The Utility Of Physics

In the section titled "To The Student" from Mary Boas's classic text "Mathematical Methods In The Physical Sciences", there is this passage:

There is a story about a young mathematics instructor who asked an older professor "What do you say when students ask about the practical applications of some mathematical topic?" the experienced professor said "I tell them!"

About a few weeks ago, my graduate students and I were just chatting away while we were waiting for the start of our meeting, and the topic of our conversation meandered into dealing with the "applications" of physics, and the usefulness of various topics in physics. I indicated that, as someone who have been involved in hosting open houses, tours, Q&A, etc. with the public, I've had to deal with trying not only to explain certain aspect of what I did, but also why what I did was important and deserved to be supported. That was when one of the students asked me what I tell a general public if I was asked what are the useful applications of certain topics in physics. I found myself replying "I tell them!" Thus, the connection with what I quoted out of Mary Boas's text.

In my years of being a physicist, I have tried to impress upon people that physicists don't just do esoteric, theoretical, no-applications-in-sight-type of work. In fact, as someone who was trained as a condensed matter physicist, I tried to impress upon the public that many of the things they enjoy today, especially their modern electronics, are all part of the areas that physicists work in. I've pointed out earlier that physics is not just the LHC, but it is also the iPod and the iPhone.

Unfortunately, being able to "tell them" the applications of various aspects of physics requires someone who is not only knowledgeable, but also someone who has a wider view of physics, and the ability to make connections between many of the common conveniences, devices, procedures, etc. that we enjoy that came into being due to physics. Many students aren't that well-equipped yet on being able to handle such breadth of knowledge that tends to come about from experience. I have done this, and have faced this type of question countless times that I can pull things out of my back pocket in an instant. However, what if you are just starting out, or what if you yourself want to know how to deal with the question of the usefulness of physics?

There are 3 different points that you can make:

1. Many areas of physics have a DIRECT and OBVIOUS applications. Condensed matter physics, atomic/molecular physics, medical physics, etc. can all boast a very obvious connection to modern electronics, medical advances, understanding of materials, etc. So point these out first, and in fact, point out that people in these fields are the MAJORITY of practicing physicists. You'd be surprised how many in the public area actually shocked by that revelation.

2. The utility of knowledge. Even in areas in which it is difficult to argue for the application and usefulness to the public, we can bring out the argument that it is difficult know the future applications of such knowledge. The history of physics is littered with many such examples, including quantum mechanics. The early development of quantum mechanics had almost no emphasis on the usefulness and application. If we only want to fund work that had such clear utility, then we would have missed out on the development of quantum mechanics. And yet, as we now know, our entire modern conveniences are based on this amazing theory. So while there is certainly value in the knowledge itself, demanding that it must have an immediate and obvious application is extremely shortsighted and ignorant.

3. The "side effect" of esoteric knowledge. One may doubt the usefulness of high energy physics, or astrophysics. However, there is no argument on the fact that the pursue to verify various aspects of theories from these fields via the advancement in particle accelerators, detectors, and other devices have had significant impact on our lives. Modern facilities and devices, ranging from synchrotron radiation centers, medical accelerators, light detectors, high-speed electronics, advance data/computations, etc. were all developed or came into being due to the advances that had to be made for various high energy physics and astrophysics experiments. These found applications, what I called the side effects, in other areas, and into our everyday lives. So the experiments to study these "esoteric" topics actually drive the innovation in many different areas that eventually trickled down to us the consumers!

So if you are starting out in physics, or already knee deep into it, do not run way from the question of the usefulness and applications of physics. You stand your ground and you tell them!

Zz.

The Sun's Magnetic Field is About to Flip

Our sun's magnetic field is about to flip. But don't panic, this happens pretty often, roughly once every 11 years or so.



Zz.

Rush Holt On Physics And Politics

One of the few physicists in the US Congress (I think he and Bill Fosters are the only two left, if I'm not mistaken), Rush Holt has been in the US House of Representatives for quite a few years.

This news article reveals a bit more of his position on several different hot-topic issues.

* On himself:
"I've always been an unusual member of Congress, partly because of my background, partly because of my approach to problems, partly because of my philosophy of governing. … I have a real commitment to the basic principles of equality and liberty."


* On climate change:
"This is an urgent problem. … Climate change has to be dealt with by removing our emphasis on fossil fuels. … We are ruining our planet and killing people by the millions. … How do we do it? We have to keep presenting the facts. Presenting the evidence. And confronting those who would deny the evidence until they would deny it no more. … A transition to more sustainable energy need not be costly. In fact, it could be a real boon to us economically. The sooner we do it, the sooner we can sell the technologies to the world, rather than buy them."

You can read more at the link above.

Zz.

Do We Expand With The Universe?

Zz.

Sorry, Capt. Kirk. Teleporting You Will Just Take Too Long

... in fact, longer than the age of the universe!

This fun, amusing, and back-of-the-envelope calculations done by a group of students at the University of Leicester in England shows that to sample and transport all the information about a human to another location (as in the Star Trek teleportation device) will just take too long for it to feasible right now.

Our universe has been around for 13.8 billion years. But the seriously tongue-in-cheek paper shows that at a beaming speed of 30 gigahertz, transmitting all the data within a single human would take 4,850,000,000,000,000 (4.85 quadrillion) years. The human dataset includes not only the person's genetic code but also all the memories and knowledge stored in his/her brain. While DNA would take up about 10 billion bits, the brain's information would bring the data total up to 2.6 x 10⁴² (26 followed by 41 zeroes) in bits.

Why not simply increase the bandwidth to speed up the process? That would require an impossible increase in power consumption beyond earth's capabilities.

I think there's something else here that should be pointed out, and something that many non-scientists should be aware of. When we think "outside of the box", we must (i) first know where the box is and where its boundary is (which means one must have the established knowledge first), and (ii) be able to make quick, back-of-the-envelope estimation to tell us if the quantitative aspect of what we wish to do or study produce a reasonable, achievable goal.

The latter is quite important, because it tells us if there's any reasonable chance that we can verify, or accomplish our goal. This means that a device, a detector, an instrument, etc. of certain parameter can either produce, detect, or accomplish that goal. When we seek support to do such work, we must show this because, as is very obvious, no one is going to fund something based on some handwaving argument, and they are especially not going to fund something if the numbers tell us that there's no REASONABLE chance for success!

So if someone wants funding to build such a teleportation device above, would you fund it knowing that it will take 4.85 quadrillion years to transport a human being? If you would, I have a bridge to sell to you.

Zz.

Did He Just Learned Physics?

In this video and news report, the BBC business editor is trying to learn quantum physics.

The title of this report is misleading, because one doesn't learn quantum physics (or any science for that matter) like this. Rather, one is learning ABOUT quantum physics. There is a difference here, and I've mentioned this quite a while back in context with my take on the many pop-science books out there.

While learning about science should be highly encouraged, especially among the general public, we should never mistaken it as learning science, because this practice provides information only at the superficial level.

Zz.

Same Paper, But Two Entirely Different Emphasis

See, this is essentially what is different between this blog, and the outlandish stuff they have elsewhere that tries to capture people's attention by drawing onto something that's improbable.

Last week, I highlighted a paper in PRL on the estimate made on the lifetime of photons based on current measurements. This upper limit also is related directly to the upper limit on the mass of photons, if any. In that blog post, I tried to highlight what is well-known and well-established, rather than try to make extrapolations on things that are still up in the air.

But that is not what is done here. This news report, also reviewing the same publication, decides to go with a different route, which is highlighting the speculative, attention-grabbing possibility, no matter how remote, how unlikely, and how improbable it might be. It focuses a lot on the minute possibility of photon decay, and decaying into "lighter" produced that could travel faster than the photons themselves.

If photons do break down, the results of such decay must be even lighter particles, ones that would travel even faster than photons. Assuming photons have mass, "there is only one particle we know from the Standard Model of particle physics that might be even lighter — the lightest of the three neutrinos," Heeck said.

It is sad that, rather than emphasizing the result that was published, news account on something like this would venture into citing remote possibilities and highly speculative conjectures. The result itself got buried. Rather, an improbable consequence of a possible outcome is the one that was brought to the forefront! This is a shameful attempt at sensationalizing a result! It is no different than the sensational front page news from supermarket tabloids.

Zz.

Still No Sign Of Violation Of Lorentz Symmetry

The more they test it, the more precise they measure the validity of the foundations of Relativity. This time, the measurement comes from a new technique of measuring the the transition energy between two electron energy states of dysprosium.

The team chose dysprosium because it has a pair of closely-spaced energy states that involve orbitals where electrons travel at very different speeds. Because of this speed difference, a change in the electron’s kinetic energy due to a change in the atom’s orientation would affect the two states very differently. The researchers illuminated a beam of dysprosium atoms with two laser beams to excite them to state B (via another state) and then drove the transition to A with a precisely calibrated microwave beam. To measure the transition energy, they found the microwave frequency most effective at driving the transition. The team repeated the experiment many times over a period from 2010 to 2012.

The orbitals of the atoms were oriented to some extent by the polarization of the exciting laser beams. So if the electrons’ kinetic energy depended on their direction of motion, the team would have seen a daily oscillation in the transition energy from the earth’s rotation. Similarly, if there were any effect from the earth’s position in the sun’s gravitational field (violating local position invariance), there would have been an annual oscillation.

There are many different ways to violate Lorentz invariance, so researchers in the field have developed a standard set of parameters to characterize different types of violations. Hohensee and his colleagues measured eight of the nine parameters that describe any dependence of the electron’s maximum attainable speed on the speed and direction of the lab’s reference frame. They significantly improved limits from previous experiments for four of them, one by a factor of 10. Their new limits on local position invariance for electrons are 160 times more precise than previous ones.

Zz.

The Physics Of High-Speed Trains

While the accident in Spain is certainly a tragedy, it is also an opportunity to examine the physics involved for us to understand a bit more of a possible cause of the accident. This article in The New Yorker has a simple enough description of it that anyone without any mathematics or science degree can understand. It tries to explain why there is speed requirement or limit of curved tracks.

One of those forces is centrifugal (“to flee from the center”) force, the inertia that makes a body on a curved path want to continue outward in a straight line. It’s what keeps passengers in their seats on a looping roller coaster and throws unsecured kids off carousels. Centrifugal force is a function of the square of the train’s velocity divided by the radius of the curve; the smaller and tighter the curve, or the faster the train, the greater the centrifugal force. As it increases, more and more of the weight of the train is transferred to the wheels on the outermost edge of the track, something even the best-built trains have trouble coping with. That’s where the concepts of minimum curve radius and super-elevation, or banking, come in.

Banked curves, in which the outer edge of the track is higher than the inner edge, balance the load on the train’s suspension. Since gravity pulls a train downward and centrifugal force pulls it outward, a track banked at just the right angle can spread the forces more evenly between a train’s inner and outer wheels, and help to keep it on the track.

But banking the tracks isn’t a cure-all—a passenger train can tilt only so far before people fall out of their seats. So the minimum curve radius comes into play. Imagine that a curved portion of track is actually running along the outer edge of a large circle. How big must that circle be to insure that a train’s centrifugal force can be managed with only a reasonable amount of banking? 

It is interesting to note that this is the type of question that we deal with in first year intro physics.

Zz.

The Lifetime Of Photons

I see questions on the mass of photon a lot on online forums. The idea that a photon has a mass has numerous implications, including a non-zero longitudinal polarization. Another consequence is that a photon having a mass is not stable and will eventually decay. Thus, it should have a lifetime.

This latest paper examines and calculates the lower limit of a photon's lifetime based on our best upper limit of the photon's mass (additional review of this work can be found at PhysicsWorld).

For a photon to decay, it must have a mass—otherwise there’d be nothing lighter for it to decay into. A photon with nonzero mass is not ruled out by theory, but experiments with electric and magnetic fields constrain the mass to less than 10−54 kilograms. Heeck assumed this upper limit and worked through a generic model in which photons decay into even lighter particles, which could potentially be neutrinos or some more exotic particles.

As a constraint, Heeck considered the CMB, the relic emission from the hot, opaque plasma that persisted for several hundred thousand years after the big bang. The CMB spectrum matches very closely a perfect blackbody, which implies very few, if any, of the CMB photons decayed on their 13 billion year journey. Heeck calculated that the minimum lifetime is 3 years in the photon’s rest frame. This might seem ridiculously small, but the photons are extremely relativistic. When time dilation is taken into account, a visible wavelength photon in our reference frame would be stable for 1018 years or more.

In other words, it is horribly longer than the age of our universe by many orders of magnitude! I'd say the odds of observing such a decay is zero.

Zz.

Physics Departments Without A Single Female Faculty Member

Before we start, let me emphasize that I'm a man, but I've been involved in promoting women participation in science, and especially physics, for years. Anyone who has followed this blog would have read several items on this issue, and also my activities in this area to promote women in science. I definitely think that there is an under-representation of women in physics, and one of the ways to improve that is to make the field more enticing and more familiar to them, both in terms of the subject matter, and the working condition.

Now, having said that, you know what's coming next is not going to be pretty. This is a news article that reports on a recent statistical analysis/modeling done by the American Institute of Physics. It aimed to address that fact that fully 1/3 of the physics departments here in the US do not have a single female faculty member. But one shouldn't stop there, because the statistics included schools with small number of faculty members (often less than 10), and these tend to be the schools that do not have any female faculty members.

The AIP ran a simulation that takes into account the number of available female faculty members and the available positions, and came out with the conclusion that the lack of female faculty members in these departments is consistent with the statistical distribution, and not due to any inherent bias.

A new report from the American Institute of Physics -- based on simulation analysis -- concludes that the large number of departments without a single woman is to be expected and is not the result of discrimination. Some experts on women and science, however, disagree.

The institute's report says that there are two factors that explain the distribution of women among departments: the size of departments and the total number of female faculty members available. There are many departments with only two or three physics faculty members, the report notes. So "it is unlikely that these departments will have a woman among the faculty because the overall representation of women among all physics faculty members is low," the report adds.

To put it simply, say that you have 100 balls. On the table, you have many compartments of various sizes, some able to contain 20 balls, while others are big enough to have only 2 balls. If you toss those 100 balls up in the air and let them land randomly into those compartments, the argument here says that naturally, the smaller compartments will have a higher probability to end up with having NO balls.

Whether one buys into the parameters set up for the simulation is another matter. But taken at face value, I don't see anything wrong with this. It is certainly a first attempt at trying to figure out if the lack of any female faculty members in these small departments are due to some inherent bias, or simply out of statistics. It is a scientifically valid methodology to START and investigate an issue. Now the next logical step is to re-examine if the parameters used are valid, or accurate. Maybe some of the assumptions used are debatable, etc., and thus, the simulation should be tweaked.

What annoys me is the response being given to this study. I certainly expect disagreement with the conclusion, but the counter-argument that has been given is purely speculative!

Janet Bandows Koster, executive director and CEO of the Association for Women in Science, said via e-mail that the report "a disappointment."

She urged physicists to study the concept of "implicit bias," which she said might have something to do with the pool of women in the discipline. "We know that most people are reluctant to accept that they are biased, and scientists in particular pride themselves on their impartiality. Yet scientists are humans raised in societies, and thus are subject to collective messages that suggest men are suited to science because they are independent and analytical whereas women are better suited to care-giving and cooperative enterprises."

It's too easy, she said, to focus only on the relatively small number of women in the field. "Inferring there is no hiring bias because the 'n' is so small for female faculty is essentially like granting a papal indulgence to physics departments across the country," she said.

I'm sorry, but that is stupid! You are countering a statistical analysis with nothing more than a speculative fishing expedition! That's like saying you don't agree with Special Relativity because you don't like the look of the equation!

And no one here is saying that there is no hiring bias. A statistical analysis such as this can't come to such conclusion. What it does say is that the lack of female faculty members in 1/3 of the physics depts. cannot be attributed to gender bias as the main factor, because statistical analysis alone can account for that observation! As scientists, we need to know what statistics say, and what they don't!

The PROPER way to counter something like this is to look at the validity of the parameter used, to see if the model is accurate, and to show where it might have missed something, NOT to simply insinuate that there are biases. For someone who is supposed to represent an association of women in SCIENCE, she sure used a lot of hand-waving, unsupported argument to counter a scientifically-derived conclusion.

Zz.

Alan Sokal Attacks Psychology Theory

I mentioned Alan Sokal and his infamous hoax before (in case you haven't heard of it). Sokal is back in the news, but not due to any hoax that he has created. This time, he's attacking a psychology theory that made use of something out of physics.

In the paper, the trio critique an application of what psychologists call the "positivity ratio" -- the ratio of a person's positive feelings to his/her negative feelings. In 2005, two psychologists wrote that people "flourish" if the ratio meets or exceeds 2.9 -- that is, if positive emotions occur at least three times as often as negative ones. A pretty intuitive concept in the abstract sense, but one Sokal and his co-authors say cannot be described by the equations the psychologists borrowed from physics.

"We find no theoretical or empirical justification for the use of differential equations drawn from fluid dynamics, a subfield of physics, to describe changes in human emotions over time," the trio wrote in their article. "Furthermore, we demonstrate that the purported application of these equations contains numerous fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors."
.
.

The trio's article, "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio," was published online July 15, 2013 in American Psychologist.

Somehow, this fits in perfectly with an earlier comment on psychophysics babble.

Zz.

Why Do Physicists Gravitate Towards Jobs In Finance?

This is a take on why physicists gravitate towards a job in the finance world.

Then again, perhaps it is not surprising that so many physicists wind up working in finance. After all, they are good at using mathematics to solve real-world problems and the money is good. There is more to it than that though. There are mathematical links between physics and finance that go back at least to 1900, when Frenchman Louis Bachelier wrote his Theory of Speculation, in which he used the mathematics of a random walk to analyse fluctuations on the Paris stock exchange. Five years later, the same ideas were used by a young Albert Einstein to explain why pollen grains zigzag when they are suspended in water. His explanation invoked the idea that very large numbers of tiny molecules, much smaller than the pollen grains, are responsible for kicking the grains around. This was a crucial insight and provided one of the earliest convincing confirmations of the existence of atoms. To make the parallel with the financial markets, we might say that stock prices are kicked around by myriad unknown factors in the marketplace. Today, these ideas have been developed into a means of computing the value of sophisticated financial instruments and the management of risk.

Now, I'm skeptical with the first assumption that there are physicists who "gravitate" towards a job in finance. I am not sure to what extent these people AIMED for such a job, or rather if they took it due to other circumstances. Would they have taken it if they had other jobs in physics that pay close to what they would be making? Did they graduate with the intention of take such jobs in finance?

Furthermore, I've mentioned a few articles in which these theoretical model in finance and areas dealing with social and human interactions and activities (what is often called as psychophysics) are being called into question.

In any case, this is an article that covers what is going on in the UK, and it doesn't look to be that much different than what is happening here in the US.

Zz.

"The Story Of Energy" - Physics Reporting At Its Worst!

Again, if this was another obscure, backwoods article, I wouldn't give a hoot. But this comes in with Scientific American tags! I do not know in what capacity this is part of Scientific American, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves to be associated with this type of garbage.

This article was written by a "Clarissa Ai Ling Lee". A search turns info that this is a Ph.D candidate at Duke University, majoring in Literature, and specializing in "..... in science and technology studies and comparative media studies."

There are so many convoluted, metaphysically-injected theme, or outright mistakes, that one just doesn't know where to start. For example:

In our three-dimensional world (even it we count time, that merely allows the curvature or space to be accounted for, and not much else),

Holy cow! Is she that ignorant, and is actually proud to share it with the world? I suppose those time-reversal symmetry (or lack of it) events are of no use. After all, we didn't use time in there just merely to allow for the curvature of space! Unbelievable!

But it gets better...

Cosmic rays, as high-energy charged particles, are sets of naturally occurring particles found through the process of atmospheric nuclei decay.

Now this is utterly wrong. High energy cosmic rays especially, a non-terrestrial. It originates elsewhere in the universe. So it definitely is not a produced of "atmospheric nuclei decay". Even a quick search on Wikipedia can correct that! How lazy can one get?

And if you can stomach it, here a winner when she attempts to describe beta decay:

According to the law of conservation, the disintegration of neutron should produce equal part electrons and equal part protons, but this was found not to be the case. Therefore, Enrico Fermi named it for a particle which is supposed to exhibit zero mass and zero charge (a sort of 'virtual' particle at that time) so as to counteract the 'shortfall' that would have resulted from the proton and electron not being consistently emitted as a 'neutrino.' 

 Did you have to rub your eyes and read that twice?

A beta decay produces EQUAL amount of proton and electron. There was never a problem with charge conservation. It was a problem of spin/momentum conservation!

And oh, she has picked an area we should study:

They want to know how understanding a specific property of strong interaction at the subatomic level can help explain why so much of our universe is constituted of dark matter. 

Bet you didn't know that, did you, that the strong interaction, at the subatomic level, no less, can help explain our dark matter. Yes sir!

The rest of the article, if you have the patience to read it, is a mumbo-jumbo of words with a generous dose of meta-physical flavor (a very popular trick) and enough word salad that it makes it difficult to be falsified and comprehended.

And aren't we glad that this is just Part 1! Can't wait on what other bastardization that is in store next!

Zz.

Energy Theater?

I've read the "press release" of this work, but only had a quick glance at the paper. But that should not stop you from having a look at it.

This activity for elementary/primary level education is meant to give a rather visual representation of the concept of energy, the ability of energy to transform from one form into another, and the conservation of energy principle.

In the current study, the researchers report their ongoing examination of an activity that they have created, called "Energy Theater." Energy Theater is specifically designed to help learners visualize energy and how it dynamically changes form and location. In Energy Theater, learners (K-12 science teachers in this study) each play the role of one "chunk" of energy, and indicate with hand gestures what form that energy has (e.g., chemical, motion, gravitational, thermal). Different objects are represented by loops of rope on the ground, and learners can move from object to object, demonstrating energy moving between those objects. While energy is not actually a material substance, this metaphor can help learners think about how a fixed amount of energy can flow between different objects.

For example, the group may be given the problem of, "Show what happens when a hand pushes a box across a table." Participants would first stand in the area representing the hand, making the gesture for "chemical energy." One by one, they would move to the area representing the box, changing their gesture to "energy of motion." Other scenarios might include how energy flows when an incandescent light bulb is turned on. The group must work together to decide how the "theater" will play out for a particular situation, making complicated decisions about just where and when the energy will flow and take different forms. 

It sounds rather convoluted to me, but that is probably because I haven't had the chance to actually see it. Maybe something like this can sink in easier with students at that age and level.

In any case, you should be able to read the actual publication that appeared in PRST-PER that gives free access.

Zz.

Particles, Fields and The Future of Physics

If you have about an hour and a half, you could do worse than viewing this lecture by Sean Carroll of CalTech on elementary particles and the future of physics.



Zz.

Light Stopped And Stored For More Than A Minute

Advances in this field of storing light have been astounding. It was only a few years ago that we had the amazing accomplishment of light being stopped and then "played back" out of Lene Hau's lab. And there have been more advances since then (read here). Now comes this latest paper (free access to the actual paper is available at that link).

There are two major accomplishment that are notable with this one:

1. They managed to store light and all of its coherent information for more than a minute, and

2. They are using a solid state medium, rather than atomic gasses, which will make this more viable for storing quantum information.

While solid-state devices would be preferable for applications, stopping light in solids is more challenging: stronger interactions between atoms and their environment severely limit the attainable coherence times. But the effect has been demonstrated in a special class of solids: crystals doped with rare-earth (RE) ions cooled at cryogenic temperatures. Since the atoms are naturally trapped in the crystal, the motion of RE atoms is limited and the transitions of interest take place between electronic levels (e.g., the 4f electrons of praseodymium) shielded from the crystal environment by outer full electronic shells (5s and 5p). This makes the coherence properties of these crystals exceptional.

Zz.

"The 1905 Relativity Paper and the "Light Quantum""

Galina Weinstein has a rather nice article uploaded on arXiv recently on the history of the "light quanta" per Einstein's 1905 paper. In particular, she explored why this issue, or rather, the "light complex" that Einstein mentioned in his photoelectric effect paper, was never included directly in his Special Relativity paper. Rather, there was an implication that SR's validity actually depends on the correctness of the photoelectric effect paper and the energy of the light quanta.

Note that in the article, Einstein clearly considered that it is the idea of the light quanta, and NOT Special Relativity, that was truly revolutionary. He thought that Special Relativity was simply an extension of classical electromagnetism.. This is the view that John Ridgen has also taken in proclaiming that it is the photoelectric effect that is a truly revolutionary idea, more so than Relativity (link requires free registration).

Zz.

Zero Gravity Coffee Cup

This video is more about fluid mechanics in microgravity, but hey, coffee is important too, even in space! :)



Zz.

Neutrinos - Nature's Identity Thieves

Here's a video explaining a bit about the flavor-changing neutrinos.



Zz.

Physics Discussion Gave Birth To Emoticons

We all know that high energy physics led to the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN. Now comes a history lesson from Symmetry Magazine which credited a physics discussion giving birth to the ubiquitous emoticons that we all have used.

On Sept. 16, 1982, Neil Swartz, a computer scientist at CMU, posed a physics problem to his computer science colleagues on the department’s “bboard,” a form of early online message board similar to today’s Facebook group. Bboard users often posted science puzzles for one another to solve and had been discussing the riddle of whether a canary could fly in an elevator during free fall.

Swartz presented a new scenario, which involved a lit candle mounted on an elevator wall and a drop of mercury on the floor.

“The cable snaps and the elevator falls,” Swartz wrote. “What happens to the candle and the mercury?”
That evening, fellow computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!”

“Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury,” Gayle wrote. “There is also some slight fire damage. Decontamination should be complete by 08:00 Friday.”

Despite posts noting that the warning was meant in jest, some people apparently took the notice at face value, believing a mercury spill had actually taken place. Various bboard users began joking about different symbols that could identify posts that weren’t meant to be serious.

Eventually, Scott Fahlman, then a computer science research assistant professor, proposed using :-) for joke posts—or, given the preponderance of joke posts, simply using :-( for serious ones.

There ya go! And there are still people who question the value of physics??!!

:-)

Zz.

Eugen Merzbacher 1921 - 2013

This is a bit late.

Many physics students, especially graduate students, would recognize that name. Merzbacher's QM text is one of the more popular texts being used at both the advanced undergraduate level and graduate level. This famous author and physicist passed away last month.

You may read the obituary here and a brief description of his life here.

Zz.

Molecular Wires With 2000% Change In Magnetoresistance!

Holy magnetic wires, Batman! This thing blows away those colossal magnetoresistance material! What's bigger than "colossal" for us to give a name to this thing?

A new paper appearing in Science today is reporting the properties of a molecular wire that has the capability of having a 2000% increase in its magnetoresistance, and all at room temperature!

Ironically, the new molecular wires aren't made with magnetic materials at all. Rather, their MR effect relies on the conductivity of nonmagnetic organic dye molecules called DXP, which the Italian automaker Ferrari once used to give their roadsters their trademark red color. Unlike conventional inorganic metals in which electrons zip through a crystalline lattice, in organics electrons must hop from one molecule to another, like pails of water being passed by a bucket brigade. To create a MR, material researchers need to switch off that bucket brigade in the presence of a magnetic field.

In organic materials researchers do this with a little help from quantum mechanics. A tenet of quantum mechanics called the Pauli Exclusion Principle states that no two fermions (particles in a family that includes electrons) can occupy the same quantum state. If two electrons with the same quantum state try to hop onto the same DXP, they can't. The bucket brigade turns off and resistance skyrockets.

Of course, we all know (don't we?) that this is the field that has been responsible for invention of computer magnetic storage disks, etc. So kids, this is another example of real-world, practical application of physics, and quantum mechanics in particular.

Zz.

First Direct Measurement of Van der Waals Force

In an amazing feat of experimental ingenuity, the first direct measurement of Van der Waals force between two atoms has been accomplished.

This latest research was done by researchers at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry (LCF) in Palaiseau and the University of Lille. "What we have done here, for the first time to our knowledge, is to measure directly the Van der Waals interaction between two single atoms that are located at a controlled distance, chosen by the experimenter," says Thierry Lahaye, who is part of the LCF team.

Controlling the distance between normal atoms – while measuring the force between them – is extremely difficult because the relevant distances are tiny. To get round this problem the team used Rydberg atoms, which are much larger than normal atoms. Such atoms have one electron in a highly excited state. This means that they have a very large instantaneous dipole moment – and therefore should have very strong Van der Waals interactions over relatively long distances. They also have unique properties that allow them to be controlled with great precision in the lab.

You can also read more review of this work at APS Physics, and, get a free copy of the paper.

Nice piece of work.

Zz.

Where Is The True North Pole?

This video might make you even more confused than before.



Zz.

Psychophysics Is Psychobabble?

This is a spot-on article on the seemingly fashionable practice nowadays to make some quantitative description of various ideas in social science.

Psychophysics secretly dominates our social sciences. Such physics-ing often improves experimental practice, but its mathematical methods face new challenges. As every infant knows, but too many scientists ignore, people aren’t biological billiard balls.

I'd go even further and say that people aren't even quantum balls.

Clearly, people are subject to the laws of physics. But nothing in physics chooses. Physics needs no strategies or game theory. Its main business is mechanical causation. Physics has no future. Like the best Buddhists, it feels only the forces of the present. Human psychology is different from physics precisely because it evolved to weigh and choose between forces from different possible futures.

Physics developed in situations like this: Everything of type X always does Y under conditions Z, where X, Y and Z are mathematically related. And simple scenarios such as: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Some people behaviors are like that. But many are not.

And I've lost count how many times I've seen discussion on the economy or in politics that kept on using various physics terms such as "every action there must be a reaction" in trying to justify or strengthen their arguments.

This topic is no different than the "Physics Envy" topic that I've posted quite a while back. The problem with adopting physics concepts in describing areas involving human actions and interactions is not just based on what has been said here in this article, but also the fact that many of the people who are adopting these physics concepts are not physicists, and have only a very superficial understanding of what they are adopting (think Deepak Chopra). So they may be using the same words and phrases, but they are severely bastardizing the concept.

Zz.

Opportunity's Improbable Anniversary

Happy 10th Anniversary, Opportunity! This is am amazing rover that could!



Zz.

Tabletop Accelerator To Create Ultra-Relativistic Positron Beams? Sure, I'll Take One!

I had just finished reading this new paper that appeared in PRL this week. Using a high-powered laser, they shoot the light beam to a He gas jet to create a beam of high-energy electrons (exceeding 80 MeV). These electrons are then shot at various high-Z material, and this is where the electron-positron pairs are created. The authors stated two separate processes for these pair production:

In these experimental conditions, the positrons inside the high-Z target are mainly generated via either direct electroproduction (trident process), in which pair production is mediated by a virtual photon in the electron field [25], or via a two-step ‘‘cascade’’ process where the electron first emits a real photon (bremsstrahlung) [26], which then produces an electron-positron pair via the Bethe-Heitler process [27].

It looks like the could get positrons with energies in the range of 90 to 120 MeV.

Now, while I'm sure the size of this whole contraption can be considered as "tabletop", it doesn't include the laser source, which is a petawatt laser, something that is not trivia and not easily available to everyone, much less having it fit onto a tabletop size (at least, for now).

Zz.

Revamping The DOE Labs

A new report produced by an interesting group of organizations has recommended sweeping management changes at DOE in the structure and running of the US Department of Energy's non-weapons laboratories.

One jolt would be to name a single DOE undersecretary for science and technology to oversee the 13 nonweapons laboratories, instead of the two that do the job now. Another recommendation would remake how the department evaluates the contractors that run the labs for the federal government. The labs should also have more flexibility to set their own spending priorities, charge fees for the use of their facilities, and develop broader entrepreneurial partnerships with industry, the report asserts. The goal, the authors write, "is not to just tinker around the edges but to build policy reforms that re-envision the lab system."

The current system is enmeshed in red tape, reporting requirements, and program directives, according to the report. "Decisions that should be made by research teams and lab managers are instead preapproved and double checked by a long and growing chain of command at DOE," it notes. "At the smallest level, DOE, in concert with [the White House Office of Management and Budget] and Congress, micromanages internal lab-directed investment decisions."

This is fine and dandy, but I echo the comment by former Lab Director Burton Richter:

One former DOE lab director, however, is skeptical that implementing the report's recommendations will produce lasting change. "The report is very good in many respects, and I'm delighted to see these issues being discussed out in the light of day again," says Burton Richter, the director emeritus of DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. He supports many of the recommendations but says that the report doesn't "explain how you would actually achieve the culture change within DOE and Washington you'd need to persuade Congress and the bureaucrats to loosen the reins." He believes that a return to micromanagement is inevitable without a fundamental change in the culture. 

In other words, one has to point the finger at Congress as well, who seem to think that they know the science priorities to set, and therefore, do their own micromanagement. If the report does NOT address that and ignore this huge component, then the DOE can make as many management changes as they want and nothing will actually change.

As a former physicist that has worked at a US Nat'l Lab, I can tell you that, while adopting to the maddening array of DOE regulations and redundant directives can be a huge pain, I'd rather deal with that than the uncertain, meandering, and ill-conceived funding directives from Congress. With DOE regulation, one at least knows what what is getting into, and the bureaucracy made them slow to change. So you can expect almost the same thing year in, year out. With the politicians, who knows! It is significantly more difficult in dealing with uncertain priorities and not knowing what will happen in the next few months.

So how come no organization is doing any kind of study on how politicians screw the US science effort, huh?

Zz.

How The Penguin Diagram Got Its Name

Some time, one just never know if a folklore that gets spread around is actually true. But this one seems believable enough that it might just be.

One of the more famous Feynman diagram in particle physics is the "penguin diagram". This news article describes the origin of this name. It appears that it came about because of a lost bet!

In 1977 John Ellis made a bet with a student named Melissa Franklin at a bar. “If you lose this game of darts,” Franklin said, “you have to use the word ‘penguin’ in your next paper.” Ellis took the bet, and lost. The result can be seen in physics classrooms all over the world: the penguin diagram. 

You can read the rest of the hilarious article, especially on why Franklin came up with "penguins". I suppose one can ask directly the participants involved and see if this story is true.

Zz.

Fermilab Has A New Director

Nigel Lockyer will have the unenviable and difficult task of guiding Fermilab through its most challenging period in its entire history of existence. He has just been named as the new Fermilab Director, taking over from the retiring Pier Oddone.

Times are tough at Fermilab, which employs roughly 1700 people. Its budget for this year is $366 million, down from $397 million in 2010. The lab has cut staff members in recent years. Most important, although Fermilab has a number of intermediate scale projects going on now, its future a decade down the road remains uncertain. 

I don't know to what extent many of these things are within his control. He has to work and guide the lab with whatever the politicians throw at him. It is the politicians, and to some extent, the public, who need to realize the importance of such science and want to fund it.

But to ask the politicians and the public to think about long-term benefits rather than short-term, instant gratification is almost an impossible task.

Zz.

Neutrinos: Nature's Ghosts?

A short video to introduce you to neutrinos, if you haven't heard about them.



I guess you will have to wait for Part 2 of the video to hear about the flavor-changing neutrinos.

Zz.

Flames In Microgravity

This is actually an interesting video on the physics of flames, and the physics of flames in microgravity. It shows a flame experiment on the International Space Station.



Zz.

Hints At The Existence Of A 4-Quark Matter

Two papers published in PRL this week report on the possible discovery of a 4-quark matter.

Two separate groups, both reporting in Physical Review Letters, have seen evidence for this strange particle, called Zc(3900). Although the data is open to other interpretations, it’s clear that our understanding of quarks has a long way to go.

The evidence for Zc(3900) comes from two independent groups: the BESIII Collaboration at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider, China, and the Belle Collaboration at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan. It is the business of both labs to accelerate electrons and positrons to nearly the speed of light, smashing them into each other and carefully analyzing the resulting debris. Taken together, the two collaborations have uncovered 466 events that appear to have a Zc(3900) in their debris.

BTW, if you're paying attention, none of these facilities are in the US because ..... altogether now .... the US no longer has any electron-positron colliders or any high energy physics colliders! What we have left are nuclear physics facilities such as RHIC, which is scheduled to shut down due to budget cutbacks.

Zz.

Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal!

I read this report either earlier in the year, or late last year, but forgot to write about it till now.

I know that I've written several "philosophy-bashing" posts in this blog. It's not that I was trying to pick a fight against philosophy in general, but rather I'm trying to tackle the often overblown perceived-importance of this field in its contribution to science as it is practiced today (I profess zero knowledge of its importance in other fields).

While those discussions are based on opinions, to some extent, this one isn't. A study done out of Georgetown University has listed Philosophy/Religions Studies major as one of the worst major in college based on the unemployment rates of its graduates and the starting salary. The only major that's worse is a degree in Fine Arts. A summary of the report can be found in this news article.

Physics/Physical Science didn't fare that badly in this study. Of course, the unemployment numbers do not clearly say if those who are employed are working in their chosen fields, or if they are employed doing other things. Previous statistics from the AIP indicated that a lot of physics degree holders outside of Academia and Research Lab are employed as "engineers, computer programmers", etc.

Zz.

Solving A Simple Simultaneous Equation Using Quantum Computer

This work appears in this week's PRL. A group of scientists have managed to solve a rather simple simultaneous equation with two variables using a quantum computation scheme proposed back in 2009.

The computational feat has been carried out by Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, the University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore, who used a quantum algorithm created in 2009 by Aram Harrow, Avinatan Hassidim and Seth Lloyd. For simple systems of linear equations, Harrow and colleagues showed that their algorithm can be exponentially faster than the best solving methods that use a classical computer. One important caveat, however, is that the algorithm does not find an exact solution, but only the most likely answer.

Most likely answer, eh? Not sure how good that will be especially when we use computers to solve already-uncertain situations such as weather forecasting and other phenomena.

Still, this is merely a baby step in the evolution of quantum computers.

Zz.

What Is An Electron?

I get asked that question surprisingly often. It is understandable because of all the mysterious, unseen subatomic, elementary particle in our everyday lives, electrons are the ones we either encounter or deal with the most. It is the predominant carrier of electricity, and it used to be what caused our TVs to display images in the old days when we still used cathode ray tubes. So naturally, many of us are familiar with the presence of electrons, but we don't quite know what it is.

This is especially true in light of quantum mechanics. QM has made all subatomic particles, including electrons, mysterious. What we thought we knew, now seems to exhibit behaviors that are rather strange.

Frank Wilczek has a very nice article in last week's issue of Nature addressing "The Enigmatic Electron"[1]. He said something that people who are not trained in science should pay attention to:

Modern quantum theory reinforces Bohr's conclusion that what you see depends on how you choose to look. Electrons are both ideally simple and unimaginably complex. They are understood with precision yet remain mysterious. Electrons are stable bedrock in physicists' world picture, and are playthings that we are learning to fragment and transform.

And that is the central theme here. Something can appear to be mysterious, appear to have strange behavior, etc., but it doesn't mean that we know nothing about that. We have such huge and vast knowledge about electrons, their behavior (especially their collective behavior), etc. This is what drove advances in modern electronics. Yet, based on QM and QFT, there are a lot of things we either don't know, or can't quite reconcile with our classical understanding of the world. So being mysterious is NOT synonymous to not understanding anything about it.

I am emphasizing this because this is identical to what I mentioned earlier when I keep hearing people claim that no one understands quantum mechanics. This is, of course, utterly silly considering that we have a formal theory of quantum mechanics, and we have used it to produce useful applications! This ability is MORE than what can be said about many other things that people seem to think they understood.

Don't miss the Wilczek article if you have access to it.

Zz.

[1] F. Wilczek, Nature v.498, p.31 (2013).

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

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

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

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

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

Zz.

Staging the Drama of Quantum Physics

This news report presents an account of the staging of the infamous battle between Bohr and Einstein that is forever linked to this history of quantum mechanics.

At the center of the drama was the rivalry and grudging friendship between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two brilliant physicists who fell on opposite sides of the new debate that came to be known as quantum theory.

Did you attend this? If you did, I'd like to hear your view of this play.

Zz.

The Physics Of Toasty Buns

It's summer (at least, here in the northern hemisphere), and lots of outdoor grilling goes on. So what a timely article on the secret to getting proper grilling of food.

At high temperatures -- about 400 degrees and up -- a substantial part of the heat that reaches the food arrives in the form of infrared light waves rather than via hot air or steam.

The higher the temperature, the bigger the part that radiant heat plays in cooking. But this form of heat interacts with color in a profound way.
.
.
A silvery, mirror-like fish skin is even more reflective than a white car. About 90 percent of the radiant heat striking it simply bounces away. Because only around 10 percent of the energy sinks in and warms the fish, cooking initially creeps along slowly but steadily.

That changes rapidly, however, as soon as the food gets hot enough to brown. It's like changing from a white shirt to a black shirt on a sunny summer day.

As the food darkens, that 10 percent of energy absorbed rises by leaps and bounds, and the temperature at the surface of the food soars.

So learn your physics to understand how to be good in grilling! :)

Zz.

Interview With David Gross

Wired as an interview with Nobel Laureate David J. Gross.

I think the title of the piece is misleading. It seems that he is urging more of a 'revolution' in theoretical physics, not ALL of physics.

These days, Gross enjoys challenging young physicists as they chalk equations at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the think tank funded by the National Science Foundation that he ran from 1997 until stepping down last year. He is eager for younger scientists to surpass his achievements, to break the impasse of under-determination that currently troubles particle physics, whereby competing theories predict the same physical results and may therefore be immune to experimental verification within the lifetime of the universe.

Gross characterizes theoretical physics as rife with esoteric speculations, a strange superposition of practical robustness and theoretical confusion. He has problems with the popularizing of “multiverses” and “landscapes” of infinite worlds, which are held up as emblematic of physical reality. Sometimes, he says, science is just plain stuck until new data, or a revolutionary idea, busts the status quo. But he is optimistic: Experience tells him that objects that once could not be directly observed, such as quarks and gluons, can be proven to exist. Someday, perhaps the same will be true for the ideas of strings and branes and the holographic boundaries that foreshadow the future of physics.

He has an interesting, but not surprising, take on String theory:

Simons Science: Is it possible to falsify string theory/quantum field theory? Or is that a purely philosophical question?

Gross: The question of how we decide whether our theories are correct or wrong or falsifiable has a philosophical aspect. But in the absence of empirical data, can we really judge the validity of a theory? Perhaps. Can philosophy by itself resolve such an ontological quandary? I doubt it. Philosophers who contribute to making physics are, thereby, physicists!

Now, in the last century, great physicists such as Ernst Mach, Bohr and Einstein were also philosophers who were concerned with developing theories of knowledge. Einstein famously criticized Heisenberg for focusing only on observable entities, when there can be indirect evidence for entities that cannot be seen. It may be the same with string theory.

Zz.

Sonoluminescence

Here's Minute Physics description of sonoluminescence.



Zz.

Theorists And Experimentalists

Hey, this is a rather good article on why many in the public seem to know more about theorists than experimentalists, and know more about theory than experiments.

Similar themes proliferate throughout the popular view of physics. Everyone knows Paul Dirac who conjectured the existence of the positron, but how many know Carl Anderson and his collaborator Seth Neddermeyer who actually found it? People similarly know about Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi stating the requirement for a ghostly particle called the neutrino in the 30s, but ask popular science enthusiasts if they are aware of the dogged pursuit of the neutrino by Raymond Davis for over 30 years and you will likely see knitted brows. Finally, even today, a schoolchild would likely know Einstein’s prediction of the bending of starlight by the gravitational field of a star, but Arthur Eddington’s verification of this fact would be little known.

The author produced a not-so-well-known quote from Feynman on the importance of experiments:

In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.

For many physicists, this is the main issue surrounding String/Superstring, etc.

The author produced a number of reason why the public are more inclined to be fascinated by theorists/theory than by experimentalists/experiments.

It seems to me that there are at least two important reasons why the public, in spite of tacitly appreciating the all-important role of experiment in physics, fails to give experimentalists their due. First is the sheer success of theoretical physics in uncovering the deepest mysteries of the universe through armchair speculation. Nobody can fail to gasp in awe at an Einstein or Bohr who, working with a few facts and pencil and paper, divine grand operating principles for the cosmos in short order.

Compared to their efforts based on pure thought, the corresponding efforts of experimentalists who get down on their knees, liberally coat their hands with grease and spend most of their time soldering electronic circuits and fashioning precision machine parts on a lathe sounds humdrum and boring.
.
.
Secondly, there are also outstanding example of discoveries made by experimenters which really had no theoretical precedent. That is what makes Rutherford and Faraday the two greatest experimental physicists in history. Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in 1908, but it took thirty years for physicists to develop a concrete theory of the nucleus. Similarly Faraday discovered the seamless relationship between electricity and magnetism – one of the very few examples of unification by experiment – but it took until after his death for Maxwell to come up with his pioneering theory of electromagnetism. Experimentalists  often follow in the steps of theorists, but the instances in which they lead the way are as full of creativity and achievement as the work of an Einstein, Bohr or Feynman. And even when they follow, they are the ones who bridge the gap between idea and hard fact.

Hum... OK. I don't quite agree with the 2nd part, even when the author gave some examples on when experiments produced something that hasn't been predicted by theory. I would say that in physics, it is more of a rule that the major advancement were made DUE to the unexpected discovery found from experiments, not the other way around.  Superconductivity, fractional quantum hall effect, dark matter, dark energy, the whole field of electromagnetism, etc.. etc. all came about out of observations first. In fact, one only needs to read Harry Lipkin's provocative essay in Physics Today from a few years ago when he asked "Who Ordered Theorists?" One can even say that Gell-Mann's often-used exclaim of "Who ordered that?" is a direct result of many experimental discoveries that no one expected or anticipated.

Zz.

Why Supersymmetry?

OK, so we had a video out of Fermilab explaining to us what Supersymmetry is. Now comes a video on WHY.



Zz.

Can You "Feel" Temperature?

Another fine video, and might answer the question (if you have it) on why a metal feels colder than a book, even when both are at the same temperature.



Zz.

Where Are All Those Doomsayers Now?

It's about time someone calls out those crackpots who predicted all those apocalyptic end-of-the-earth scenarios. This is especially true with the LHC and all that nonsense about it destroying the earth.

These prophesies share something else as well. Whenever an apocalyptic prediction fizzles, the doomsayers remain strangely silent — until the next opportunity to capture the public’s imagination. The new millennium did not bring down airplanes or knock out power grids; but no software engineer has confessed that the Y2K scare was a con — or at least a serious mistake — that cost the United States alone an estimated $300 billion. On the contrary, some have begun to warn that, in 2038, certain computer software and systems will experience “integer overflow,” causing them to report negative system times and, in turn, to fail.

The interval between a doomsday prophecy’s fall and the rise of the next one evidently is decreasing, perhaps owing to the accelerating pace of modern life — and, with it, the acceleration of forgetting, which enables potential beneficiaries to capitalize. Last year’s misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar clearly helped — and was probably helped by — the proprietors of some Yucatan hotels, which reached 100-per-cent occupancy in the weeks surrounding the world’s projected end.

Unfortunately, these crackpots would not get any kind of free publicity were it not for the media that seem eager to jump to such sensational story.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are eager to provide a platform for fear-mongers. Doom sells; scientific empiricism, not so much. In an increasingly cutthroat media culture — in which falling behind a story is often considered worse than making a mistake — serious journalism has largely given way to infotainment and sensationalism.

For example, in 2008, the Russian physicist Grigory Vilkovisky claimed to have proved that black holes radiate away only about half of their mass — contrary to Stephen Hawking’s celebrated finding that they radiate away their entire mass. At the time, I wrote that, if Vilkovisky were correct, accepted ideas about black-hole physics would have to be radically altered, and “black holes created at CERN might actually survive long enough to be taken seriously.” While I intended only to suggest that the black holes would be considered seriously as a scientific phenomenon, my words were interpreted to mean that the black holes could pose a serious threat to Earth.

Anyone who has written a science article for the public, or have science blogs, will inevitably encounter something such as this:

On the other hand, the rising incidence of false prophecy might equally reflect the increasing prevalence of charlatanism masquerading as science. Each time I publish a scientific essay, I attract the attention of a dozen self-proclaimed messiahs eager to impart their divinely inspired ideas, which invariably lack higher mathematics (or, in the case of the black-hole sentinels, rely on elevated but meaningless mathematics). Their conviction that they represent the Alpha and Omega of knowledge is as rigid as their scientific illiteracy.

I certainly have. I lost count on how many "comments" I had to delete coming from people who claim to have solved the entire mystery of the universe. Love that DELETE button on Blogger. I've ever used the MARK AS SPAM on habitual crackpots who can't seem to get a clue that none of their garbage will ever get free advertisements on here.

Ah, such fun!

Zz.

Philosophy Isn't Dead Yet?

This is a rather strange article. The author is arguing that the problems that physicists are dealing with right now shows that philosophers are still needed. He presented several different major questions being dealt with in physics, including QM/GR unification, the measurement problem in QM, and the question of what is "time"?

But there could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton of metaphysical inquiry to physicists. Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

And then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".

I'm scratching my head here because these are all physics issues. I do not see how philosophy could SOLVE any of those, because inevitably, what will resolve these issues are accurate physical theories AND experimental verification. Last time I checked, none of those are done in philosophy. In fact, I would even put it to you that the reason why some parts of physics are in "such a mess" IS because they have neglected a major aspect of physics, which is the experimental part. To paraphrase Brian Greene in his "Elegant Universe" TV series, if String theory cannot provide a way to produce an experimentally measurable effect, it isn't physics, but rather a philosophy! So I can easily turn this around and say that this mess is caused by a "philosophy" rather than by physics.

And this is generally the case in physics when there isn't a sufficient body of experimental evidence YET. Lacking a set of decisive experiments, many different scenarios can fit into the same set of observations. So you end up with competing but different ideas, all claiming equal validity. That is why experiments are so important, and why continued refinement of existing experiments and continued performance of new experiments are needed to weed out which idea is valid. That is how physics and science in general have worked. It is just that it is taking long and longer now for that to occur because the problems are getting to be more and more difficult to solve.

Zz.

Accelerators For Baggage Scanners

I've been doing my part in trying to convey the fact that the overwhelming majority of the applications for accelerators have nothing to do with particle physics. Here is another example, the use of accelerators to generate x-rays for baggage scanners.

Two SLAC physicists with decades of particle accelerator experience helped a Silicon Valley company design and build X-ray devices that scan cargo containers for nuclear materials and other hazards. A version of this screening system is now in commercial use, and on May 16, the company received national recognition for its successful development from the federal Small Business Administration. 

There are a lot more examples of this that many of you come in contact with almost everyday. You use or come in contact with particle accelerators more often than you realize.

Also note that this is another example where research that was meant for the study of fundamental physics, found an application elsewhere as an off-shoot.

Zz.

"Ghostbusters 3" To Be Based On Physics Research?

I'm trying very hard not to roll my eyes (it's getting difficult to pop them back into the sockets), but hey, if it is done tongue-in-cheek like the first movie, it might just be entertaining enough.

It appears that the new Ghostbusters movie will tackle spacetime, or at least, something that threatened our spacetime.

Dan Akroyd told the ever-famous radio personality about the story of Ghostbusters 3:

“It’s based on new research that’s being done in particle physics by the young men and women at Columbia University. Basically, there’s research being done that I can say that the world or the dimension that we live in, our four planes of existence, length, height, width and time, become threatened by some of the research that’s being done. Ghostbusters – new Ghostbusters – have to come and solve the problem.”

Oooookay! Another creation of black holes in a particle collider that could destroy our universe, perhaps?

It sounds like it could be a storyline for a Marvel movie. We'll just have to see how they play this out.

Zz.

What Is Supersymmetry?

Here's a video "tutorial" of what Supersymmetry is.



Zz.