The Physics Of "The Avengers"

Hey, did you go see "The Avengers" this past weekend and were a part of the folks who help set a new box office record for an opening weekend? I did. I don't normally go for this type of movie, but I went and see it anyway, and I was glad I did. The movie was a lot of fun, witty dialog, and hilariously funny. And oh, if you plan on seeing it, DO NOT LEAVE TILL THE CREDITS END. You'll be sorry if you did.

Anyway, as is the case whenever a movie like this opens, and opens big, you get some discussion on the physics involved in the movie. This blog article discussed the "tesseract", the almost-infinite energy source that is the center of this movie, and what everyone seems to want.

Still, with a movie like this, one has to take many of the artistic license with a grain of salt. They certainly bend the rules of physics quite a bit.

All of this does not detract from a very enjoyable movie.

Zz.

The Saga Of Lisa

Funding problems are plaguing the European effort at detecting gravitational waves. It appears that the LISA project, and its reincarnation NGO project, are not going anywhere.

But everyone you speak to still says it represented marvellous science. So why did it lose out?

There're probably a few reasons, and I'll try to summarise the comments that have been made to me.

One was the price tag. Even in its remodelled format, the mission would have cost Esa more than 1,000 million euros (the Lisa/NGO team disputes the reality of this figure) and this was substantially above the ceiling of 650 million the agency had set.

Another reason was launch readiness. Esa's executive did not believe the mission could be made ready before 2025, and it wants to maintain a certain flight cadence for its science projects, ie Esa needs to be seen to be doing stuff regularly.

This is an excruciatingly difficult experiment to do, so it will be an astounding effort if they can detect such gravitational wave. But like the Higgs, it is an aspect that needs to be verified and confirmed for GR (as with the Standard Model for the Higgs).

Zz.

Achievements and Lessons from Tevatron

One always looks back with nostalgia at something that is gone. This is no different with a facility such as the Tevatron that has produced an amazing body of knowledge for high energy physics for such a long time.

This article looks back at all the achievements of the Tevatron, and also what has been learned from that facility. Hopefully, if you didn't know much about it, you'll appreciate what has come out of it.

Zz.

Is Lorentz Force Law Incompatible with Special Relativity?

This paper has been getting quite a bit of brouhaha among physicists, but not with the General Public since most probably don't get the big deal or understand what a "Lorentz force law" is. Of course, among physics students and physicists, the Lorentz force law is one of the first things we learn in intro physics classes. So it would be astounding that a textbook principle is shown to violate Special Relativity right in front of us. But does it?

The paper is to appear in PRL (if it hasn't already), but you can find the preprint here. Adrian Cho at Science covered it last week in the News and Analysis section. It highlights the status so far where people think there's something wrong with the analysis, but no one can figure out where.

“If it's true, it's astonishing,” says Stephen Barnett, a theorist at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, U.K. “I suspect there is something subtle going on here” that doesn't contradict relativity. But Rodney Loudon, a theorist retired from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, says, “As far as I can tell, [the analysis] is right."

I tell ya, even now, classical E&M can still spring a few surprises! I love it!

Zz.

Edit (5/8/2012): As one can imagine, there are already responses to this paper. One just appeared on arXiv today:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1080

I'm sure we'll hear a lot more.

Edit (5/24/2012): More rebuttals against this paper, and this time, it comes from someone who should know what he is taking about:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4646

I believe this effectively solves the "paradox" in the original paper.

Final Day To Submit Your Nominations For Most Attractive Physicist

This is the final day to submit your nominations for our 2nd Most Attractive Physicist contest!

Don't be shy! Send in your nominations now!

Zz.

The Consolation of Philosophy

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It seems that Lawrence Krauss had to elaborate on the rather provocative interview that was published in the Atlantic barely a week ago. As you recall, in that interview, he challenged the usefulness and relevancy of philosophy and religion, in light of advances made in modern physics.

In this OpEd piece, he clarified his statement, with an apology to the philosophy community for lumping them all in one group. But he is not apologetic on the influence (or lack thereof) of the field of philosophy in advancing physics.

What I find common and so stimulating about the philosophical efforts of these intellectual colleagues is the way they thoughtfully reflect on human knowledge, amassed from empirical explorations in areas ranging from science to history, to clarify issues that are relevant to making decisions about how to function more effectively and happily as an individual, and as a member of a society.

As a practicing physicist however, the situation is somewhat different. There, I, and most of the colleagues with whom I have discussed this matter, have found that philosophical speculations about physics and the nature of science are not particularly useful, and have had little or no impact upon progress in my field. Even in several areas associated with what one can rightfully call the philosophy of science I have found the reflections of physicists to be more useful. For example, on the nature of science and the scientific method, I have found the insights offered by scientists who have chosen to write concretely about their experience and reflections, from Jacob Bronowski, to Richard Feynman, to Francis Crick, to Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, and Sir James Jeans, to have provided me with a better practical guide than the work of even the most significant philosophical writers of whom I am aware, such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. I admit that this could primarily reflect of my own philosophical limitations, but I suspect this experience is more common than not among my scientific colleagues.

But what slammed the door on what I would call "theological philosophy" is what he wrote at the end of the article.

So, to those philosophers I may have unjustly offended by seemingly blanket statements about the field, I apologize. I value your intelligent conversation and the insights of anyone who thinks carefully about our universe and who is willing to guide their thinking based on the evidence of reality. To those who wish to impose their definition of reality abstractly, independent of emerging empirical knowledge and the changing questions that go with it, and call that either philosophy or theology, I would say this: Please go on talking to each other, and let the rest of us get on with the goal of learning more about nature.

Hahaha.... I enjoyed reading that! :)

Zz.

Analytical Thinking Causes Religions Beliefs To Waver?

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Not that this is surprising to me, but there appears to be a study that suggests that when people start thinking a bit more on certain things, ".... you reject statements that otherwise you would endorse... ", and this includes certain religious beliefs.

To test this idea, the duo devised several ways to subconsciously put people in what they considered a more analytical mindset. In one experiment with 57 undergraduate students, some volunteers viewed artwork depicting a reflective thinking pose (such as Rodin's The Thinker) while others viewed art depicting less intellectual pursuits (such as throwing a discus) before answering questionnaires about their faith. In another experiment with 93 undergraduates and a larger sample of 148 American adults recruited online, some subjects solved word puzzles that incorporated words such as "analyze," "reason," and "ponder," while others completed similar puzzles with only words unrelated to thinking, such as "high" and "plane." In all of these experiments, people who got the thinking-related cues reported weaker religious beliefs on the questionnaires taken afterward than did the control group.

In a final experiment, Gervais and Norenzayan asked 182 volunteers to answer a religious questionnaire as usual, while others answered the same questionnaire printed in a hard-to-read font, which previous studies have found promotes analytic thinking. And indeed, those who had to work harder to comprehend the questionnaire rated their religious beliefs lower.

I'm usually skeptical on whether such things can be studied, and if these statistics are reliable. The authors claim they are since many different studies and methodologies seem to indicate the same, consistent findings, which makes it a bit more believable.

Still, if this is true, then Science and Religion are truly at odds with each other, not just culturally, but rather at the FUNDAMENTAL level. It means that they are, in principle, incompatible with each other.

Zz.

Role of Physics in Medicine

This is a good article that reviews Lancet's special issue on Physics and Medicine.

While many of us, and especially those who are in this field, are aware of this, the article is more useful when it is preached to those who are not in the choir. The general public, and especially the politicians that determine fundings, need to be told of this FACT. While the knowledge that is gained out of apparently "useless" subject area such as high energy physics, elementary particle physics, astrophysics, etc. are themselves interesting and important, the EXPERIMENTAL techniques and the technology that are pushed to do these studies are paving the way for applications in other areas, including medicine. Your x-rays, MRI, proton therapy, PET-scans, etc., all came out of the advances made to perform these high energy physics/astrophysics/etc. experiments!

High energy physics, especially, continues to push detector technology. Unlike many areas of physics where experimentalists buy equipment off the shelf, and therefore their ability to do many of these experiments depends on what is commercially available, high energy physicists/astrophysicists often have to BUILD and DEVELOP their own detectors. The area of detector physics deals with a lot of applications that are targeted at detecting single-photon pulses of Cerenkov light from, say, a neutrino interacting with a tank of water, or a calorimeter for particle physics collider, etc. Many of the knowledge gained in producing these detectors will eventually make it into other areas, including medicine.

What this means is that, reduced funding in areas which you think has no effect on you is simply going to affect the future of your well-being, and the well-being of your children and grandchildren. It takes years for such knowledge to trickle down to useful applications, and one is simply ruining the seeds that one should be planting now.

Zz.

Frank Wilczek's "A Long View Of Particle Physics"

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This is probably either an excerpt, or the text of a talk given by Frank Wilczek at last year's Solvay Conference.

Abstract: 2011 marked the hundredth anniversary both of the famous Solvay conferences, and of the Geiger-Marsden experiment that launched the modern understanding of subatomic structure. I was asked to survey the status and prospects of particle physics for the anniversary Solvay conference, with appropriate perspective. This is my attempt.

It's a surprisingly short paper, considering the title, which means it is short on details. Still, it might be an informative read for some people.

Zz.

Rethinking The Neutrino

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I mentioned the news out of Data Bay a while back. The paper has now been published in PRL and you can get a free copy of it. It is also the subject of an excellent review article on our knowledge of neutrinos so far, especially on the mass/mixing angle. If you want a quick catch-up on what is what, this is the article to read.

Zz.

Retired Physicist Makes Cheap Touchpad Stylus

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If you have a tablet, you know how expensive a stylus can get. I bought one for my iPad, and I looked for the cheapest (~$12 at Best Buy). Turns out, I wasn't the only one who thought that, even at that price, it is a tad too expensive. A retired physicist thought so too, but he decided to do something about it.

The instructions for installing Microsoft Office on his new tablet suggested purchasing a stylus to make it easier to type on the keypad. When Gordon began researching that suggestion, though, he discovered that the better ones cost from $15 to $50.

"I thought that seemed a lot of money, and I thought that if they do work, I can make one myself," Gordon said.

Using his knowledge of the technology involved in touch screens, Gordon set to work.

You may read the link to see what he did. He's selling his "homemade" stylus for $5 and all proceeds benefit the Amherst Senior Center.

BTW, CNET had ran an article on how to make your own stylus in less than 2 minutes! Granted, it looks rather ... er .... rustic, but it works in a pinch.

Zz.

Interview With Lawrence Krauss - Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

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On the same day that I posted a rebuttal by Vic Stenger, the Atlantic published an entertaining interview with Lawrence Krauss in response to the recent attack on his book in the NY Times. In it, he showed how little he thinks about philosophy, or philosophy of science in particular.

I want to start with a general question about the relationship between philosophy and physics. There has been a fair amount of sniping between these two disciplines over the past few years. Why the sudden, public antagonism between philosophy and physics? 

Krauss: That's a good question. I expect it's because physics has encroached on philosophy. Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then "natural philosophy" became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers. This sense that somehow physicists, because they can't spell the word "philosophy," aren't justified in talking about these things, or haven't thought deeply about them---

Is that really a claim that you see often?

Krauss: It is. Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.

Whoa! Them's fighting words! If that doesn't start a fight with philosophers, I don't know anything that ever will! :)

You should read the rest of his interview, where he clarified quite a bit more on the central theme of his book. Very entertaining!

Zz.

Physics Didn't Get Him Off His Traffic Ticket

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For people who thought that UCSD physicist  Dmitri Krioukov got out of his traffic ticket because he argued his case using physics, we now have the opinion from the presiding judge, and it isn't as "sexy" of a story as the media has made it to be.

But the equation-filled paper on the physics of a car in motion went largely over the head of Superior Court Commissioner Karen Riley, she told U-T San Diego.

“The ruling was not based on his physics explanation,” Riley said. “It was based on the officer’s view ... The officer, wasn’t close enough to the intersection to have a good view.”

There ya go! Simple geometry and optics! :)

Zz.

A Lot Of Something On Nothing

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Looks like the debate originating out of Lawrence Krauss's latest book "A Universe from Nothing" continues. This time, Vic Stenger wrote an opinion piece with counter argument against a recent NY Times OpEd opinion piece by Philosopher David Albert.

The problem here, of course, is the insistence that (i) there has to be something and (ii) that this somehow can stop at God and that's it. Stenger stated this clearly:

Albert is not satisfied that Krauss has answered the fundamental question: Why there is something rather than nothing, that is, being rather than nonbeing? Again, there is a simple retort: Why should nothing, no matter how defined, be the default state of existence rather than something? And, to bring religion into the picture, one could ask: Why is there God rather than nothing? Once theologians assert that there is a God (as opposed to nothing), they can't turn around and ask a cosmologist why there is a universe (as opposed to nothing). They claim God is a necessary entity. But then, why can't a godless multiverse be a necessary entity?

In other words, if one lives by the philosophy that everything must be the result of something, then one must also ask "What is God the result of?" One can't simply shift the rule and stop asking the same question by the time one reaches God. If one argues that the rule doesn't apply to god (i.e. "god state" is the ground state of the system), then why can't cosmologists argue that vacuum state is the ground state of our universe and stop there? The vacuum ground state has more experimental evidence than the god ground state (which has none). So which one would you believe in?

Zz.

PVC Extrusions For NOvA

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I pointed out a video of the assembly of the prototype NOvA detector a while back. This is a picture of the cross-section of the PVC extrusions that make up the detector block.

The channels formed by the extrusions will be filled with scintillator liquid (mineral oil?) that hopefully will emit light when a neutrino interacts with the liquid.

A lot of studies have been done with huge structures of these PVC, especially on its structure integrity for something that size over a period of time. In any case, the NOvA detector will have its ribbon-cutting ceremony sometime later this month, and construction will commence very soon afterwards.

You may read more about the NOvA project at their website.

Zz.

No Dark Matter In Our Neighborhood?

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The most provocative report from this past week is the recent publication of a new result that tries to find any sign of dark matter in our part of the galaxy. Strangely enough, the researchers found none, or at least, there wasn't any need for the presence of dark matter to explain the observed celestial dynamics.

But that's not what Christian Moni Bidin, an astronomer at the University of Concepción in Chile, and colleagues find. Using data gathered with several telescopes, they studied old stars called red giants in a cylindrical region a couple of light-years wide and extending 13,000 light-years above the plane of the galaxy. Treating the stars a bit like atoms in a gas, researchers assumed that they were trapped in the gravitational "well" of the galaxy. So by studying distributions of the stars' speeds in three dimensions, they could deduce the well's shape and hence the total distribution of mass from both dark and ordinary matter along the cylinder. Subtracting the distribution of ordinary matter as determined from star counts would then reveal the distribution of dark matter.

When Moni Bidin and colleagues did the analysis, however, they found that no dark matter was needed to explain the stars' speeds. The researchers had expected to detect a complicated mass distribution with a contribution from the galaxy's disk of stars and gas and the presumably spherical "halo" of dark matter surrounding the disk. Instead, they found that the disk alone neatly explained their data, as they report in a paper in press at The Astrophysical Journal.

Of course, there are skepticism with this report, especially with regards to the type of analysis being done.

Or not. The new result may say more about the method than the distribution of dark matter, Navarro says. To get that distribution, at each position in space Moni Bidin and colleagues must subtract one large quantity (the amount of ordinary matter) from another large quantity (the amount of total mass) to get a small quantity. That process is likely to suffer from large uncertainties, Navarro says. "I applaud them for trying," he says. "I just don't think this method will ever give a conclusive answer." Moni Bidin says the method is robust and that larger surveys to come will pin down the dark matter distribution more precisely.

As with any report that are this controversial (re: superluminal neutrinos), we need to let the system works out on its own. A lot more studies need to be done with more analysis and observations. Things are seldom confirmed with just one observation using one technique, especially in a situation such as this where the methodology of analysis influence the result. So I certainly would not want to draw any kind of conclusion this soon.

Zz.

Webinar: Framework for Next Generation of Science Standards

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Here's a free webinar for you to attend if you're interested.

Friday, April 27, 2012
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. US ET

Helen Quinn, Professor of Physics at Stanford University and Education and Public Outreach Manager at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), will outline the Framework for K-12 Science Education that is the basis of the coming Next Generation Science Standards. Helen will discuss aspects of the Framework that are of interest when thinking about physics teacher preparation.

Noah Finkelstein, associate professor of physics and director of the Physics Education Research group at UC Boulder, will moderate the discussion.

Long-time readers of this blog would have recalled that Helen Quinn wrote one of the most compelling essays that I've come across, and I've asked everyone to read it. If you haven't, this is a good reminder for you to do so if you missed it the first time around.

Zz.

Postmodernism, The Physicist, and The Porn Star

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When was the last time you read an article that has, in one shot, something about creative writing, postmodernism, a physicist, and a porn start trying to change career? Well now you have!

This article is lamenting the state of creative writing classes, and that they no longer teach you how to write, but now teach you how to think. But worse still, they inflict on postmodernism ideas onto students.

The trouble with creative writing classes in the modern university is they do not teach writing. As anyone who has suffered through one of these classes knows, they are nebulous attempts at inculcating students with the values of today's postmodernists -- most importantly, pretension. Pop-cultural analysis, pop-psychology, and pop-philosophy are discussed, while how to write a compelling sentence is not. Rules of capitalization and punctuation are ignored probably because they are vestiges of neocolonial homophobic sexism.

Now, as someone who didn't take creative writing in college, I have no idea if this is true, or if this is universally practiced in all schools. So I'd like to hear from someone who knows more about this than I do. Still, the mention of the word "postmodernism" cannot evade the infamous Alan Sokal that managed to throw a pie in the face at that discipline.

Social Text's editors published the article in 1996 and soon after Sokal revealed it was a hoax, proving that certain branches of academia today are unable to distinguish nonsense from fashionable nonsense. This stems from the fact that relativism forms the intellectual bedrock of the humanities today. Because attempts at discovering truths are derided as antediluvian, substance and argumentation are relegated, while servility to the gatekeepers takes on supreme value. This is why we get such fashionable nonsense, and, unfortunately, this is exactly what Lorelei Lee will both teach and be taught.

Ah, such fun!

Zz.

No Exotic Explanation For Pioneer "Anomaly"

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So much for all the exotic explanations and theories for the Pioneer anomaly. As reported earlier, there appears to be a rather conventional explanation for unusual trajectory taken by Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts. This latest news is a further confirmation to that conventional explanation.

According to Turyshev, the biggest challenge in developing the simulation was the "lack of precise and complete information on the spacecraft", which was designed and built more than 40 years ago. As a result, the team interviewed engineers who had built the spacecraft and still had notes and memories on the design and materials used. Also crucial to the team's success was the use of data that were beamed back to Earth during the mission. These included the temperature at several locations on the spacecraft, which allowed the team to evaluate the accuracy of its computer model and also to infer the thermal properties of some of the materials used in the satellite.

The team also performed an independent analysis of the trajectory of Pioneer 10 from which the researchers were also able to extract the relative contributions of the RTG and instruments to the anomalous acceleration. Both the thermal simulations and the trajectory analysis gave similar results, within experimental and computational errors.

You may read the ArXiv preprint of the result here.

Now, I wonder what are the "excuses" given by all these people who had proposed all of these exotic theories for this anomaly? We tend not to hear much from them after something like this. Kinda like the superluminal neutrinos. Tons of exotic explanations are offered, but not offers any explanation or retractions when the effects either goes away, or is explained away by conventional means.

Zz.

Bending Light Without Dispersion

It is amazing that, even after all these years, Maxwell equations can still hold a lot of surprises.

A theoretical solution to Maxwell equations may produce the bending of light, even in vacuum, without any dispersion.

In a paper in Physical Review Letters, Ido Kaminer and colleagues at Technion, Israel, report on wave solutions to Maxwell’s equations that are both nondiffracting and capable of following a much tighter circular trajectory than was previously thought possible. Apart from fundamental scientific interest, such wave solutions may lead to the possibility of synthesizing shape-preserving optical beams that make curved left- or right-handed turns on their own. The equations describing these light waves could also be generalized to describe similar behavior in sound and water waves.

You can read the rest of the review article in the link, and even get a free copy of the actual paper.

I can't wait for someone to demonstrate this experimentally.

Zz.

Nomination Still On-Going For Most Attractive Physicists

In case you missed it, the nomination period is still ongoing for our 2nd Most Attractive Physicist contest. Don't miss nominating the physicists you think are the most attractive.

So far, I've only received 3 nominations, and they are all for female physicists (where are the males?). You still have a bit of time left to submit your nominations, so don't be shy!

Zz.

Victory Over Traffic Tickets

This story seems to be getting a lot of legs. A couple of people have pointed it out to me already.

A UCSD physicist claimed victory over a traffic ticket by using a simple kinematic analysis.

A physicist at the University of California San Diego used his knowledge of measuring bodies in motion to show in court why he couldn't be guilty of a ticket for failing to halt at a stop sign. The argument, now a four-page paper delving into the differences between angular and linear motion, supposedly got the physicist out of a $400 ticket. If you want to use this excuse, you'll have to learn a little math -- and some powers of persuasion.

The article cited a "paper", which is wrong, since it is only an ArXiv article (not sure if and where it was submitted). Note also that it was uploaded on April 1st, but supposedly, this isn't an April Fools stunt.

You may read his analysis yourself and see if you are convinced of his innocence, or if you can poke holes in his argument.

This story reminds of an earlier attempt at using the laws of physics to argue against another supposed traffic violation.

Zz.

How Do Physics Careers Compare To Others?

A brief analysis of a recent ranking of 200 jobs, in which a career in physics was ranked surprisingly high - 25.

You can read of the ranking in the link given in the article, and also the analysis of what was missed and what wasn't. But in the end, I tend to agree with the writer, even taking into consideration that I, unlike him/her, is not a science/newspaper reporter.

Important factors like these are often glossed over when these career rankings are compiled, but there's certainly not an easy way to quantify all of these factors. Furthermore, weighting all of these factors for everyone doesn't work well: Diverse people are going to value different things in a career.

While these career rankings can be fun and interesting, I don't think they're quite as helpful as they claim to be.

Zz.

El Videos?

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OK, I had a chuckle, or several chuckles, while reading this article. It is a report on using videos as supplements for students at the US Air Force Academy. What got me to chuckle was the effect of doing their own videos on not just the students, but also the instructors who had to appear on those videos.

Additionally, instructors both teach what we know and impart who we are; therefore, we also preferred an approach to EI Videos that would promote officer development as well as academic success.Since the goal is to develop character and not just teach academics, most EI Videos include a brief introductory vignette, a 30-120 second segment before the pedagogical portion encouraging cadets to form better habits, pointing out the military or practical applications of the topics being discussed, and/or sharing personal experiences related to the topic or the training process.  One of the cadets' favorite vignettes is an instructor attempting dance moves from “Saturday Night Fever” and then admitting, “When I try to dance,I look like a dufus –because I haven't practiced.”  The vignette closes and transitions into the example problem with the admonition that without practicing the homework problems, watching EI Videos won't make them any better at math than watching “Dancing with the Stars” will make them a better dancer.  Other vignettes feature an instructor with a barbell encouraging, “The math class is the weight room for the mind . . .” warning against “Five frequently fatal freshmen physics fantasies”[3]or holding a precision rifle and explaining the importance of mathematics in the profession of arms which is about “putting projectiles on target.”  Some example videos have been uploaded to YouTube, because a lot about the vignettes is hard to explain in writing, but easy to perceive.

Detailed production tips are described in the appendix.  None of the video instructors have been terribly excited about how they look and sound on video.  The camera adds 20 pounds and seems to magnify every wrinkle and mannerism, every “um”, “er”, and pregnant pause while one collects a thought and considers the next phrase.  Confidence and improved ability come with practice.  We have learned to get over our vanities and get the job done putting well considered solutions on video.  Teaching on video is a great tool for breaking bad habits and smoothing one's presentation.  One video instructor lost 30 pounds to better present a good example of lifelong fitness on camera and in the classroom.  The path to growth is jumping in and trying it. 

That's funny! And oh, the videos seem to be quite effective as well! :)

Zz.

Matt Strassler's "OPERA: What Went Wrong?"

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I'm a bit late to the party, but if you haven't read Matt Strassler's analysis of what went wrong with the OPERA's result, you should! It not only gives you a good overview of what happened and what might have happened, but you should also read his personal take on the matter, and why the OPERA leaderships made a poor judgement on how they announced the results.

Like I said earlier, it appears that many people forgot the Cold Fusion debacle and lessons on how to handle a potentially-explosive news. Things have changed a lot since the late 80's when Cold Fusion debacle occurred, and news and rumors spread almost instantaneously nowadays. So the OPERA debacle is many times worse.

One can only hope the next group of people with such a type of result will learn from this embarrassment.

Zz.

The Elements iPad App

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Hey, did you see NOVA's "Hunting the Elements" last week? If you enjoyed that, then there's an iPad app for you to continue with your exploration of the various elements.

The Elements iPad AppThe free app, available now on the App Store, takes the periodic table off the wall and puts it into users’ hands, bringing life to the world’s elements in colorful and dynamic ways.

NOVA Elements, featuring tech guru David Pogue, allows users to explore an interactive periodic table, build elements from their particles, construct 3D rotating molecules, and watch the two-hour NOVA program, “Hunting the Elements,” premiering tonight at 9PM/8c on PBS (check local listings).

The NOVA Elements App allows users to:

• Learn key facts about each element: its discovery, appearance, real-world application and more.

• Play in an atomic sandbox to create any or all of the 118 elements by adding the correct number of protons, neutrons and electrons.
  
• Combine the elements you’ve built into 3D rotatable molecules found in everyday objects, like a banana or a watch, in the “My Essential Elements” game.
  
• Jump to related segments in NOVA’s “Hunting the Elements” program with the tappable periodic table.
  
• Share your exploration and discoveries with tweets.

• Watch the complete two-hour NOVA program, “Hunting the Elements.” Streaming is only available in the U.S. and its territories.

The NOVA Elements App is available for free from the App Store on iPad or at here.

So here's another app to add to something that might be useful and relevant to physics.

Zz.

The 2nd Physics And Physicists Most Attractive Physicist Contest!

Oh yes! Just when you think it was safe to follow this blog, I am going back into the territory that caused so much ruckus last time. That's right, folks, the poll/contest for us to select who we think is the most attractive physicist is back!! Get your kids off the streets and make sure grandma is sitting down in her chair! We are going to take no prisoners!

The first contest when quite well, don't you think? We anointed our attractive physicists, both female and male. Strangely enough, some people were offended by the poll on the female physicists, but strangely enough, no one felt offended by the poll done on the male physicists. Wonder why that is? Oh well, this isn't a psychology blog, or we would have dealt into that at length.

So, on with our 2nd contest. We will follow the rules that was set up for the last one, but with a few changes:


1. Anyone can nominate a physicist who he/she thinks is a candidate for being the most attractive. The deadline for nomination is April 30, 2012.


2. The physicists that landed in the TOP 3 for men and women in our previous contest are NO LONGER QUALIFIED to be nominated for this contest. However, everyone else who were nominated qualifies for this contest.

3. You may nominate as many as you want. HOWEVER, you should include either a picture, or at least a link to a picture, so that the voters have an idea what this physicist looks like. The links can also be videos, etc., i.e. anything to give the rest of us a good idea on this person's feature. This will be useful especially if it is someone who is not a household name.

4. You may nominate someone based on his/her attractiveness at a different age. For example, the Albert Einstein who worked at the Swiss Patent Office may be more attractive than the one that landed at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. So if you are nominating Einstein in his younger years, you have to accompany that nomination with a picture of him in that age.

5. If you are submitting someone who isn't a household name, it would also help that you include a link to show that this person is a physicist. A link to either a paper, or university position, etc. would be sufficient. But how do I define a physicist, you ask? To me, anyone with a physics degree, even if that person isn't a practicing physicist, qualifies! I may have to contact you if I can't verify a nominee's credentials.

6. Don't be afraid to nominate yourself, if you are a physicist, and if you think you might qualify as being attractive. Or nominate your colleagues, with their permission, of course! I want as many good-looking physicists as I can get for this contest.

7. Submit your vote by adding a comment to this blog post. If you do not wish to have your nomination made public, please clearly indicate as such and your nomination will not be released (all comments to this blog are moderated and will only be made public upon release by me).

8. At the end of the nomination period, I will tally up all the nomination, and will select the Top 5 the male and a separate Top 5 for the female physicist.

9. I will then open up the voting to all readers of this blog, so YOU get to choose who you think is the most attractive male and female physicist. I haven't decided yet on what I'll do if we end up with a tie, so I'll just make things up as I go along if that happens.

10. If you see that you have been nominated by someone, but you do not wish to be included, please contact me (zapperz at gmail) or leave a comment to this blog post and I will remove the nomination.

OK? Ready? So bring it on! And let's see how badly I get bashed this time around.

Zz.

The Non-Newtonian Physics Of Angry Birds Space

It was bound to happen. Analysis of the physics (or non-physics) of the new Angry Birds Space is already out. This is one such example. Of course, anyone with a good knowledge of physics would have already spotted a few non-Newtonian dynamics of this game.

But some of the more realistic characteristics of the game don’t quite obey Newton’s laws. For starters, the gravitational fields appear to have a uniform magnitude instead of weakening with distance from an object’s center (called the inverse square rule). That seems to be a casualty of making the game fun. “Otherwise, gravity would be too weak at the edges of the field,” says Erin Catto, the game physics programmer who created Box2d, the physics engine that runs behind the curtain at Angry Birds.

It's still a fun game but it would have been ridiculously outrageous if they had stuck with the actual physics. :)

Zz.

Looming Crisis For US Physics

We have heard this many times, and at some point, it's hard not to say "So what else is new?"

This report in an excerpt of the panel discussion during the last APS Meeting among prominent physicists. It highlights the fact that there is a clear perception that the US is losing grounds on discoveries and advancement in physics with the shift going to other countries. The major culprit here is the continually dismal funding of science, and physics in particular.

"We need to redouble our efforts to make sure the projects we select are of the highest importance and impact, and be on the lookout for new technologies and innovations that would allow us to do more of our science goals with more modest resources," said Timothy Hallman, associate director of science for nuclear physics at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Jim Siegrist, director of the Office of High Energy Physics in DOE's Office of Science, agreed. "We need to find a way to do more science with a fixed amount of money," Siegrist said.

"I think it'd be easier just to have more money," Wilczek replied.

He argued that society doesn't adequately value and recognize the economic benefits of basic science.
"Think about how much the invention of the transistor is worth," Wilczek said."The fundamental science that went into that was understanding quantum mechanics, understanding the micro world. Bohr didn't get rich from it, Heisenberg didn't get rich from it. But society got rich from it." (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were two of the pioneers of quantum mechanics.)

I've mentioned this earlier that I wouldn't be surprised that 100 years from now, if the US no longer is a major economic power, historian might look at this time period of the past 10 years as the turning point and the start of the decline of the US civilization. Every civilization in our history went through such golden period and then the decline. Some even completely perished. Are we beginning to see eventual fate of the US? When a nation no longer supports what has admittedly been the major source and driving force of innovations that had sustained and grew the economy,  then it is a sign of the beginning of the downfall.

Zz.

Exploring The Nature Of Matter

This is more of a "promotional" series of videos that cover research work conducted at Thomas Jefferson Lab. So if you want a quick, simplified overview and are not familiar with the work done at JLab, this might be a video you want to see.





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Zz.

LHC Is Running At 8 TeV

Press release from CERN:

*LHC physics data taking gets underway at new record collision energy of 8TeV*

Geneva, 5 April 2012. At 00:38 CEST this morning, the LHC shift crew declared ‘stable beams’ as two 4 TeV proton beams were brought into collision at the LHC’s four interaction points. This signals the start of physics data taking by the LHC experiments for 2012. The collision energy of 8 TeV is a new world record, and increases the machine’s discovery potential considerably.

/“The experience of two good years of running at 3.5 TeV per beam gave us the confidence to increase the energy for this year without any significant risk to the machine,”/explained CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. /“Now it’s over to the experiments to make the best of the increased discovery potential we’re delivering them!”/

Although the increase in collision energy is relatively modest, it translates to an increased discovery potential that can be several times higher for certain hypothetical particles. Some such particles, for example those predicted by supersymmetry, would be produced much more copiously at the higher energy. Supersymmetry is a theory in particle physics that goes beyond the current Standard Model, and could account for the dark matter of the Universe.

Standard Model Higgs particles, if they exist, will also be produced more copiously at 8 TeV than at 7 TeV, but background processes that mimic the Higgs signal will also increase. That means that the full year’s running will still be necessary to convert the tantalising hints seen in 2011 into a discovery, or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether.

/“The increase in energy is all about maximising the discovery potential of the LHC,”/said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. /“And in that respect, 2012 looks set to be a vintage year for particle physics.”/

The LHC is now scheduled to run until the end of 2012, when it will go into its first long shutdown in preparation for running at an energy of 6.5 TeV per beam as of late 2014, with the ultimate goal of ramping up to the full design energy of 7 TeV.

While this is exciting, it is also high noon for Supersymmetry. If there's not even a hint of these supersymmetric particles at this energy, it will be in deep doo-doo.

Zz.

Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career

I did only a quick browse of this paper (a lot of statistical analysis which I don't quite get). The abstract was .... "abstract" enough that I dove into the paper and looked for some main points that the authors was trying to make. One point that I got was in the conclusion/discussion of the paper:

An ongoing debate involving academics, university administration, and educational policy makers concerns the de nition of professorship and the case for lifetime tenure, as changes in the economics of university growth have now placed tenure under the review process [3, 6]. Critics of tenure argue that tenure places too much financial risk burden on the modern competitive research university and diminishes the ability to adapt to shifting economic, employment, and scientifi c markets. To address these changes, universities and other research institutes have shifted away from tenure at all levels of academia in the last thirty years towards meeting sta ff needs with short-term and non-tenure track positions [3].

For knowledge intensive domains, production is characterized by long-term spillovers both through time and through the knowledge network of associated ideas and agents. A potential drawback of professions designed around short-term contracts is that there is an implicit expectation of sustained annual production that e ffectively discounts the cumulative achievements of the individual. Consequently, there is a possibility that short-term contracts may reduce the incentives for a young scientist to invest in human and social capital accumulation. Moreover, we highlight the importance of an employment relationship that is able to combine positive competitive pressure with adequate safeguards to protect against career hazards and endogenous production uncertainty an individual is likely to encounter in his/her career.

In other words, moving away from tenureship won't give you more productive personnel.\

Zz.

Hunting The Dark Sector On The Cheap

A short review of the effort to hunt for the hypothetical "dark" photons at JLab, and doing it with a minuscule budget when compared to other elementary particle physics experiments.

The HPS researchers at the Jefferson Lab are quick to concede that the experiment, like two others at the lab probing this dark sector, is a long shot that is likely to achieve little more than null results. But the reasonable price tags for such projects — about US$3 million to build and run the HPS detector — have prompted more physicists to try. “It’s always a great question in physics to go around wondering if there are more fundamental forces,” says physicist John Jaros, co-spokesman for the HPS experiment.

Good luck to them. It's a long shot, but as with many of these things, one tends to learn something new even when no discovery is made.

Zz.

Non-detection of the Tooth Fairy at Optical Wavelengths

Whoa!

First we had a "paper" on Gods as Topological Invariants. Now comes a "study" on the detecting Tooth Fairies! Is it still April 1st?

In any case, it is still a pretty funny piece. Still, where do these people find the time to do all these, and are they still on sale? :)

Zz.

OPERA Leaders Step Down

Heads are already rolling as the consequence of the OPERA result debacle. Both its science coordinator and its spokeperson have stepped down from their positions within the OPERA collaboration.

“We have now an indication [along] that line,” says Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyons, France, and, until last week, OPERA's physics coordinator.

Autiero resigned from the collaboration on 30 March, a day after OPERA spokesman Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. The moves followed months of internal tension and media leaks and, last week, votes of no confidence in Ereditato and Autiero by OPERA’s collaboration board, which consists of representatives from its member institutions.

One needs to be clear here in that (i) there is no deliberate manipulation of results and (ii) the issue here isn't the report on what appears to be an erroneous result. Wrong results are reported often in science. That isn't the issue. The issue here is how this was handled, and how it was reported. Anyone can see that reporting a result such as this would create quite a stir and quite a sensation, especially in the media and the general public. Things can get out of proportion very quickly with something like this.

So the criticism here is directed at the publicity surrounding the announcement. It is no different than the media circus surrounding the Fleishmann and Pons "cold fusion" announcement. Unfortunately, the OPERA result might suffer from the same fate as that infamous "discovery".

Zz.

Gods as Topological Invariants

OK, I had way too much fun reading this!

Abstract: We show that the number of gods in a universe must equal the Euler characteristics of its underlying manifold. By incorporating the classical cosmological argument for creation, this result builds a bridge between theology and physics and makes theism a testable hypothesis. Theological implications are profound since the theorem gives us new insights in the topological structure of heavens and hells. Recent astronomical observations can not reject theism, but data are slightly in favor of atheism. 

Don't forget to look at the date that it was uploaded to ArXiv, in case you missed it.

I suppose if we take away the "joke", something like this is similar to what Alan Sokal did for Social Text! :)

Zz.

More Evidence Against Phonon-Origin As The Glue In Cuprate Superconductors

This latest result will not settle it, but it is another evidence against phonons as the dominant "glue" for the origin of superconductivity in the cuprate family of high-Tc superconductors. This latest work comes from fast optical measurements on the Bismuth-based cuprate superconductors[1].

The researchers measured the part-in-10-thousand changes over a few thousand femtoseconds and then plugged the numbers into a computer model to gauge which processes were most important in carrying energy through the lattice. Electron-electron interactions such as spin fluctuation should carry energy away much faster than phonons do, the researchers argued, making it possible to separate the different contributions.

The ability to study the reflectivity at different wavelengths was key, Giannetti says. That's because the ultrafast electron-electron processes were too fast to observe in the time traces. However, those processes affect the reflectivity at different wavelengths in different ways-100 femtoseconds after the pulse the material was less reflective at longer wavelengths and more reflective at shorter wavelengths. Taken all together, the data show that phonons aren't needed to explain BSCCO's superconductivity, Giannetti says. Electron-electron interactions are strong enough to do the job all by themselves.

As you can read from the article itself, while this experiment convinces people who are already in the spin-fluctuation camp, those in the phonon camps are not convinced at all due to possible issues in the analysis of the data.

In other words, this is still not the smoking gun, and the debate continues.

Zz.

 [1] S. Dal Conte et al., Science v.335, p.1600 (2012).

CODATA 2010

This is the latest version (uploaded this past weekend) of the CODATA standard.

Zz.

Brief Biography of Emmy Noether

To celebrate her 130th birthday this month, the NY Times has an informative biography of "The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of" - Emmy Noether (read it quickly before it is no longer available for free online).

Of course, to many of us in physics and mathematics, her name is quite familiar, and if you need a concise reason why she is so important in physics, this description of the Noether theorem would settle the case:

What the revolutionary theorem says, in cartoon essence, is the following: Wherever you find some sort of symmetry in nature, some predictability or homogeneity of parts, you’ll find lurking in the background a corresponding conservation — of momentum, electric charge, energy or the like. If a bicycle wheel is radially symmetric, if you can spin it on its axis and it still looks the same in all directions, well, then, that symmetric translation must yield a corresponding conservation. By applying the principles and calculations embodied in Noether’s theorem, you’ll see that it is angular momentum, the Newtonian impulse that keeps bicyclists upright and on the move.

I continue to be amazed at many of these women scientists and mathematicians who, despite all they had to endure during the times that they lived in, were able to persevere and produce such profound body of work. It is amazing enough to produce these amazing work. But considering that these women had so many social obstacles that the men didn't have, one can't help be impressed by what they had accomplished.

Zz.

Barn And Pole Paradox Revisited

Many of us (at least those of us who are/were physics majors) have come across the infamous pole-and-barn problem when dealing with Special Relativity. It truly tests one's understanding of SR's time-dilation/length contraction effects, and forces us to examine how and when we know about something that occurs.

This paper revisits that pole-and-barn paradox and tries to convey a clear explanation of all the issues surrounding this problem. It might provide a clarification for those who might still have a bit of a problem with this scenario.

Zz.

Data That Outpace Theory?

There's something very wrong with the "theme" of this NY Times article. It started with the infamous Eddington's quote.

The British astrophysicist Arthur S. Eddington once wrote, “No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.”

In this case, the issue of neutrinos moving faster than light from the OPERA experiment was  used as the poster child to illustrate the "validity" of the quote.

Eddington’s dictum is not as radical as it might sound. He made it after early measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe made it appear that our planet was older than the cosmos in which it resides — an untenable notion. “It means that science is not just a book of facts, it is understanding as well,” explained Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, who says the Eddington saying is one of his favorites. If a “fact” cannot be understood, fitted into a conceptual framework that we have reason to believe in, or confirmed independently some other way, it risks becoming what journalists like to call a “permanent exclusive” — wrong.

People here are confusing between a valid "fact" that comes experiment, versus something that is still being debated to be valid. The OPERA result was by NO MEANS a "fact"! The validity of the result was still debated. It doesn't qualify to be a fact!

A valid fact is a valid fact. The discovery of high-Tc superconductivity came without any theory. In fact, after more than 20 years of its discovery, there is still no valid theory for this family of material. There are, however, an abundance of FACTS, ranging from the values of Tc for many of the cuprate superconductors, to the symmetry of the order parameter, etc.. etc. Does that mean that since these things are not understood in a coherent theory, that they are "permanent exclusive"?

And let's go to the other extreme - String Theory - a theory that has outpaced data! Or in this case, a theory that has ZERO data. Is this any better?

We should also not forget that phenomena such as the blackbody spectrum, photoelectric effect, atomic spectra, etc. were ALL "facts" that came first, ahead of quantum mechanics. In fact, I would say that the majority of the expansion of our knowledge came via unexpected discovery in experiments FIRST, ahead of any existing theory to describe those phenomena. CP violation, fractional quantum hall effect, superconductivity, etc.. etc. were all knowledge that got initiated via experiments first, well ahead of a theoretical understanding.

Certainly, physics involves both theory and experimental verifications. That is not the issue. For something to be considered to be "understood", there must be both. However, for experimental facts to be valid, they do  not have to require a theory to be there. We have seen enough examples of this already.

Zz.

More On Driving And Saving Fuel

So I was driving along the US Interstate over the weekend, and stopped at a rest area on an Illinois interstate (we call them Oasis over here) highway. In the washroom, they have these posters placed in several places, and one of the posters has these things that tells you some "green" driving tips. One of the tips given was something that I had brought up quite a while back. It is on driving with your windows down.

The poster here said this:

Try using vents and opening windows to cool off before you turn on the air conditioner. Air conditioning increases fuel consumption.

Now, if you've read my earlier post when I asked about this, you will also have read the two comments left behind, including one on an investigation done by the Mythbusters folks. Here, it turns out that if one is driving faster than 50 mph, then rolling up the windows and turning on the air-conditioning uses LESS fuel than driving with the windows down and no air-conditioning. The drag forces above that speed causes more use of energy than the air-conditioning unit.

So this poster is not quite up-to-date on "green driving".

Zz.

Largest Molecule To Show Quantum Interference

They certainly keep pushing the envelope.

A group led by Markus Arndt has now shown quantum interferences of the largest molecule to date: a derivative of phthalocyanine molecules, with 1298 AMU. Nature Nanotechnology is also right now listing the paper as available for "free" (not sure for how long)[1].

Abstract: The observation of interference patterns in double-slit experiments with massive particles is generally regarded as the ultimate demonstration of the quantum nature of these objects. Such matter–wave interference has been observed for electron, neutrons, atoms and molecules and, in contrast to classical physics, quantum interference can be observed when single particles arrive at the detector one by one. The build-up of such patterns in experiments with electrons has been described as the “most beautiful experiment in physics”. Here, we show how a combination of nanofabrication and nano-imaging allows us to record the full two-dimensional build-up of quantum interference patterns in real time for phthalocyanine molecules and for derivatives of phthalocyanine molecules, which have masses of 514 AMU and 1,298 AMU respectively. A laser-controlled micro-evaporation source was used to produce a beam of molecules with the required intensity and coherence, and the gratings were machined in 10-nm-thick silicon nitride membranes to reduce the effect of van der Waals forces. Wide-field fluorescence microscopy detected the position of each molecule with an accuracy of 10 nm and revealed the build-up of a deterministic ensemble interference pattern from single molecules that arrived stochastically at the detector. In addition to providing this particularly clear demonstration of wave–particle duality, our approach could also be used to study larger molecules and explore the boundary between quantum and classical physics.

Zz.

Edit: click on this YouTube link to see the video of this. The authors, for some reason, are disabling any imbedded video.

http://youtu.be/vCiOMQIRU7I

[1] T. Juffmann et al., Nature Nanotechnology doi:10.1038/nnano.2012.34, published online March 25, 2012.

No LBNE

... or at least, not the way it has been envisioned.

The US Dept. of Energy has requested that LBNE be scaled down in light of flat budget for the Office of Science in the next foreseeable future.

At a projected $1.5 billion, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, is not affordable, says William Brinkman, director of DOE's Office of Science. So this week he asked physicists to come up with a cheaper way to do the same science.

This seems to be a common pattern lately. The FRIB project also initially was supposed to be twice as expensive, until it was scaled down. We shall see what kind of a plan the Fermilab/LBNE collaboration can come up with to salvage the project.

Zz.

NASA Uses "Angry Birds - Space" To Teacy Microgravity

Hey, why not?

NASA is making use of the crazy popularity of Angry Birds - Space to teach about microgravity.

Angry Birds Space has provided NASA an opportunity to share a core concept of space exploration: gravity. Not only does gravity play a vital role in the game but, in general, gravity is a force that governs motion throughout the universe. It holds us to the ground, and it keeps the moon in orbit around Earth and Earth around the sun. The nature of gravity was first described by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago. Now three centuries later and more than 200 miles above our home planet on the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit shares the thrill of concepts like gravity and trajectories with some help from Red Bird.

 You may view the video of Don Pettit at the link above or directly below.



Zz.

Physicists Can Detect If You Are Texting While Driving

Ah, the joy of statistical analysis.

Soon, there is a way to know if you are texting while driving (and hopefully, haul your rear end off the streets). Physicists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory can now look at how your text output is being affected by your driving, and can accurately predict if you are texting while driving.

People who are texting "time-share" their attention between driving and texting, Watkins said. They look down briefly and then up again to check the road.

When Watkins compared the keystrokes from driving and nondriving texters, the differences were consistent and quantifiable, he said. Drivers text and pause and text again, without the rhythm of usual texting.

They didn't say where this research was published, but I think I found it with a bit of searching.

 "Autonomous detection of distracted driving by cell phone" M.L. Watkins et al.  14th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2011.

  

Zz.

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2012/03/21/1873247/pnnl-team-finds-formula-for-cellphone.html#storylink=cpy

First Ever Neutrino-Based Communication

I continue to be amazed at some of the things that people are capable of accomplishing.

Physics World is reporting the first ever use of neutrinos to transmit information.

Stancil approached Fermilab with the proposal and, having gained agreement, the researchers encoded the word "neutrino" into binary code. This was then used to modulate the neutrino beam with a bit rate of 0.1 bits/s. The message was received with a bit error rate of just 1%, allowing the message to be decoded easily after one repetition. Nevertheless, given the short distance over which communication was achieved, the low data transmission rate and the extreme technology required to achieve it (MINERvA itself weighs several tonnes), neutrinos are clearly not a viable method of communication in the short term.

Huber, however, is excited by the work. "I think the most significant feature of this work is that somebody went out and did it," he explains, adding "it makes an enormous difference because it proves it's possible."

Certainly this falls under the "proof of concept" experiment, and I don't think we'll see anyone seriously pursuing using neutrinos for communications, at least, not within my lifetime. Still, considering how difficult it is to detect these neutrinos, I'm amazed that they are able to accomplish such a thing.

Now, if OPERA is right, then we have found a way to transmit information faster than c! :)

Zz.

Tevatron's "Organ Donations"

I guess the Tevatron signed an "organ donation" card. Now that it is no longer around, various valuable parts of it are being donated to sites all over the world.

Fermilab’s CDF experiment is donating photomultiplier tubes, computers, electronics racks and other equipment to experiments located all over the world, said Jonathan Lewis of Fermilab’s Particle Physics Division, who is organizing the decommissioning of the detector.

“These computers are going to a lab in Korea,” Lewis said during a tour of the building. “And we’re sending those electronics racks to Italy.”

So in essence, the Tevatron will continue to live in years to come via all these various experiments.

Zz.

Bad Physics In TV Commercial

There's a fun discussion on the bad physics in a TV commercial.

One can argue on what is the big deal about something like this. After all, we see bad physics in TV and movies very often. Well, this isn't a big deal at all. It is just a fun exercise, even for students, to practice their knowledge on simple kinematics. But on the other hand, considering that physics-based games such as Angry Birds, Where's My Water, etc. are trying to get as close to being physics-accurate, there's very little reason (other than pure fiction or pure fantasy) to completely blow away all kinds of reality.

Zz.

You Want Us To "Consider" The Creator Hypothesis?

It seems that there's a delicious fight going on between Rabbi Lurie on Huffington Post, and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. I will let you read it for yourself.

What I will address is the tired plea from many of these people, and also a common tactic done by crackpots. They want us to spend time and effort to "consider" their position. "Why don't you consider such-and-such?" "Why don't you try to understand my theory?" Yet, all this while, THEY refused to do the same to OUR position. If this Rabbi wants us to ".. at least consider that there could be a Designer... ", then I'd say that it is fair to ask this Rabbi to ".. at least consider that there could be NO Designer"! How about them apples, huh? Has he done it? Has he read AND UNDERSTOOD Hawking's argument? Has he read and understood Lawrence Krauss's argument?

It seems that it is always the scientists that have been asked to "disprove" of something, rather than these people showing ample validity for things they believe in. And do you want to know why? Because the physical characteristics of this "designer" can't be defined and agreed upon by all those who believe in it! There's no science that can consider testing for something that is so shifty and vague! So far, the most common argument for the "apparent" existence of one is in the form of the "god of the gaps". And we all know what happens to such a concept - the "gaps" get smaller as we know more and more about things. The anthropic principle, for example, has a lot of detractors and many arguments against such a thing. Using it as one of your supporting argument (all without knowing the intimate physics of what it is) is a risky practice and could fall right into your face.

So for this Rabbi to insist that we should "consider" such possibility is laughable, because the concept of a "designer" is unfalsifiable and "not even wrong"! If he wants us to consider the possibility, then it is only fair that he consider the opposite possibility. That is, of course, assuming that he has the ability to understand the physics with his "post-graduate level" physics courses, whatever those are.

Zz.

ICARUS Challenges OPERA's Result Again

This could be the beginning of the final nail in the coffin for OPERA's result.

ICARUS already had a very compelling result to initially challenge OPERA's superluminal neutrinos claim. Then OPERA revealed that they had some timing errors in their electronics that could sway things one way or the other. Now comes the most direct challenge so far of the OPERA's result, again from ICARUS, which not only use the neutrinos created from the same source (CERN), but also with detectors that are in almost the same location as OPERA!

THREE weeks ago the OPERA collaboration in Italy found a possible glitch that may account for its startling finding last September that elusive particles called neutrinos move faster than light, in flagrant disregard of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Now the first crosscheck from a rival experiment seems to vindicate the overwhelming majority of physicists who were convinced all along that some error must have crept in to OPERA's analysis. On March 16th the ICARUS collaboration posted a paper on arXiv, an online repository, which reports that neutrinos they looked at are not travelling faster than light, after all.

I'm sure the OPERA's folks will still redo their measurements (if they haven't started already considering that the LHC is back circulating protons). But so far, in terms of experimental results, there hasn't been anything to support such superluminal neutrinos.

Zz.

US Voters Have Gloomy View of US Science Future

Less than half of US voters polled think that the US will be the world's leader in science and technology by 2020.

Of the 1005 likely voters polled, 47% said they thought the United States would lead the world in health care by 2020—though the poll did not define which factors would play into that designation. More than a quarter of respondents said they weren't sure which nation would hold that title in 8 years, while 18% speculated that it would be the European Union. The rest of the responses split among China, India, and Brazil. Only 42% said they thought the United States would retain its position as the world leader in science and technology by 2020, while 26% predicted China would assume that mantle, and 23% chose India.

And yet, we are still cutting back severely on research in many fronts, especially in the physical sciences.

Zz.

Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?

Holy Crap. This opinion piece almost quoted everything that I've been writing about in this blog! Do I have a twin somewhere that I don't know about? :)

For example, haven't I been saying something like this all along?

Often too interested in politics as entertainment, the media is complicit in keeping such “controversies” running. Doing so isn’t hard since vivid, just-so stories and anecdotes usually trump (or should that be Trump) dry, sometimes counterintuitive facts and statistics.

This is a damn, fine article. The only bad part here is that most of the people that should be reading this, aren't! Are the politicians themselves reading this? Do they even KNOW what it means? Or do they have staffers who read this, and then "translate" it?

Actually, the one point that the writer didn't explore is why scientists, engineers, and mathematicians MAY NOT want to be involved in American politics. One only need to look at the amount of money involved in running for office, the amount of wheeling and dealing involved in getting the party one is affiliated with to back one's candidacy, and of course, the amount of bells and whistles one has to add to one's campaign to attract the public. It is, truly, a process of turning oneself in a pseudo-celebrity and getting enough "fans". This is not something many scientists aspire to, I don't think, nor has the patience for (I certainly don't).

Zz.

Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry

This is an excellent article on the matter-antimatter asymmetry. It reviews the latest paper on decay asymmetry of the charm and anticharm mesons, but in the process, provided quite a good coverage of the progress in understanding why our universe is overwhelmingly lacking of antimatter.

Zz.

"Big Bang Theory" Gets Stephen Hawking

"The Big Bang Theory" TV series got its dream guest star - Stephen Hawking.

The renowned theoretical physicist will guest-star on the April 5 episode of the CBS comedy, the network said Monday. In the cameo, Hawking visits uber-geek Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) at work "to share his beautiful mind with his most ardent admirer," according to CBS.

I still haven't watched this series. Most of my friends kept asking me if I have seen it, and I kept having to say that I haven't. Then they look at me funny.

Maybe one of these days, I might see it, get terribly addicted to it, and can't stop talking about it. Till that happens, I have to keep telling people that I haven't seen it.

Zz.

The Physics of Angry Birds

I have seen plenty of article on the physics employed in the wildly-popular app game "Angry Birds". I came across another one here that describes the kinematics and collisions that any intro physics student can understand.

I think that the kinematics part is rather trivial, but the subsequent collisions and "destruction" that follows can be quite complicated. That would have been a more interesting part that should be discussed in depth.

Zz.

Maxwell's Demon Exorcised?

Heh, sorry. Couldn't help with the pun.

It appears that there's now experimental evidence that erasing information requires the expenditure of energy. Consequently, this energy defeats the scenario presented in the Maxwell's Demon.

The results safeguard one of the most cherished principles of physical science: the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that heat will always move from hot to cold, or equivalently, that entropy — the amount of disorder in the Universe — always increases.

In the nineteenth century, the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell proposed a scenario that seemed to violate this law. In a gas, hot molecules move faster than cold ones. Maxwell imagined a microscopic intelligent being, later dubbed a 'demon', that would open and shut a trapdoor between two compartments to selectively trap hot molecules in one of them and cool ones in the other, defying the tendency for heat to spread out and entropy to increase.

Landauer’s theory offered the first compelling reason why Maxwell’s demon couldn’t do its job. The demon would need to erase (‘forget’) the information it used to select the molecules after each operation, and this would release heat and increase entropy, more than counterbalancing the entropy lost by the demon.

It is very difficult to go against the 3rd Law, I tell ya!

Zz.

Invisible Mercedes-Benz

Hey, who needs all the trouble of cloaking devices using narrow-band metamaterials when you can simply use flexible LED screens!

That is what they used to make this Mercedes-Benz vehicle almost invisible.

The invisibility cloak had its tryout this week on the streets of Stuttgart, Germany. To make Q's idea of an invisible car real, Mercedes employed dozens of technicians and some $263,000 worth of flexible LED mats covering one side of the car. Using a camera mounted on the opposite side of the vehicle, the LEDs were programmed to reproduce the image from the camera at the right scale, blending the vehicle into the background from a few feet away. Doing so required power sources, computers and other gear totaling 1,100 lbs. of equipment inside the B-Class.

Not sure what this demo has got to do with promoting the "...  first production fuel-cell vehicle in Germany ... ", but ok......

Zz.

Daya Bay Measures Neutrino's θ_13

The major symposium held overnight on the new Daya Bay result reveals that they have finally measured the last neutrino mixing angle, θ<sub>13.

The preprint for the paper that has been submitted to PRL for publication can be found here.


Zz.</sub>

LHC's Higgs Gets Support From Tevatron

Well, at least they are consistent!

We are starting to see some agreement here with the various data coming out of different detectors and different facilities. A new report from ALL the data analyzed out of the now-departed Tevatron shows a hint of the Higgs in the same energy range as that reported earlier out of the LHC. It seems that both CDF and D0 might be seeing the same thing that ATLAS and CMS saw recently.

Located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron smashed protons into antiprotons to blast into fleeting existence subatomic particles not ordinarily seen in nature. Those collisions occurred within two massive particle detectors, known as CDF and D0, which strived to identify new particles as they quickly decayed into combinations of more familiar ones. In their final data sets, both the CDF and D0 teams see more candidate Higgs decays than one would expect from random background processes, scientists reported today at the conference Rencontres de Moriond in La Thuile, Italy.

The excesses are in line with Higgs hints reported in December 2011 by researchers working with the LHC at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC smashes protons into protons within two even bigger detectors that are hunting the Higgs, called ATLAS and CMS. The ATLAS and CMS teams both see excesses of candidate Higgses with a mass of about 125 giga-electron volts (GeV), or 133 times the mass of the proton. The CDF and D0 teams see candidates with roughly the same mass although with poorer mass resolution. "If you look at what ATLAS sees, at what CMS sees, and at what CDF and D0 see, it starts to look like a consistent picture," says Fermilab's Rob Roser, co-spokesperson for CDF.

While the data out of the Tevatron can't do much in terms of providing the evidence for the Higgs, it certainly can throw a huge wrench if the results aren't consistent or contradictory to that out of the LHC. So this agreement here certainly help as part of the process in gaining credibility. Ultimately, the verification for the existence of the Higgs will have to come from the upcoming LHC run that will provide a significantly more data.

Zz.

The Brain Behind "The Big Bang Theory"

I mentioned about a news article on physicist David Saltzberg a while back, who is a consultant for the "The Big Bang Theory" TV series. Now Symmetry Magazine has an interview with him on his role for that show and all the surrounding impact. It's a very good interview and covers a lot of grounds.

Zz.

Most Precise Measurement of W-boson Mass

While the Tevatron at Fermilab has gone into the collider heaven in the sky, none of us expects that we won't be hearing about its legacy well into the future. And this is one such example.

The DZero collaboration has reported the most precise measurement of the W-boson mass. This should have wide-ranging ramifications, including putting more constraints on the Higgs mass.

The CDF collaboration recently measured the W boson mass to be 80387 +/- 19 MeV/c2. The DZero collaboration measured the particle’s mass to be 80375 +-23 MeV/c2. The two new measurements, along with the addition of previous data from the earliest operation of the Tevatron, combine to produce a measurement of 80387 +- 17 MeV/c2, which has a precision of 0.02 percent.

I'm sure there will be more to come out of the retired "old lady".

Zz.

The Many Uses Of Electron Antineutrinos

This is a terrific Physics Today article on the applications of electron antineutrinos.

As is the case in many other examples, we should NOT lose sight of the fact that something that first appeared to be esoteric out of high energy/elementary particle physics has now become something that has important uses. Think about this next time you hear someone asks for justification in funding for these high-energy physics experiments.

Zz.

Discovery of Majorana Fermions?

The big news so far coming out of the APS March Meeting going on right now is the result from the Leo Kouwenhoven group at Delft University. They reported on their latest experiment that, in some circles, shows compelling evidence for Majorana fermions.

Kouwenhoven’s apparatus is along the latter lines. In his group’s set-up, indium antimonide nanowires are connected to a circuit with a gold contact at one end and a slice of superconductor at the other, and then exposed to a moderately strong magnetic field. Measurements of the electrical conductance of the nanowires showed a peak at zero voltage that is consistent with the formation of a pair of Majorana particles, one at either end of the region of the nanowire in contact with the superconductor. As a sanity check, the group varied the orientation of the magnetic field and checked that the peak came and went as would be expected for Majorana fermions.

If this is true and verified, my earlier bet that Majorana fermions would probably be discovered in a condensed matter system first ahead of high energy physics experiments has come true! :)

In any case, this is an astounding experiment and an amazing accomplishment. I will eagerly anticipate reading the publication of this work.

Zz.