fine and dandy. The demo for 1st Law (inertia) was rather clear. The object not in motion will want to stay that way unless acted upon by a force. Unfortunately, the website only describes an object that is in "uniform motion".

First Law:
Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

So the demo and the written description do not match.

The problem comes in with the demo for the 2nd and 3rd Laws. They were not very clear at all and, in fact, may have missed the mark. The 2nd Law (F=ma) was demonstrate with a hammer knocking on various objects of different masses. So year, you need more force to push on heavier mass, but how would this show the relationship between F, m, and a? It doesn't, because you can't get "a" or "F" from just looking at the demo.

The 3rd Law (action = reaction) was demonstrated with a balloon and letting the air out. The person simply blurted out in passing that the air pushes one way and the balloon pushes the other way. Huh? A "general public" person would ask "how does air pushes one way and how does the balloon pushes the other way?" It isn't clear how things are being pushed here. If anything, this is more of a demo of conservation of linear momentum.

And unfortunately, that's what the demo following this one is all about. The person started to demonstrate conservation of angular momentum, which isn't even covered. No mention of what is involved here, and no clear physics explanation was mentioned.

I'm being nit-picky here because we have seen many physics demo, even done on a shoe-string budget. I'd rather the presentation be on ONE topic (say, inertia since that was done very clearly) and the physics is explained clearly, rather than rush through a bunch of demo without any kind of details. Just simply producing a bunch of demo one after the other turns it into a circus, without any kind of useful knowledge being passed on.

Zz.

High School Physics Class Exclusively Use iPads

This is not unexpected, and probably a sign of what's to come for many schools, if its not here already.

This high school physics class make use of iPads exclusively, not just for reading texts, but also in doing assignments, etc.

Jon Gums` physics class at Mandan High School may look just like any other. A closer look reveals that there are no books, paper or pencils. That`s because this class is on the forefront of digital education. This class, along with a few others, is part of a pilot program that incorporates iPads into the classroom.

Gums says the idea was to give students instant access to both digital media and curriculum through the iPads. Because of the technology, in addition to writing their assignments on the iPad, students can also add photos and video to document each step of their project.

Of course, this is good for the environment as well.

The iPads are the property of the school, and the student is responsible for the $500 replacement cost if it is lost, damaged or stolen. Gums also says that since the beginning of this school year, the students have only needed about 15 sheets of paper each.

With Apple pushing for college textbooks on the iPad, and other initiatives in providing free, open-access textbooks, I have a feeling that how we conduct our education is going to change dramatically within the next 3-4 years. In fact, on the research front, the iPads are already showing its usefulness.

So now we'll just have to wait if the rumors of a new iPad3 to be announced in early March is true... :)

Zz.

Science Lessons

The IoP has uploaded a series of videos that they called "Science Lessons". These appear to be video presentation of some basic physics, which can be quite useful for someone just learning physics.


Science Lesson 1 - Pendulum Motion


Science Lesson 2 - Falling Weights


Science Lesson 3 - Lenses and Telescopes


Science Lesson 4 - Astronomy and Planetary Orbits


Science Lesson 5 - Galileo's New Universe


Zz.

UW-Madison Physics Department Open House

Hey, my alma mater is having an open house!

The Dept. of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is having its Open House on Feb. 18, 2012, between 11 am and 4 pm.

The family-friendly event, free and open to the public, will feature laboratory tours, hands-on activities, demonstrations and displays. Visitors are invited to chat with scientists and play with exhibits in the Ingersoll Physics Museum.

The event coincides with the 29th annual "Wonders of Physics" presentation by UW-Madison physics professor Clint Sprott.

I already mentioned a while back about this amazing physics show called "Wonders of Physics". If you have the opportunity to see it, and it does make a road trip to a few places, you shouldn't miss it.

I wonder if they are going to do a huge celebration next year for the 30th anniversary.

Zz.

The Physics of Floating Pyramids

Or as the title of this article goes, it is the UNUSUAL Physics of Floating Pyramids.

It turns out that, based on the research being reported in the article, a top-heavy pyramid appears to be better at straightening itself out when it is floating on a stream of air from below.

The researchers placed hollow paper pyramids inside the cylinder. The objects were about 1 to 5 centimeters high and were made of tissue paper or letter paper on carbon fiber supports, like tiny homemade kites. Physicist Bin Liu led the experiments, attaching a beadlike weight to a post running down the center of the pyramid and changing the height of the bead to give the object a different center of mass. Common sense says that the pyramid should be most stable when the bead is at the bottom of the post, like ballast in the hold of a ship. But when the team released the pyramids over the subwoofer, the opposite was true: The bottom-heavy pyramids were likely to flip over and fall, whereas the top-heavy ones remained upright and continued to hover (see first video), the group reports in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.

The video is available in that link. I'll keep an eye out on PRL and update this entry when I have
the exact citation for the paper.

Zz.

Edit: We have a synopsis of this work AND the exact reference to it.

Higgs Getting To Be More "Real"?

Further analysis of the data out of LHC's CMS detector increases the confidence level that was reported earlier.

First, there are no new data in there — the LHC stopped colliding protons back in November, and these latest results are just rehashes of that earlier run. In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), physicists have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs’ overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma. In other words, if statistics are to be believed, then this signal has about a 99.996% chance of being right.

Of course, no one is declaring a discovery yet, and they shouldn't. Everyone is waiting for the LHC to get back online with, hopefully, a higher energy that will generate more data and more statistics. It has to be at least 5-sigma from both CMS and ATLAS, together and separately, I would think, for most high energy physicists to consider the Higgs as being discovered.

Zz.

Free Intro Physics Textbook?

All of us who have gone through the educational system know how expensive textbooks can get. At the undergraduate level, when you have to buy new books almost every year (or even every semester), this can occupy a substantial portion of our yearly expenses.

This is what is being addressed in this article, and the impending availability of free intro textbooks to students.

But soon, introductory physics texts will have a new competitor, developed at Rice University. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers’ offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College.

Using Rice’s Connexions platform, OpenStax will offer free course materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90 million in the next five years if the books capture 10 percent of the national market. OpenStax is funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation.

This could be a game-changer if universities start to adopt it or something similar. Of course, we need to wait and see if the text is any good. But with the amount of effort put into this one, there's a good chance that it might be. So I'm looking forward to seeing this when it come out.

But I wonder how this will fit in with Apple's textbook initiatives. It appears that this textbook will be a standard PDF document and will not make full use of the technology that's available for tablets, etc. I suppose that is a good start, but I'm hoping that this free textbook initiative will look into modernizing the textbooks reading experience.

Zz.

Celebrity Physicists Trigger Enrollment Boom In The UK

This could be a double-edged sword.

It appears that all those famous physicists in the UK has triggered a boom in physics enrollment at UK universities.

On their application forms, physics candidates have been citing Cox’s show as their inspiration, as well as the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, near Geneva, and the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, centred on a group of geeky scientists at the California Institute of Technology.

Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at Surrey and himself a television presenter, said there had been 320 applicants for 60 physics places, a 40 per cent increase from last year and a contrast to the 10 per cent decline in overall applications at the university.

“There are a whole host of reasons, but Brian has helped fuel this renaissance of enthusiasm for physics and astronomy,” said Al-Khalili. “We stress the career benefits . . . but students are not mainly choosing the subject for vocational reasons, it is because it is fascinating.”

On one hand, it is an amazing effect in that physics is now something "cool" to do and not just relegated as for "geeks" only. Brian Cox especially has managed to obliterate that stereotype. But on the other hand, are these people doing physics for the right reason, and not simply for the "romance" of it?

What is more beneficial here is that the general public, and students who are NOT going to be physicists, are learning about physics and having some idea on how physics work. To me, that is the most important effects. I wish more of what physics is is presented, and that it is not just the LHC and the Big Bang, but also your iPhones and your computers and your MRI's. Don't just show the esoteric side of physics, even if it is the sexier side. The "workhorse" side is where most of the physics students will end up in, and it is also the reason why most of physics gets funded and stays relevant with the population.

Zz.

Teaching Teachers A Lesson

This is a news article on a symposium at Harvard about revamping the way we present our instructions to the students.

The group had convened in Harvard’s Northwest Science Building for a one-day symposium on learning and teaching, the first salvo in a $40 million attempt by Harvard to rethink education.

The initiative’s proximate goal is to make Harvard’s teachers better, but the ultimate goal is much more ambitious: to improve education beyond Harvard Yard, perhaps in ways that cannot yet be foreseen.

But as you can read further in the article, the final impetus on many anything better lies with the instructor itself. One can try all the bells and whistles one want, but an effective teacher is an effective teacher, no matter what the methodology is.

But at least now, you know what would happen to the hole on a heated plate. BTW, who in their right mind would put a metal plate in a microwave anyway?

Zz.

The Physics of Football

Now, we're talking about AMERICAN football here, not soccer. Since the Super Bowl is tomorrow, article and discussion such as this tends to crop up at this time of the year. This is a transcript on NPR on football physics that some of you might find interesting.

For me, there's not a whole lot of physics/classical mechanics in the discussion that I find interesting. That's too bad, because they could have tackled quite a bit more, especially in the physics of the ball's trajectory through the air (with and without spinning).

Zz.

Attacks On Climate Scientists

I think that this is a sad reflection of the times we live in, especially when people can send out things anonymously and threaten others for doing their jobs.

This article looks at the challenges being faced by climate scientists, and not on the task they faced with their jobs either!

Harassment of climate scientists by climate-change deniers goes back at least to 1995, after the IPCC published its Second Assessment Report. Santer was the lead author of chapter 8, which looked at the causes of climate change. “The single sentence ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate’ changed my life,” he says. “I was the guy who was associated with this sentence. Those who did not like that finding did everything not only to undermine the finding but also to undermine my scientific reputation.”

 

The harassment has ramped up in recent years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University, whose book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, due to be published by Columbia University Press in early March, includes a retelling of his own ongoing experiences with harassment. “Political intimidation, character attacks, what appear to be orchestrated phone and email campaigns, nasty and thinly veiled threats, not just to us but to our families, are what it means in modern American life to be a climate scientist,” says Mann. Even this magazine, after publishing last October articles on the science of climate change—about its being under fire and about communicating that science to the public—received an abundance of letters with the tenor, “How could PHYSICS TODAY print such a one-sided portrayal of climate science when many reputable scientists disagree?”

 

Fossil-fuel interests, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA, “have adopted a shoot-the-messenger approach. It’s been a very successful strategy. They have created a chilling effect, so other [scientists] won’t say what they think and the conversation in public stays bereft of anyone who knows what they are talking about.” Schmidt cofounded RealClimate.org, a forum for climate scientists to “provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.” Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a vocal opponent to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, is suing NASA for the release of Schmidt’s personal emails.

This, of course, is made worse when politicians, people who should know better but don't, somehow voice the same level of skepticism. In the minds of some feeble-minded climate deniers, this gives them legitimacy to go after these scientists.

This may be the 21st Century. But some aspect of the Dark Ages still persists, and prosecution of scientists appears to be one of them.

Zz.

Women In Physics - A Tale Of Limits

I'll highlight the link to this important article in Physics Today, but I haven't had time to read it carefully yet. I've only skimmed through some of the highlighted points and figures, but I'm not going to comment on this till I read it properly. Unfortunately, I've been horrendously busy with work lately. But it shouldn't stop you from having a go at it.

Zz.

Boycott Elsevier?

I just heard about the movement to Boycott Elsevier journals when reading Sean Carroll's blog.

Certainly the success and failure of a peer-reviewed journal depends very much on the participation of scientists, both in terms of submitting good work for publication, and for refereeing these submissions. So if this movement catches on, Elsevier would certainly be faced with quite a challenge.

In my current position, the only Elsevier journal that would be affected is the Nuclear Instrumentation and Method - A. In my "previous life" as a condensed matter physicist, I would say Physica B and Physica C, but not anymore.

So this "boycott" probably won't be affecting us that much since we can certainly bypass NIM-A for other journals.

But what about you? If you are a practicing scientist and you do send work to be published in an Elsevier journals, would you stop doing that? Would you also stop refereeing for an Elsevier journal?

Zz.

Sustainable Energy: Fact or Fiction

Hey, if you are in the Chicagoland area, this might be something you want to attend, considering that this is certainly an important and relevant topic nowadays. It is a talk on sustainable energy by Argonne's George Crabtree.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
McCormick Tribune Campus Center
McCloska Auditorium
3201 South State Street

Let me know if you are attending it. I'd appreciate a report.


Zz.

What Is The Scientific Method?

An Physics World blog entry linked to an audio discussion of what is meant by the "Scientific Method". You can click on the BBC link to hear the whole discussion on what it is, what it isn't, or the many variations to it.

As physicists, and scientists in general, I don't see many of us sit down and discuss this. I think we just do it and it comes as second nature because it is what we have been doing all along. It is also difficult to define because there is no one single way of doing things. In the end, Mother Nature gets to decide what's what.

But because of that, I think it is rather amusing that most of the discussion on what a scientific method is being done primarily by non-scientists. Or to put it bluntly, by philosophers. I suppose that is part of what they do. But I can't help thinking of the Feynman's quote:

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

One could say that a discussion of the scientific method is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. But regardless of that, I find it a bit weary that people who are discussing what it is are mainly non-scientists, which are people who have not gone through, or practice such method that they are trying to analyze. We all know that there is a clear difference between studying about something versus actually doing it. You could read and study about riding a bicycle till you're old, but that doesn't mean that you can gain the skill or have a feel on riding a bicycle. One actually has to get on a bicycle, practice many, many times, fall a few times, before one gains the ability to ride one. Reading or studying about something is different than actually doing it.

So how do people who have never done scientific research have the ability to discuss what the scientific method is or is not?

Zz.

X-Ray Laser From Atoms

Another stunning accomplishment. We now have a first documented evidence of the generation of x-rays from atoms, with the help of x-rays generated from an accelerator.

The new atomic x-ray laser won't replace the LCLS and other accelerator-based systems. In fact, to make the atomic laser work, researchers blasted neon atoms with x-rays from the LCLS itself. Still, the results mark a conceptual triumph, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction that such an atomic x-ray laser is possible. "Nobody had done this before, and everybody knew that somebody had to go out and do this," says Philip Bucksbaum, director of SLAC's PULSE Institute for Ultrafast Energy Science in Menlo Park, California, who was not involved in the work. "So this is great."

It'll be interesting to see if they can turn this into a useful device, at least before an x-ray FEL catches up on producing similar quality x-ray beams.

Zz.

The Physics of Wind-Blown Sand and Dust

This review article might be of some interest to some people, especially those who are curious about how we can know so much about the conditions on Mars based on what we can observe of the landscape.

Abstract: The transport of dust and sand by wind is a potent erosional force, creates sand dunes and ripples, and loads the atmosphere with suspended dust aerosols. This article presents an extensive review of the physics of wind-blown sand and dust on Earth and Mars. Specifically, we review the physics of aeolian saltation, the formation and development of sand dunes and ripples, the physics of dust aerosol emission, the weather phenomena that trigger dust storms, and the lifting of dust by dust devils and other small-scale vortices. We also discuss the physics of wind-blown sand and dune formation on Venus and Titan.

Zz.

Intro to QM - "... For Those Who Dwell In The Macroscopic World"

I came across this yesterday, but didn't get a chance to post it here.

This appears to be a lecture note/text for a QM class designed for engineers (i.e. the people who "dwell in the macroscopic world"). It covers the fundamental aspect of QM that one would see in the first few chapters of a QM text. A layperson will probably get 10% (or less) of what is being covered due to the level of mathematics required. But if you have sufficient mathematics background and haven't had a course in QM, this will be just right for you without having to weed through a thick QM text.

Zz.

Millikan Oil-Drop Experiment

This appeared a couple of days ago, but in case you missed it, here is a Focus story on the historically-significant experiment. I am guessing that you get free access to read/download the original paper. You also get to read a bit on the controversy surrounding the result back then.

Zz.

Creationists Clutching At Quotation Straws

Holy Creation! Can creationists be THIS desperate?

Creationists saw Hawking's comments as an admission that God was needed to create the universe. And they were particularly gleeful about a subsequent story in New Scientist Magazine, headlined "Why Scientists Can't Avoid a Creation Event." That piece called the substance of the conference "the worst presents ever," referring to the failure of several theories attempting to explain the origin of the cosmos.

The story set off a round of virtual chest-thumping. One writer said it raised the "thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator."

Supposedly, this is what Hawking uttered:

A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.

Really? Just that?

I'll leave it up to you to read the rest of the article, especially the response by Alan Guth. But what I want to address here is this:

1. Do creationists that are so happy with such a statement completely neglected all of Hawking's history and written pieces on his opinion of God, that one single quote somehow negates ALL of that? It is not even physics!

2. If you hang on so closely to his words (as if they are Divine gospel) and somehow believe him this time, how come you dismissed all of his earlier comments on the same topic before this? How are you able to pick and choose which ones to accept and which ones to reject?

This is unbelievably hilarious. Rather than strengthen the case for creationism, it has reduced such idea to a pathetic desperation for any kind of justification and validation.

Zz.

Revival of "Heisenberg Microscope"

I've often mentioned that one of the most popular misconception in physics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP). A lot of people think that it has something to do with our instrumentation inability to measure these observables. The concept certainly came out of the infamous "Heisenberg microscope" being given as the example.

Still, incorporating the Heisenberg microscope into the HUP hasn't been empirically shown... till now.

Then, in 2003, Masanao Ozawa at Japan's Nagoya University derived a new universal expression of the uncertainty principle that includes error and disturbance – as well as the standard-deviation terms. Now, Ozawa has joined forces with Yuji Hasegawa and colleagues at the Vienna University of Technology to confirm the calculation using spin-polarized neutrons. Instead of looking at position and momentum, the experiment measures two orthogonal spin components of the neutron – quantities also governed by the uncertainty principle.

But people still need to realize that the standard form of the HUP that we know and love still isn't about such "error and disturbance" effect. It is an inherent property within QM.

Zz.

The Science of Color

If you have an hour to spare (not necessarily continuous), this is an educational video on light and color understandable almost at all levels.



Zz.

"I Want To Do Theoretical Physics"

I see that statement surprisingly often enough. Whenever I talk to high school students who are interested in doing physics, or even new undergraduate students thinking of majoring in physics, I often ask what they would like to eventually go into. The response I get is of the type "I want to do theoretical physics".  When I ask them what they mean by "theoretical physics", I often get a reply that to the effect that they want to study string theory, elementary particles, etc.. etc. In other words, to many of these people

theoretical physics = string theory, elementary particles, and that type.

This, of course, is a highly faulty understanding of what "theoretical physics" is. It is no different than this very poorly written "guide" on becoming a physicist.

For better or for worse, physics has many different fields of study. If you look at the various division of the APS, you will get a good overview of all the different areas of physics that currently covers most, if not all, of the professional physicists in the US. So these are the different types of physics that people are working on. But also note that, in many cases, a person could be working in more than one field of study, i.e. the work involves more than just one field.

Now, within each field, we have both experimental and theoretical areas, well, all except string, which has no experimentalists! :) So if you are working in, say, nuclear physics, you can be either an experimentalist, or a theorist. Even so-called "applied" field, such as condensed matter physics, accelerator physics, etc., you can have both theoretical and experimental work.

So what this means is that, if you say you want to do theoretical work, that's rather vague and puzzling, because, it means that you haven't made up you mind what area of physics you want to work in. That's similar to someone saying "oh, I want to do experimental work", and someone would then reply "yeah, but doing WHAT?" Now, it's OK if what you mean by saying such a thing is that you don't quite know what field you want to work in, just as long as you are doing theoretical work. If this is really what you intended, that's fine. But most of the people who claim that they want to do "theoretical physics" don't mean that. They have a very narrow view of what physics is, and more importantly, what "theoretical physics" is. I've seen a look of surprise when I told them that Phil Anderson, Bob Laughlin, John Bardeen, are all theorists in condensed matter physics (which is often thought to be an "applied"  physics), and they all have won Nobel Prizes in physics!

I think this is one of the "myth" about physics (and about physicists) that I try to constantly smash to pieces. Physics isn't just the LHC, and physicists aren't just the Brian Greene's. It is also the iPods, the MRIs, etc.. etc. And for someone who still don't know that "theoretical physics" does not automatically mean what they think it means, it is highly advisable that they hold off on focusing on what they want to do before they have done sufficient "window shopping" to see what physics really is and what it has to offer. At some point, there needs to be a dose of reality injected into a decision on what one wants to do.

Zz.

Origin of Mass

This is a good, "light-weight" article for the general public on what we think is the origin of mass. And no, it is not all due to this Higgs boson, or doughnuts!

It is commonly said that nucleons are made of three quarks, which is true to a point. It is logical to think that each quark has one third the mass of the nucleon, but that's not actually true. The mass of the three quarks in the nucleons make up only about one to two percent of the mass of the nucleons. What makes up the other 98 percent?

This is where things get cool. First, you need to know that a nucleon is not a static object with three ingredients. A nucleon consists of three very light quarks held together by the strong nuclear force. Those three quarks are moving at high velocities inside the nucleon. To picture this, imagine three ping pong balls in a lottery machine. Those ping pong balls aren't the most important thing; rather, you should focus on what's forcing them into motion. Think of nucleons as three quark flecks, tossed furiously inside a little subatomic tornado. The tornado is far more important than the tiny flecks.

The Higgs only comes in the explanation for the mass of the quarks themselves, which obviously is only 2% of the mass of a nucleon.

Isn't it interesting that the "god particle" plays such an insignificant role in this case?

Zz.

FRIB Might Be In Funding Jeopardy?

No one is saying it is, but this news article reads between the lines and is sounding an alarm that the Facility for Rare Isotope Beam that is to be built at Michigan State University might be in a funding jeopardy.

But yesterday, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu came to Detroit and strongly hinted that the project was in jeopardy.

“We have to be careful,” about starting too many new things, he said, adding that when the project was approved in the waning days of the Bush Administration, quote, “we did not anticipate the depth of the recession, (and) the budget issues.”

If this was a trial balloon, it went over like lead. The Energy Secretary’s words threw Michigan’s U.S. Senators, both Democrats, into something like a tizzy. Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin, one of that body’s most powerful members, said “it would be unconscionable if the federal government failed to live up to its commitments in meeting this critical national priority.” Debbie Stabenow, who is facing a tough reelection fight, noted that the state and the university have already begun investing in the new facility, adding, “it would be absolutely unacceptable if the rug was pulled out from under them now.” She is right, of course. This project is no “bridge to nowhere” but a spaceship, of sorts, to knowledge and, conceivably, a better and more prosperous future for mankind.

Welcome to science funding, ladies and gentlemen! I show you several study cases : the Superconducting Supercollider, the ITER, etc... etc. Many of these were approved and initial funding committed, only later to see funding completely shut down, or cut drastically.

Also note that the Obama Administration requested considerable increase for the DOE and NSF budgets for 2012. Guess who was responsible to chopping those down? You elected people who want to indiscriminately chop budgets left and right without thinking of the long-range effects to the country, much less, to science and its future economic impacts. But when the cuts are in YOUR backyard, and affects you directly, you cry foul and suddenly, the fate of knowledge and "future of mankind" come into play.

Zz.

Apple's "Education Event".

So there is a buzz surrounding the invitation-only education event hosted by Apple on January 19, 2012 at the Guggenheim museum in NYC. Of course, people are already speculating what the event will entail. One interesting speculation is that is could be a major announcement related to iPad platform for textbooks.

Although Apple typically holds its events in Silicon Valley, Morris' sources said Apple chose New York for the event because of its proximity to major textbook publishers. He also said Apple would not be unveiling any new hardware at the event, despite hopes that the company would show off the next iPad sooner rather than later.

Apple's push into the education market isn't much of a surprise. In Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs, the author wrote that the company's late co-founder had "set his sights on textbooks," since he believed the $8-billion-a-year business was "ripe for destruction."

I can certainly see that. I already mentioned earlier on what I would like to see in a physics digital textbook. Being able to have several physics text on an iPad would be a tremendous convenience, especially when one has no internet connection. Of course, nowadays, everything wants to be on a cloud.

It will be interesting to see if it really is about textbooks (and more), or if it is something else.

Zz.

Did The Media Made Hawking Famous?

There's no question that Stephen Hawking is the most famous living physicist right now. The brouhaha surrounding his 70th Birthday is evidence that only someone like him can commend such a symposium with such publicity. But how did he become THIS famous and this well-known, and why?

This article makes a critical examination on Hawking's celebrity status.

The build-up began in earnest last week when Hawking gave an exclusive interview to New Scientist in which he discussed the most exciting development in physics over the course of his career (finding evidence that the universe expanded rapidly after the Big Bang), his biggest scientific blunder (thinking that information was destroyed in black holes), and his advice to young physicists (formulate an original idea that opens a new field).

But none of these comments was as newsworthy, seemingly, as the response he gave to a question about what he thinks about most during the day: “Women. They are a complete mystery.” This quote was chosen as the lead in stories about Hawking by, among others, CBS news, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Huffington Post.

This focus on Hawking-as-personality illuminates a recurring theme in his public life: that his fame—his reputation as “the brightest star in the scientific universe”—has as much, and perhaps more, to do with his media-created popular appeal as with his scientific achievements.

The article certainly mentioned the role of the media in not only presenting him to the public, but also in helping to shape his image, all with the participation of (and maybe even orchestrated by) Hawking himself.

But for journalists examining Hawking’s wider profile, the crucial point to note is that these characteristics—his cosmological research, his popularization work, his physical condition—have all been combined and packaged in his media portrayal. His public image could not have occurred without the media. With his participation, they shaped and molded it.

But does he warrant such publicity? Has he really contributed to some of the most important ideas in physics? What do other physicists think about him? More importantly, who would they rank as the physicist that has made the most important contribution to physics?

This has led to tensions within his field. Other physicists have been, at times, ambivalent about his reputation, because of what some of them see as his having a public profile that is out of proportion to his scientific merit.

In 1999, Physics World surveyed approximately 130 physicists and asked them to name the five researchers who made the most important contributions to the field. Albert Einstein came first with 119 votes. Richard Feynman came seventh with 23 votes. Paul Dirac came eighth with 22 votes. Hawking received one vote.

 I will admit that, as a physicist, I would not have put Hawking anywhere in the top 10, much less, top 5. One tends to select a physicist whose work has impact in ALL areas of physics, not just a narrow section of physics. Certainly Einstein, Dirac, Feynman, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc. all have done so. As someone who specialized in condensed matter physics while in college, and then became an accelerator physicist, I don't ever recall using or learning something that came from Hawking's work. I certainly am aware of when I was using something that came out of Einstein, Dirac, Feynman, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc., and often, in many different subject areas. Hawking's contribution to the body of knowledge of physics isn't pervasive enough.

Now, if you want to talk about his contribution to popularizing physics, especially to the public, now that's a different matter. Physics and physicists certainly owe him a lot of gratitude for his part in making the subject of physics hip and cool among many who followed Hawking's celebrity status.

Come to think of it, I think I read a while ago that Carl Sagan also suffered from a certain level of "disdain" by fellow astronomers due to his popularity in the media. Of course, one can't be a professor at Cornell if one is a lightweight in astronomy. So as in the case with Hawking, Sagan had produced quite a bit of work. But I don't recall Sagan having such an "idolization" as much as Hawking. Certainly no one insisted that Sagan should "... have won the Nobel Prize many times...” and “....is somebody who has discovered many things in his lifetime.....”, as stated by Richard Branson in the article. The level of celebrity is just different now with the media and the internet.

Members of the public, and Richard Branson in particular, need to examine why there is disconnect between how physicists perceive Hawking, and how they perceive him. Do you care more about the bells-and-whistles instead of the substance? Sure you do! Admit it! :)

Zz.

"Supersolids: What and Where Are They?"

This is a review paper on supersolids that will be published in Rev. Mod. Physics, so you get to see and read it right now. It should address all the questions you have on supersolids, but were afraid to ask!

:)

Zz.

Intro To Metal-Insulator Transition

This is a terrific review of the phenomenon surrounding the metal-insulator transition. I highly recommend it.

And if you think this is a boring topic (who cares about a metal-insulator transition?), read this review. In one swoop, this topic covers everything from high-Tc superconductivity to quantum phase transition. It also has a concise coverage of band structure description, why it works, where it doesn't, and why it doesn't. In the process, you get to learn about charge transport, charge localization, and a bunch of other fascinating stuff in the world of strongly-correlated systems.

Zz.

"Do You Know Everything?"

Er... yes, I have been asked that by high school students and even undergraduate students. What they wanted to know by asking that is whether a physics know everything that was taught in an undergraduate curriculum, and that that information and knowledge is something that a physics can simply dial up whenever he/she wants to.

It's an interesting question, and something that can have a range of answers, depending on the nature of that physicist job. I suppose if you are a university instructor, you will have a very well-honed knowledge of the subjects that you regularly teach. If you are a practicing physicist/research physicist and you don't teach, you probably are well-versed in the subject area that you deal with everyday, but not so much on the other areas. If you are a physicist that has left the field, or don't often make use of the topics that you came across while in college, then you may not be able to dial in such topic.

But the thing I always stress when I try to answer such a question here is that, as physicists, we all share the same basic knowledge. All of us know what Maxwell equations are and had done countless problems in E&M. All of us know what a "Hamiltonian/Lagrangian" are and have equally done numerous problems in classical mechanics. We certainly know what Schrodinger equation is and have an idea of what it can do. Now, we all may not be able to look at an advanced undergraduate mechanics problem and solve it immediately the way we did when we were taking such a class, but given enough time and some refresher activity through our old notes or text, we should be able to solve such a problem again. The point here is that we may not be able to immediately tackle such a problem, but we have that ability and knowledge to solve it if we have to.

So in a sense, we do know everything (almost) that we came across while in college. We may not recall how to tackle them, or what they are right away,  but we have that ability to recall such things given time and effort. As physicists, we share that common knowledge and skill. And one of such skill is the ability to learn, which I consider to be THE most important thing that I learned in being a physicist.

Zz.

A Universe From Nothing

Lawrence Krauss had a new book out titled "A Universe From Nothing". In it, he makes the same claim as Hawking/Mlodinow did in "The Grand Design", that one can use just the physics that we know of today to show that the universe can spontaneously form out of nothing. He doesn't make use of the exotica that was employed in Hawking/Mlodinow book, and in that sense, this might be easier to digest and understand than that book.

First, you have to clearly define nothing, since it isn't an official scientific term. Scientists talk about empty space as well as a state in which space and time themselves don't exist. Either type of nothing can spontaneously produce stuff.

Empty space, as it turns out, can't be perfectly empty. Every type of matter has an equal and opposite counterpart, and pairs of particles and their anti-particles can spontaneously emerge from empty space and then disappear again.

One consequence of quantum mechanics' uncertainty principle is that a vacuum cannot remain perfectly empty forever. Not only will particles pop in and out of existence without violating the laws of physics, they have to.

I've mentioned Krauss's argument in an early blog post. So obviously, this book is now out. Now, of course, as expected, it doesn't garner as much brouhaha as Hawking's book, even if the argument is as damning (and in my opinion, stronger) than Hawking's. Did those people who made all those noises against "The Grand Design" got tired and ran out of rants?

Zz.

Hawking's Best Quotes

Looks like many of the news agencies and websites are going ga-ga over Hawking's 70th Birthday symposium and celebration, even though he missed the first day of the event.

Wired Magazine has compiled what it called as Hawking's best quotes. While they're good, I'm not sure they have the same "catchyness" as Einstein's, or even, for that matter, Feynman's.

Zz.

Hawking Misses Birthday Celebration

The celebration to commemorate Stephen Hawking's 70's birthday missed the guest of honor. Hawking wasn't well enough to attend the beginning of the celebration after being discharged from a hospital last Friday.

Hawking's remarkable career is being honored as part of a daylong conference on cosmology being hosted at the university. But Vice Chancellor Leszek Borysiewicz said the celebrity scientist was released from hospital on Friday, and that "unfortunately his recovery has not been fast enough for him to be able to be here."

He didn't say when Hawking was hospitalized or specify the nature of his condition, although he did say that Hawking would be well enough to meet some of the attendees over the next week.

Even without Hawking, anyone attended the conference?

Zz.

How Many Slaves Would It Take To Pick Those Oranges?

The 8-year olds at the Beaver Ridge Elementary school somewhere in Georgia had a rather "colorful" math homework assignment. They were asked to solve math problems with very eye-raising context:

"Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?"

"If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"

It is never too young to instill bigotry or violence, I suppose.

Supposedly, the possible reason why the math teachers gave such questions was .....

"In this one, the teachers were trying to do a cross-curricular activity," Gwinnett County school district spokeswoman Sloan Roach said.

 Really! What curricular activity were they trying to cross with math? Child-beating 101?

At best, some people used very poor judgement and poor tastes.

Zz.

Greatest Living Physicist?

I'm always uncomfortable with question like this. Not only is it almost impossible to pick one, but what exactly do we mean by "greatest"? Is it in size of the person's waistline?

In any case, Physics World is conducting a poll on on their Facebook page on who people would consider as the "greatest" living physicist. They proposed or nominated 5 names:


Philip Anderson
Stephen Hawking
Steven Weinberg
Frank Wilczek
Ed Witten

At least they included a condensed matter physicist!

You can cast your vote there if you wish. I'd rather ask you on who you think should have been included for consideration on that list, and why.

Zz.

Art Is Like Science? NOT!

Why do people want to "justify" something by equating it to science or physics in particular? We have seen this "physics envy" in economics, and we have seen many crackpottery and pseudosciences that try to validate themselves by claiming that physics "explains" whatever it is that they believe in. Now along comes the practice of art!

This "practicing artist" is equating what she is doing as being similar to being a scientist.

As a practicing artist I see a lot in common with my scientific counterparts. My studio is my laboratory where I'm constantly experimenting with new materials and subjects. I wear a really messy version of a lab coat splattered with paint. I 'publish' my findings in the form of exhibitions. I even conducted an experiment on myself while painting to dissect the the creative process, which I determined to have eight stages, in one my earliest essays for HuffPost. Of course whether or not my art is predicting the next major breakthrough in physics remains to be seen.

Of course, she's only making a comparison at the superficial level here because she doesn't see things underneath that. Let's dissect this carefully, shall we?

1. My studio is my laboratory where I'm constantly experimenting with new materials and subjects. The artist is experimenting using new materials and subjects. That's the extent of it. A scientist is performing an experiment to figure out what Nature is trying to say. A scientist's experiment must produce a set of results that are REPRODUCIBLE, meaning the result is not subjective. And practically ALL scientific experiments are subjected to not only the accuracy of the instruments, but the accuracy/statistics of the results. When was the last time one sees such criteria being imposed on art?

2. I wear a really messy version of a lab coat splattered with paint.
Ignoring the really stupid statement being made here, I could also easily say that she has a lot in common to a butcher (messy coat, splattered with blood). So how come she doesn't make that comparison? And how many experimental physicists do you see wearing lab coats anyway? I don't even own one, much less, wear one!

3. I 'publish' my findings in the form of exhibitions.
This is laughable, that she would compare an art exhibitions to a scientific publication. Just think of (i) the refereeing process, (ii) the reason for a science publication (scrutiny, reproducibility by independent sources, etc..) is way different than having an art exhibition.

4. I even conducted an experiment on myself while painting to dissect the the creative process, 
How is this even similar to what scientists do is anyone's guess. We don't do an experiment on ourselves. This is not a common practice.

5. Of course whether or not my art is predicting the next major breakthrough in physics remains to be seen.
Oh, I can answer that easily. There won't be, and I'm 100% certain of that.

All of the above comparison done by the artist is based on a superficial appearance of what she thinks a scientist does. There is no attempt at understanding the what, why, and how. It is like she can't tell the difference between a mallard duck and Sesame Street's Big Bird ("oh, they both have what looks like feathers!").

People should not try to piggyback on top of science to justify what they are doing, especially when there's no justification for such comparison.

Zz.

Temporal Cloaking

OK, we have had cloaking of objects using these matematerials. Now along comes an experimental demonstration of not spatial cloaking, but temporal cloaking[1]!

Abstract: Recent research has uncovered a remarkable ability to manipulate and control electromagnetic fields to produce effects such as perfect imaging and spatial cloaking. To achieve spatial cloaking, the index of refraction is manipulated to flow light from a probe around an object in such a way that a ‘hole’ in space is created, and the object remains hidden. Alternatively, it may be desirable to cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and the idea of temporal cloaking has been proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time, producing a ‘time hole’ in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the event from the observer. This approach is based on accelerating the front part of a probe light beam and slowing down its rear part to create a well controlled temporal gap—inside which an event occurs—such that the probe beam is not modified in any way by the event. The probe beam is then restored to its original form by the reverse manipulation of the dispersion. Here we present an experimental demonstration of temporal cloaking in an optical fibre-based system by applying concepts from the space–time duality between diffraction and dispersive broadening. We characterize the performance of our temporal cloak by detecting the spectral modification of a probe beam due to an optical interaction and show that the amplitude of the event (at the picosecond timescale) is reduced by more than an order of magnitude when the cloak is turned on. These results are a significant step towards the development of full spatio-temporal cloaking.

There is also a News and Views article on this work in the same issue of Nature.

I'm still reading this, but thought those who have access to Nature might want to looking into it. Fascinating work!

Zz.

[1] M. Fridman et al., Nature v.481, p.62 (2012).

Assembly of Prototype Blocks for NOvA Detector

For those who don't get to see the "behind the scenes" of all the hard work that goes into constructing some of the stuff that we want to do, here is a video of one such endeavor. This is the assembly of the prototype NOvA detector prototype that will eventually be employed at Ash River in Minnesota. It took a lot of engineering effort to come up with not only to come up with the design, but also to figure out how to properly assemble these detectors at the remote site.




A little bit of insight into this video. This testing was done at Argonne National Lab. They assembled and tested it under the High Energy Physics division's effort. What they didn't mention in the video is that the "glue" that they used to assemble the detector STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN! :) :) I've always wanted them to actually use the glue each time we have high-level visits by some administrators from DOE or somewhere, so that these people can smell the stink! But I suppose that would be bad form. :)

Zz.

Stephen Hawking 70th Birthday Celebration

For someone who was given only 2 years to live, Stephen Hawking has not only outlived that, but has lived a life that is quite remarkable, to say the least.

This article briefly looks back at his life and times. It also mentioned the upcoming 70th Birthday celebration in his honor, and a new exhibition devoted to Hawking.

On Sunday, Hawking will celebrate his 70th birthday, and this week a conference will be held in his honour in Cambridge: the 27 invited speakers are world leaders in black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics. While his body was paralysed, Hawking used his mind to journey through the cosmos, glimpsing the origins of space and time. And that, indeed, is the story of his life: he is a man who has defied the laws of medicine in order to rewrite the laws of physics. 

If anyone reading his is planning on attending the conference and/or the exhibition, I would appreciate a report.

Zz.

The Race To Build The ILC

Happy New Year!

This article describes briefly the need for the International Linear Collider, and why the US is losing its grip on its ability to build one. It is another indication of the sad state of high energy physics in the US.

To physicists, a circular collider like the one at CERN is like a telescope, Brau says. It reveals where all sorts of new particles hang out like a telescope discovering new stars. But a straight-line linear collider like the ILC is more of a microscope. It offers very precise views of what is going on at pre-set magnifications, locations that have to be revealed by the circular collider discoveries.

Japan wants to build it, Europe wants to build it, and Russia wants to build it. The ILC effort in the US, on the other hand, is languishing  in a sea of uncertain funding. While this describes science funding in general in the US, the high energy physics, and the ILC in particular, has not had that much of a financial support.

If this track continues, the next big particle physics experiment would  not be built on US soil. Now, this may not mean much to those who don't have a clue on such an impact, but it means that it will be DECADES dramatic impact. This is because the planning of such a facility now takes at least a decade. Construction adds another several years. You just can't get back into the game that easily and that quickly. Not having the ILC in the US means that it will be another 20-30 years before it can even be considered to host another such large-scale facility. That is a very long time to go without.

Zz.

Stephen Hawking Posted Help Wanted Ad

In a job that I would categorize as being the voice of the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking has posted a Help Wanted advertisement for someone to support and maintain his electronic voice system.

The famed British physicist is seeking an assistant to help develop and maintain the electronic speech system that allows him to communicate his vision of the universe. An informal job ad posted to the famed physicist's website said the assistant should be computer literate, ready to travel, and able to repair electronic devices "with no instruction manual or technical support."
.
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The synthesizer's robotic monotone has become nearly as famous as Hawking himself, but the computer — powered by batteries fastened to the back of Hawking's wheelchair — isn't just for speaking.

It can connect to the Internet over cell phone networks and a universal infrared remote enables the physicist to switch on the lights, watch television, or open doors either at home or at the office.

There ya go! If you have the skills, you might get to travel all over the world and maintain the voice of this icon.

Zz.

Fringe Physics

This is a very good review of "Physics on the Fringe". It has almost everything that I wanted to say whenever a crackpot tells me that I have to pay attention to his or her "theory".

Quantum theory and special and general relativity (which Carter, like many outsider physicists, rejects) aren’t entrenched for no reason. They seem to describe the world in a real way - having proven empirically robust and useful in various applications. Microchips, GPS satellites, and many other inventions rely on the remarkably precise predictions they make about how matter and energy interact. Wertheim points this out, but fails to adequately address the obvious question - given these theories’ successes, is it really all that much to ask that an outsider theory provide at least as much explanatory power?

No, it isn't too much to ask, but it is too much to ask of these crackpots. But the most annoying aspect is equating a field such as physics, where an objective verification and validity exist, to something in the arts, where subjectivity and personal opinion rule.

Some outsider theories of physics might be evocative and beautiful, but if their proponents haven’t done the legwork (read: math) to show why they can compete with other, more established theories, why should we listen to them? Why should physics be an open endeavor in the same way most people would agree art should be (an argument Wertheim hints at repeatedly)? Since she sidesteps these questions, “Physics on the Fringe,’’ while often fascinating, doesn’t quite reach its potential.

I'd say that anyone that equates those two fields is clueless to what science is.

Zz.

ATLAS In Lego

The title and content of this news article are a bit inaccurate, but it is still an astounding endeavor to do. A physics professor at the Neils Bohr Institute has gotten his students to build a replica of the ATLAS detector using, get this, LEGO!

Mehlhase has decided to help promote the LHC to students by taking the time to recreate a 1:50 scale model of it using Lego bricks. In total he spent 81 hours creating it, which was split between 48 hours of designing the model on his laptop, and a further 33 hours putting it together.

I'm not sure how this "promotes" the LHC, as if the LHC needs any more promoting lately. And as you can read from the comments, a lot of responses pointed to the fact that what has been created is the ATLAS detector, not the LHC, which is the whole complex itself that consists of several different detectors (physics professors shouldn't make such mistakes, or is this something that was due to the news reporting?).

Not sure if LEGO will start producing LEGO sets specific for building science structures after this.

Zz.

LHC Discovers Its First New Particle

It may not be the Higgs, but hey, a new particle is a new particle!

News reports are citing the uploaded ArXiv preprint that the LHC has discovered its first new particle, the chi_b.

The Chi_b (3P) is a more excited state of Chi particles already seen in previous collision experiments, explained Prof Roger Jones, who works on the Atlas detector at the LHC.

"The new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together," he told BBC News.

"People have thought this more excited state should exist for years but nobody has managed to see it until now. 

 This is an example of the argument that the LHC wasn't built just to find one thing. No one in their right mind would want to pay and authorize the building of such an expensive machine just to look for one thing. Even discounting the Higgs, the LHC is a machine that will reshape our understanding of fundamental particles. This discovery is merely the beginning.

Zz.

"Systematic study of student understanding of the relationships between the directions of force, velocity, and acceleration in one dimension"

I posted a rather straightforward question earlier that requires a good understanding of force, acceleration, and velocity in one-dimension. I asked readers of this blog to post a comment as to the answer to that mechanics question.

The answer is F, which means that all three scenarios are possible.

The question was taken from a physics education research paper with the above title, which you should be able to access for free. It has other questions on similar level that you might want to take a look. In fact, if you are an intro physics student, you might want to test your understanding by reading this paper and see how your understanding (or lack of it) is a serious topic of study.

Actually, if one understands the force, acceleration, and velocity at every part of the trajectory of a simple spring-mass system, one would see that the car-on-the-hill problem is no different.

Zz.

The Need For New Physics, With Or Without The Higgs

John Ellis has written an intriguing opinion piece which argued that whether the Higgs boson is found or not, there is already a need for new physics beyond the Standard Model (link may be open only for a limited time).

It is too early to say whether these promising hints will be confirmed, but if they are, many people would take this to be a validation of the standard model of particle physics. There have been previous indirect signs from other data that the Higgs boson probably weighs less than 150 GeV, and CERN's possible observation would be in line with that. But I am a contrarian. I argue that whether or not the Higgs boson exists, we already know that there must be physics beyond the standard model.

I think most particle physicists are acutely aware that the Standard Model, as it stands, may need to be changed. But whether this is in the form of a tweak, or a major overhaul, that is still up in the air. The outcome of the Higgs search will certainly be a contributing factor to this.

Zz.

Accelerator Research Center at Fermilab Broke Grounds

A new building to house the Accelerator Research Center at Fermilab broke ground this past week.

The goal for the new center is to build relationships between scientists and the private sector to develop accelerator technology that can be used in medicine, national security and other industries.

The facility will also work to address environmental issues, such as purifying wastewater, and providing energy-efficient sterilization of medical instruments and food packaging.

Kids, this is just one more example where, even when high energy physics/particle physics experiments are slowly "dying" in the US, the field of accelerator physics still flourishes. An early Symmetry article shows where this field is almost "begging" for people. Projects such as the one here in Fermilab shows how versatile and important a particle accelerator can be (read this). Someone who is in this field are not tied to one particular industry or field and thus, has a wide range of "employability".

So while Fermilab may no longer be colliding particles, it still wants to do research in accelerator physics. That should say a lot of the field of accelerator physics.

Zz.

Car On A Hill

OK, I found a physics education paper that studied Intro Physics students understanding (or misunderstanding) of the concept of velocity, acceleration, and force in one dimension. One of the questions they used to test a student's understanding is actually quite interesting in the sense that it DOES appear to test how well a student actually understands the difference between velocity, acceleration, and force. So I thought, before I give the link to the paper, that I will ask the question here. If you are a student, or even just someone trying to learn physics, see if you can answer this:

A car is on a hill and the direction of its acceleration is uphill. Which statement best describes the motion of the car at that time?

A. it is moving uphill
B. it is moving downhill
C. it is not moving
D. both A and B are possible
E. both A and C are possible
F. A, B, and C are possible

Try it.

This is one example where one needs to understand something beyond just a superficial level. Many people will tend to pick the obvious answer because, well, it's obvious. But to understand why the correct answer is the correct answer will require an intimate knowledge of what velocity, acceleration, and force mean, and their relationships to each other beyond just a hand-waving understanding.

I'll give this a few days, and I'll edit this post to link to the paper in question. If you happen to have read the paper already, or better yet, one of the authors, please hold off your comment and let others try it first. Please post your answer on here, but I will hold off on releasing all comments with answers till AFTER a few days, so that no one will be influenced by any of the submitted responses. Comments that do not contain the answers will be released as usual.

EDIT: I'm getting a few responses already. Again, just a reminder, I'll keep the comments that contain answers moderated for now. I'll release those in a few days when I post a link to the paper. So if you don't see your comment appearing after you submit it, you'll know why.

EDIT (12/20/2011): I've posted the answer and the source paper that this question came from. Thanks to all those who participated and posted their answers.

Zz.

First Physics Experiments In Sanford Lab

Symmetry Breaking has a news report on the first physics experiments that will move into the underground facility of the Sanford Underground Laboratory.

Early next spring researchers will begin installing two experiments there—both of them at the leading edge of 21st-century physics. The Large Underground Xenon experiment, which already is taking test run data in a building on the surface, aims to become the world’s most sensitive detector to look for a mysterious substance called dark matter. Thought to comprise 80 percent of all the matter in the universe, dark matter remains undetected so far. The second experiment, the Majorana Demonstrator, will search for one of the rarest forms of radioactive decays—neutrinoless double-beta decay. Majorana could help determine whether subatomic particles called neutrinos can act as their own anti-particles, a discovery that could help physicists better explain how the universe evolved.

No mention of LBNE, the long-baseline neutrino experiment that was in limbo and some funding trouble.

Zz.

Physics Envy?

This is a rather interesting article. It is actually a book review of Emanuel Derman's "Models Behaving Badly". In it, he looked at why mathematical models used for human behavior, such as in economics and the financial world, are really not the same as mathematical models and theories done in physics. And this is written by someone who has a background in physics, and has worked in the financial world.

Mr. Derman's particular thesis can be stated simply: Although financial models employ the mathematics and style of physics, they are fundamentally different from the models that science produces. Physical models can provide an accurate description of reality. Financial models, despite their mathematical sophistication, can at best provide a vast oversimplification of reality. In the universe of finance, the behavior of individuals determines value—and, as he says, "people change their minds."
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The basic problem, according to Mr. Derman, is that "in physics you're playing against God, and He doesn't change His laws very often. In finance, you're playing against God's creatures." And God's creatures use "their ephemeral opinions" to value assets. Moreover, most financial models "fail to reflect the complex reality of the world around them."

Other than his unfortunate use of the term "God" in this case, this is a fairly accurate reflection of my view when something like this is used to model human activities and interactions. I find that the effort in trying to find analogies from physics to fit itself into such human fields to be a bit strange and sometime amusing, thus generating the possibility of some of them having this "physics envy".

Zz.

Higgs Boson Latest Update

This is a very useful video out of Fermilab on how we are looking for the Higgs boson.




Of course, this is on the heels of the latest news out of CERN that they many have seen "evidence" of the Higgs at 124-126 GeV. These results are still at or below 3 sigma, so we will have to wait a bit further while they continue to look at the data. No one is claiming discovery as of yet.

Zz.

Vacation

Hey everyone. I just got back from a 10-day vacation (and boy, did I need it!). I'll need a few days to catch up with work, and to figure out what's going on with the world of physics. Was there any big news that I missed? They found evidence for Supersymmetry yet? :)

Being on a cruise, and being completely cut-off from the internet and phones (unless I'm willing to pay exorbitant amount of money to get connected) for several days was kinda refreshing. As someone who tries to be plugged in to the news, especially physics news, it took only a couple of days to get used to. After that, it was easy to just let go. The huge amount of food they fed you also helped to distract from your internet withdrawals! :)

And now, let's see how big of a pile of work that I may have to dive into.....

Zz.