Just Because A Lot Of Things Are Mysterious, That Doesn't Mean They Are Connected

It looks like I am not the only one who is frustrated by the likes of Michio Kaku and Deepak Chopra when they delve into something that they have little knowledge about. This "rant" is almost on points as far as pointing out the ridiculousness of someone who delve into an area that he/she has little knowledge in and thinks that he/she has formulated a meaningful idea.

I hold degrees in physics and have spent a lot of time learning and teaching quantum mechanics. Nonphysicists seem to have the impression that quantum physics is really esoteric, with those who study it spending their time debating the nature of reality. In truth, most of a quantum mechanics class is lots and lots of math, in the service of using a particle’s quantum state—the bundle of physical properties such as position, energy, spin, and the like—to describe the outcomes of experiments. Sure, there’s some weird stuff and it’s fun to talk about, but quantum mechanics is aimed at being practical (ideally, at least).

Yet the mysterious aspects of quantum physics and consciousness have inspired many people to speculate freely. The worst offenders will even say that because we don’t fully understand either field, they must be related problems. It sounds good at first: We don’t know exactly how some things in quantum physics work, we don’t know exactly how to go from the brain to consciousness, so maybe consciousness is quantum.

The problem with this idea? It’s almost certainly wrong.

Just do a search on Deepak Chopra or my rant on The Secret book on here and you'll see my similar argument.

The essay also took shots at physicists who dipped their toes into areas that they had very little expertise in.

Some of them think that the overwhelming success of modern physics gives them the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences, from linguistics to paleontology. Celebrity physicist Michio Kaku is a particularly egregious example, getting evolution completely wrong (see this critique) and telling infamous crackpot Deepak Chopra that our actions can have effects in distant galaxies. Then there are the physicists—including Freeman Dyson, one of the architects of the quantum theory describing interactions between light and matter—who contradict climate scientists in their own area of expertise.

The take-home message is contained in the very last paragraph, which I strongly endorse.

The problem with Klemm’s assertions, as well as those of many others who misuse the word quantum, is that their speculation is based on a superficial understanding of one or both fields. Physics may or may not have anything informative to say about consciousness, but you won’t make any progress in that direction without knowing a lot about both quantum physics and how brains work. Skimping on either of those will lead to nonsense.

You can take that, and substitute it with any particular knowledge, and you'll have a very respectable way of living a life. One can argue that a lot of the major political and societal problems that we face are due to people who make decisions and arrive at conclusions based on incomplete or faulty knowledge of a particular matter.

Zz.

A Disappointingly Weak Case Made For HEP Funding

When I came across this blog entry in Huff Post by a high-energy physicist, I thought, "Oh good! Someone is going to make a good case to the public on why they, and the politicians, should not make funding cuts to HEP". I was sadly disappointed after a rather weak essay made to argue for its support. The basic argument was made in the very last paragraph:

I encourage you to find out more about the exciting science to be done. I hope that after this significant planning exercise, our field will be able to make the case that we are good stewards of the public money, have an exciting program that benefits humanity, and will receive more positive news from the budgets to come.

In other words, fund us because we do good and important science.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, such a thing just doesn't work, or is not that convincing anymore. In fact, I think in the few essays on this that I've written on my blog, I had made a more convincing arguments on why HEP funding is NECESSARY, and I'm not even in HEP!

Whenever someone from an esoteric field such as HEP, Astrophysics, etc.. tries to make a point on why it is necessary to fund such a field, there must be several different types of argument to be made when it is pitched to non-specialists/scientists:

1. Pitch the science, i.e. what are you trying to do.

2. Argue why basic knowledge, even when there seems to be no obvious application or benefit to mankind, is necessary, based on history.

3. Argue why the process of studying these things, especially in experiments done, had produced numerous "by products" that are now ubiquitous in our lives. So even areas that may not have any immediate applications from the knowledge, have produced many immediate applications just from the pursuit of studying these things.

4. Present the percentage of money being spent in perspective, i.e. look how how minuscule the funding for HEP in DOE's Office of Science, for example, when compared with the funding levels of other fields and when compared to the cost of a single stealth bomber. You cannot just present a number to the public without putting in some context and perspective. After all, to many (all?) of us, US$750 million is a lot of money! But is it a lot when compared to the overall funding picture and the costs of many of the things being paid out of the US budget?

Based on my interactions with many of the members of the public for many years, both in person and online, these are the four main points that I have found to be effective in convincing many to fund these areas that are very hard to argue for based on the nature of the subject matter. I don't have to argue that hard to convince the public on why funding the study of semiconductors or quantum computation is necessary. They can already figure out the potential applications of these things. Arguing why they need to fund the search for the Higgs require a lot more effort, and a lot more careful thought than just to argue that it is a necessary step in the intellectual process, or that we need to cater to our curiosity. A lot of people are curious, yet they don't seek millions of dollars of public funding to satisfy those curiosities. You need to make a careful, thoughtful, and convincing argument on why support such a thing is important in a number of ways, and how previous fundings of such areas have impacted our lives.

Make it so that they should care!

Zz.

"The Milky Way is Not Just a Refrigerator Magnet"

This is a nice video from NASA on the mapping of the magnetic fields of our galaxy. So not only do we have our Earth's own magnetic field, but there are larger scale magnetic fields generated by the sun and the galaxy.



Zz.

Behavior Change Because Of What You Do

I was thinking about how, when I became a practicing physicist, some of the things that I got used to was directly due to what I do for a living. This all came to me because I have been thinking of buying a new watch.

Now that may sound strange, but hear me out. I used to work with a Class 4 laser. If you had ever worked with one, you know that there's a whole issue of safety training and stuff that one needs to know before dealing with such a dangerous equipment. One of the things that I do is doing a laser alignment. This often involves repositioning or adjusting the laser path.

The safety guidelines highly recommend that you do not wear anything shinny on your hands and arms. This is to prevent specular reflection of the laser that may bounce either at you or at someone else in the room. So for as long as I can remember, I've always wore plastic watches that have very few, or no shinny, reflective surfaces. I'm sure I could easily just take off my watch before I perform the work, but there's another thing you need to remember and at the rate I was going, I could easily forget where I left my watch at the lab! So the best option for me was to wear a plastic watch.

The cheap option turns out to be also useful, mainly because I also often got close to strong magnetic fields. I lost count how many watches that I had killed due to this, so I needed something which won't drain my bank account if I had to throw it away and replace with another one.

Well now, I no longer had to deal with such a thing, but I still find that I only want cheap, plastic watches. I like the classic Swatch watches, with black plastic strap, white face, clear numbers, and day/date display. Again, no shinny surface. It may be more expensive than your regular plastic watches, but hey, I think I can handle that now that I don't have to stick my hand near any strong magnetic field.

Do you have an ingrained characteristics or preferences as a result of what you do for a living?

Zz.

Slowing Down Sound So That You May Hear It?

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

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

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

REALLY!

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

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

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

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

Zz.

US Senator Marco Rubio Shifts Position And Thinks He's A Climate Expert

A while back, I started a series of blog entry titled "You Can Teach Yourself To Think Like A Scientist". In Part 3 of this series, I mentioned about the general principal that one might be able to draw when reading the statements made by a US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. To refresh your memory, in a GQ Magazine interview, the senator was asked on how old he thinks the Earth is. He evaded answering the question by claiming that he's not a scientist, and that the issue has nothing to do with the economy of the US, which one would gather is the more important issue on his plate at that time.

Based on that interview, I tried to illustrate trying to extract the principals that Senator Rubio was using, which presumably are the principals that guide him in his decisions. His refusal to answer this question and based on his responses, one can conclude that he would rather defer such questions to experts. There's nothing wrong with that, and certainly, being put in a position like that, deferring to the experts is a rather smart way to respond to such a question.

However, such a principal no longer applies anymore, it seems. In the latest news report, it seems that Senator Rubio thinks that he's a climate expert.

"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," Rubio said.

"I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy," he added.

In the week since the Obama administration released a national climate change report that named Miami as the city most vulnerable to rising sea levels, Rubio has been critical of the White House push on global warming.

"I think it's an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or the majority of them are attributable to human activity," he told CNN.

Not only did he not defer to the experts on this subject, it seems that he has the expertise, he thinks, to even dispute them! Based on what, you may ask? Why, based on his "belief", of course. He believes in these things, thus, it must be true, regardless of what the evidence and the experts say.

So what happened here? There are certainly two contradictory events. If one lives by the principal that one defers to experts and won't offer an answer on something one isn't well-informed in (as in the age of the Earth), isn't it rather contradictory to then turn around and behave the opposite way by contradicting those experts in another subject area?

And let's not ignore the very annoying, and often dangerous, traits of some people of relying on their "beliefs" that seem to trump expert opinions and evidence. It is one thing to question the validity of something when one has evidence to back it up. It is another when all one can offer is simply one's beliefs. This is a sign of someone who can't think properly when faced with a problem, and simply decides not on what the evidence say, but rather on some preconceived ideas on how things should be. I think this is another example where the public, and a politician in this case, put more emphasis on their "values" rather than facts.

Think of these things when you vote for your candidate next time.

Zz.

Freeman Dyson's Podcast

The recently-controversial physicist Freeman Dyson did an interview, the podcast of which you can listen to at the link. The HuffPost article highlights what they call as the one thing about science that people do not get:

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

This is certainly true. However, it is also true that there ARE things that we do know. Otherwise, there would be no progress. We explore things that we don't understand based on the stuff that we know. It may turn out that as we learn more, the stuff that we know might become more of a special case, or a simplified case, as in what happened with Newton's laws, but we do know it works and when and where it works.

I happen to be in the camp where Dyson's controversial view on climate change isn't a big deal. I don't know why it created that much of a controversy, and it is also certainly not as if he had seriously did a scholarly research on it the way Richard Muller did. What is annoying is that this is done in the media, rather than among the experts, i.e. via publications in which all the experts can scrutinize everything. This is also part of science, and how science is practiced.

Zz.

Can You Find The Current In This Circuit?

A father of a high-school freshman is puzzled by this assignment given to his daughter. Can you find Ix in that circuit, or is there something wrong in this picture?

He also asked what you would do if you were the teacher responsible for this.

Zz.

7 Great Innovators In Physics

National Geographic has listed what it considers to be the 7 Great Innovators in Physics. The list is the usual, big names in physics, but also include what I think are names that the public may not be aware of.

Did I ever told you that I once sat next to Ray Davis (who is listed here) on a Southwest flight from Islip, Long Island to Chicago's Midway? At that time, I didn't know who he was. He was sitting with his wife in the same row as I was, and I was by the window. We started talking and he told me he his name (it didn't ring a bell at that time) and that he was retired but still came in now and then to do stuff in the Chemistry Dept. at Brookhaven (I was doing my postdoc at Brookhaven also at that time).

We started talking and I certain inquired what he did. He told me about the problem with the solar neutrinos, and at that time, the initial results on the flavor oscillation had just came in, so the solar neutrinos problem hadn't been solve just yet. All that time, somehow his name, and the fact that he worked on solar neutrinos, never clicked in my head on who he really was (I must have been totally tired and totally dense back then, which is a common state for a postdoc!).

It was later on when it was announced that he had been awarded the Nobel prize, and I saw his picture in the papers, that I finally put two and two together. Oh yeah, I wanted to kick myself a few times because had I known who he was, I certainly would had asked him a lot of other questions. After all, we had at least 2 boring hours in the plane!

Oh well. I wonder how many other important, noteworthy people I've sat next to and not even aware of it?

Zz.

Helium Balloon In An Accelerating Vehicle

A while back, in a Part 6 of my Revamping Intro Physics Lab series, I mentioned an "experiment" that students can do involving a suspended helium balloon in an accelerating vehicle. I mentioned that this would be an excellent example of something where the students get to guess what would happen, and at first, what actually happens does not make sense.

Well now, we have a clear demonstration of this effect on video.



There is a good explanation of why this occurs in the video. It is also nice that he included a hanging pendulum in the beginning for comparison, and that this is what most of us are expecting to occur.

Might be a nice one to quiz your kids if you are teaching basic, intro physics.

Zz.

Dark Energy

In case you want an entertaining lesson or information on Dark Energy and why we think it is there, here's a nice video on it.



This video, in conjunction of the earlier video on Dark Matter, should give you some idea on what these "dark" entities are based on what we currently know.

Zz.

Learn Quantum Mechanics From Ellen DeGeneres

Hey, why not? :)



Although, there isn't much of "quantum mechanics" in here, but rather more on black holes and general relativity. Oh well!

Zz.

Science Is Running Out Of Things To Discover?

John Horgan is spewing out the same garbage again in his latest opinion piece (and yes, I'm not mincing my words here). His latest lob into this controversy is the so-called evidence that in physics, the time difference between the original work and when the Nobel prize is finally awarded is getting longer, and thus, his point that physics, especially "fundamental physics", is running out of things to discover.

In their brief Nature letter, Fortunato and co-authors do not speculate on the larger significance of their data, except to say that they are concerned about the future of the Nobel Prizes. But in an unpublished paper called "The Nobel delay: A sign of the decline of Physics?" they suggest that the Nobel time lag "seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend."

This comment reminds me of an essay published in Nature a year ago, "After Einstein: Scientific genius is extinct." The author, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, suggested that scientists have become victims of their own success. "Our theories and instruments now probe the earliest seconds and farthest reaches of the universe," he writes. Hence, scientists may produce no more "momentous leaps" but only "extensions of already-established, domain-specific expertise." Or, as I wrote in The End of Science, "further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns."

So, haven't we learned anything from the history of science? The last time someone thought that we knew all there was to know about an area of physics, and all that we could do was simply to make incremental understanding of the area,  it was pre-1985 before Mother Nature smacked us right in the face with the discovery of high-Tc superconductors.

There is a singular problem with this opinion piece. It equates "fundamental physics" with elementary particle/high energy/cosmology/string/etc. This neglects the fact that (i) the Higgs mechanism came out of condensed matter physics, (ii) "fundamental" understanding of various aspects of quantum field theory and other exotica such as Majorana fermions and magnetic monopole are coming out of condensed matter physics, (iii) the so-called "fundamental physics" doesn't have a monopoly on the physics Nobel prizes. It is interesting that Horgan pointed out the time lapse between the theory and Nobel prizes for superfluidity (of He3), but neglected the short time frame between discovery and the Nobel prize for graphene, or high-Tc superconductors.

As we know more and more, the problems that remain and new ones that popped up become more and more difficult to decipher and observe. Naturally, this will make the confirmation/acceptance up to the level of Nobel prize to be lengthier, both in terms of peer-reviewed evaluation and in time. But this metric does NOT reflect on whether we lack things to discover. Anyone who had done scientific research can tell you that as you try to solve something, other puzzling things pop up! I can guarantee you that the act of trying to solve the Dark Energy and Dark Matter problem will provide us with MORE puzzling observations, even if we solve those two. That has always been the pattern in scientific discovery from the beginning of human beings trying to decipher the world around us! In fact, I would say that we have a lot more things we don't know of now than before, because we have so many amazing instruments that are giving us more puzzling and unexpected things.

Unfortunately, Horgan seems to dismiss whole areas of physics as being unimportant and not "fundamental".

Zz.

Graphene Closer To Commercial Use

When an article related to physics makes it to the CNN website, you know it is a major news.

This article covers the recent "breakthrough" in graphene that may make it even more viable for commercial use. I'm highlighting it here in case you or someone else needs more evidence of the "application" of physics, and if anyone who thinks that something that got awarded the Nobel Prize in is usually esoteric and useless.

Zz.

"An Engineering Guide To Photoinjectors"

How would you like to own a 335-page book on the physics and engineering of electron photoinjectors? For free!

That is what you will get if you click on the link. If you are ever interested in electron accelerators, especially at the "birthing" end where the electrons are generated and given the initial acceleration, this is the review book to get. It explores not only the engineering aspect of the photoinjectors, but also the physics of photocathodes, and what makes a good photocathode for accelerator applications.

Highly recommended.

Zz.

"Introduction to superfluidity -- Field-theoretical approach and applications"

A very useful book chapter on superfluids if you are so inclined to study this subject in a bit more detail.

Zz.

Exploding Anvil In "Outrageous Acts of Science"

Rhett Allain vented his frustration on the bad physics being used to explain the "exploding anvil" situation from the TV show "Outrageous Acts of Science".

See if you can take up his challenge and come up with a better diagram and explanation. :)

Zz.

Physics In Health And Industry

I always try to show people that many of the stuff they now use, came out of the research work that had almost no apparent and immediate practical application. I often use high energy physics as an example, because in many camps, this is the poster child of esoteric physics that has no clear applications. Yet, people forget that the World Wide Web, the medical detector and diagnostics, and many others, came about as direct spin-offs of experiments in high energy physics.

This report of a recent conference on advanced radiation detectors will reinforce this point.

The first afternoon was rounded up by Colin Latimer of the University of Belfast and member of the EPS Executive Committee. He illustrated the varying timescales between invention and mass-application multi-billion-dollar markets, with a number of example technologies including optical fibres (1928), liquid-crystal displays (1936), magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) scanners (1945) and lasers (1958), with high-temperature superconductors (1986) and graphene (2004) still waiting to make a major impact. Latimer went on to present results from the recent study commissioned by the EPS from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, which has shown the importance of physics to the European economy.
.
.
.
Erik Heijne, a pioneer of silicon and silicon-pixel detectors at CERN, started by discussing innovation in instrumentation through the use of microelectronics technology. Miniaturization to sub-micron silicon technologies allows many functions to be compacted into a small volume. This has led in turn to the integration of sensors and processing electronics in powerful devices, and has opened up new fields of applications (CERN Courier March 2014 p26). In high-energy particle physics, the new experiments at the LHC have been based on sophisticated chips that allow unprecedented event rates of up to 40 MHz. Some of the chips – or at least the underlying ideas – have found applications in materials analysis, medical imaging and other types of industrial equipment. The radiation imaging matrix, for example, based on silicon-pixel and integrated read-out chips, has many applications already.

Without the effort and the need to push the capabilities of these detectors, there would be no reason to innovate, and the pace of advancement in many of these detectors will slow down considerably. The need to make better detectors to do high energy physics experiments DRIVES innovation in these various areas that have a clear and direct spin-offs into practical applications.

This is the part that many, including politicians, seem to not be aware of.

Zz.

Relativity Isn't Relative

This is a good Minute Physics video. Most people when they superficially read about Relativity (Special and General) pay most of their attention to the "relative" quantities, such as mass, length, and time. Yet, the most important aspect of SR and GR, and other areas of physics such as gauge theory, the thing that we want are the covariant/invariant quantities. These are things, as the video stated, that aren't based on perspective, or relative to anything. It is why, for example, that we can state the mass of the many elementary particles without the need to state the speed of these particles (not that the concept of "relativistic mass" makes much sense in the first place).

So if all you have heard about Relativity is how everything is relative, then this video will be useful to you.



Zz.

The Real Physics Behind "Star Trek"

This is a rather last-minute notice, but if you are in the Chicago area, Dirk Morr will discuss the physics and technology behind Star Trek, today, Wednesday, April 2, 2014, at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.

Dirk K. Morr, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, joins us to discuss the scientific ideas behind Star Trek technologies. Morr will present his findings at 6:00 pm on Wednesday at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Behavioral Science Building.

You may read the rest of the article to see what science and technologies from Star Trek that have some resemblance to what we do now.

Zz.

10 Things That Can Tangle Your Brain?

A blog on the Huffington Post listed 10 things in physics that can "tangle" one's brain. Normally, I would read this and shrug. But there's a bit of misleading and incorrect information here that should be corrected. Let's go through the list:

1. Space ripples

OK, this one was on the news a lot the past couple of weeks. Nothing much to say here since the coverage is appropriately on the superficial level, which is fine this this is meant for the masses.

2. Quark-gluon plasma

I'm not going to nitpick this one since the description doesn't say much more than some generalization of what it is.



3. Time is slowing down

This is where the trouble begins. The argument for "time slowing down" is given by "Tidal friction caused by the Moon's gravitational pull is causing Earth's rotation to slow so that a day on Earth gets 1.4 milliseconds longer about every 100 years. " Sorry, but this is NOT time slowing down. It is the earth's rotation that is slowing down. The rate of oscillation of cesium atom in an atomic clock remains the same.




4. Light can be stopped completely


This is not new, but it might appear to be if you read it here: "Last year scientists in Germany successfully stopped light from traveling for an entire minute, by trapping it in a crystal." Light has been stopped in atomic gasses since way back in 2001, especially from Lene Hau's group at Harvard.. That's more than a decade! They may not have done it as long as the German group, but they have stopped it, completely!

5. Teleportation

6. Quantum entanglement

I'm grouping these two together because they are basically the same thing. The claim that a photon has been "teleported" is false, because what is teleported is not the photo, but rather a particular property of the photon, and that is tightly connected to quantum entanglement. If you read the article, you'd think this is your "teleportation" that one sees in Star Trek. It isn't.

7. Quantum foam

OK, so this is vacuum fluctuation.

8. Light bends matter

On one hand, this may be unusual to most people. But if one learns a little bit about physics, is this really new and unexpected? Compton scattering, anyone? That old and well-known phenomenon alone shows that light of a certain wavelength can change the trajectory of matter (electrons, for example). And let's not forget, particle accelerators around the world use RF sources to accelerate, bend, and manipulate charged particle trajectories.

9. Invisibility cloak?

10. The "God particle"

Nothing much to comment on there.

Anyhow, I guess it should be commended that a mainstream news source is covering something in physics. I just wish that they would at least find an expert FIRST to clean up the article, rather than just use "an education research assistant" as the other contributing author. I'm always surprised that people without the proper background seem think that they can write an accurate description of something which clearly is way over their heads.

Zz.

"Brief history for the search and discovery of the Higgs particle - A personal perspective"

I find this "personal perspective" on the search for the Higgs to be extremely enjoyable. Don't be deceived by the title. This article has a lot of tabulated values and information that one can easily refer. It also explained why physicists were looking for the Higgs and why there was such a huge range of mass that had to be explored before it could be narrowed down during the final years before its discovery at the LHC.

Highly recommended.

Zz.

One Of The Most Common Practice That Students Make

Over the years, I've seen several things that students make repeatedly that had to be "corrected". I know I've made some of these things myself when I was a student. I've talked to a number of professors, and they too have commented that these things that students do are quite common before they learned not to do it.

One of the most common ones happen when they have to plot a graph. Inevitably, physics students will have to produce a report that includes graphs. This often continues into graduate school where they either will have to produce graphs for publication, or for presentation.

Inevitably, when they first do this, the most common thing they failed to do is to resize the labels and the axis titles. What they typically will do is simply to use the default setting of whatever data plotting/analysis software that they were using. For example, the graph below was done using Origin, and I simply used whatever the default settings that the software had:

Now, here's the problem. The labels are just too small! These may be fine at "normal" size, but they present a problem when (i) one is submitting this for publication where graphs are often required to fit inside a 2-column paper, and (ii) you are presenting this on the screen and expect everyone, especially in the back row, to see this.

My graduate students meet with me and a couple of other faculty members weekly to discuss the work being done. During these meetings, the students often present their results and whatever else that they did, and inevitably, there will be a few graphs. The new students ALWAYS, never fail, did what I had just described. Most of the time, we could hardly see the axis labels and values on the screen because they were so small. It is almost a right of passage that one of us will have to tell them that they have to resize these things and make them bigger. If they forget to do this when they're submitting a manuscript for publication, then they will encounter a comment from the editor of the journal about resizing the labels.

Eventually, they learn, as with other things, as part of their process of becoming a scientist. In the scheme of things, this is not a big issue, but I find it amusing that almost every single student that I've encountered started out by doing this identical habit.

Zz.

Walter Kohn and The Creation Of DFT

You all know that I try to highlight the lives and contribution of physicists that many in the general public are not aware of. This is another such example.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the article, since I haven't read any other biography on him, but this one describes the life of Walter Kohn, the person most responsible for the creation of Density Functional Theory (DFT), which has become a ubiquitous method in computing band structure and other properties of atoms, molecules, and solids.

Abstract: The theoretical solid-state physicist Walter Kohn was awarded one-half of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his mid-1960's creation of an approach to the many-particle problem in quantum mechanics called density functional theory (DFT). In its exact form, DFT establishes that the total charge density of any system of electrons and nuclei provides all the information needed for a complete description of that system. This was a breakthrough for the study of atoms, molecules, gases, liquids, and solids. Before DFT, it was thought that only the vastly more complicated many-electron wave function was needed for a complete description of such systems. Today, fifty years after its introduction, DFT (in one of its approximate forms) is the method of choice used by most scientists to calculate the physical properties of materials of all kinds. In this paper, I present a biographical essay of Kohn's educational experiences and professional career up to and including the creation of DFT.

The purpose of all my effort in pointing out the stories of these various physicists is not for us to worship and idolize these figures. I see people quoting many of these famous scientists as if they are word of god, and using those as if they are a sufficient counter argument. Far from it. I highlight them because we need to know that many of the things we accept and use and take for granted came from many of these nameless folks. It is trying to instill a sense of gratitude that the intelligence, creativity, and hard work of many of these people gave us the numerous convenience and advances that we enjoy today. You may not know before how much they had affected your lives, but you should now. You've gained another piece of knowledge/information that you didn't have before about someone who mattered.

Zz.

Flex Your BICEP

... or in this case, BICEP2.

The recent BICEP2 results seem to have caught a lot of media attention. News coverage ranges from NY Times to CNN, etc. And let's face it, this isn't easy to understand even if the news media coverage glosses over the physics on why this is such an important discovery.

To add to the body of "explanation" given out there, here's MinutePhysics version of it.



With all the euphoria surrounding this, Neil Turok voice his caution to all the brouhaha surrounding this result.

"If...and it's a big if...this is true, it would be spectacular evidence for what happened at the Big Bang," Turok told physicsworld.com. While he agreed that at first glance, the BICEP2 observations are in keeping with inflation "as suggested over 30 years ago, wherein space–time would resonate with the aftershocks of inflation and would ring like a bell", a closer look at the discrepancy between the new results and previous data from the Planck and WMAP telescopes is what worries Turok. Indeed, the tensor-to-scalar ratio of 0.20 that BICEP2 measured is considered to be significantly larger than that expected from previous analyses of data. But the BICEP2 researchers said in their press conference yesterday that they believe certain tweaks could be made to an extension of the ΛCDM cosmological model that could make the two results agree. 

As with ALL experimental observations and discovery, there has to be reproducibility, and agreement with other types of experiments that point to one single, consistent picture. This is what makes science different than other areas of human endeavor. We NEVER confirm something with just one single experiment or with just one single type of experiment. Superconductivity is confirmed with resistivity measurement and magnetic susceptibility measurement.

So while this is certainly a major discovery, there's a lot of hard work left to be done to confirm this observation.

Zz.

Single-Photon Detectors

This topic came up a few times during the past month in online discussions and with a few people that I've met. Most of these were in context with the photon detectors used in the EPR-type experiments, but a few came up due to the photon detectors used in detecting Cerenkov light from neutrino experiments.

A lot of people are confused with, and misinterpret, the meaning of "single-photon detectors". Most of them who are not familiar with it think that such detectors can detect every single photons that the detector comes in contact with, i.e. if there's a photon hitting a detector, it will detect it.

This is false. A single-photon detector is sensitive down to detecting single photons. So this is a sensitivity issue. However, it doesn't mean that it has a 100% efficiency. It doesn't detect every single photons that it encounters.

A photodetector such as a photomultiplier tube used in many photon detector is often made up of a photocathode (it converts the incoming photon into a photoelectron), an electron amplifier (something that multiply that single photoelectron into many electrons), and a signal generator/converter that converts the many electrons into an electrical signal. This is what we eventually detect in our electrical signal.

The problem here is that the photocathode does not have a 100% quantum efficiency. In fact, most photocathodes used in photodetector tubes have quantum efficiency less than 50%. What this means that if 100 photons hit the photocathode, less than 50 of them will be successful in generating a photoelectron each. The rest of the photons that hit the photocathode will generate no photoelectron and are lost.

So while the detector is sensitive down to the single-photon level, it is not 100% efficient. Single-photon detectors refer to the sensitivity, not the efficiency, of the detectors.

Zz.

Snapshot of 2014 APS March Meeting

If you didn't get to attend this year's APS March Meeting, or didn't get to the highlights they listed here, APS Physics has a summary of 4 of the major presentations at the recently-ended meeting. They range from "no-photon laser" to hyperbolic metamaterial.

Don't miss it.

Zz.

Oh, You Poor LHC Blackholes. You Were So Much Fun When You Almost Existed!

Remember all the brouhaha when the LHC was about to fire up and the whackos were out in force trying to stop it because they thought it will create blackholes that will destroy our planet? Wonder what happened to them now that the LHC has been in operation, and we are all still here. Hey, there's always the next apocalyptic event to get busy for, I suppose.

The latest analysis out of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC has published a paper in search of these quantum blackholes at the LHC. Their conclusion? None has been found.

Had such QBHs been created, they would have decayed into various particles that could be seen with the ATLAS detectors. ATLAS looked for a specific set of predicted decay products: an electron or a muon and a quark jet. While the search came up empty, the analysis set a lower bound of 5 TeV on the mass of QBHs, which may help guide future searches.

Now, let's be clear about this, since there might be people out there reading this and automatically assume that (i) if we do detect these blackholes, then (ii) it will automatically mean we'll be dead. There is a HUGE series of logical step that needs to connect from (i) to (ii), and so far, all our physics point to the knowledge that these quantum blackholes, if they get created, will be extremely fleeting, will decay very fast (that's why they're looking for the decay signals at ATLAS), and they are not these gravitational blackholes swallow galaxies! I often wish that many of these reports and news article clarify that, rather than simply go for the sensational, headline news that skip over important details.

So we haven't found it at 8 TeV yet, and the LHC will run at a much higher energy soon enough. There's no guarantee that they'll find it at these higher energies, but even if they do (and I hope they do), this has nothing to do with ending our existence on this earth here! There is a higher probability that we will kill each other first before we get killed by some stray blackhole!

Zz.

PhysicsWorld Special Edition On Physics Education

The March 2014 issue of Physics World focuses on physics education. It can be downloaded for free (with registration). The blurb on this says:

In the March 2014 issue of Physics World – a PDF copy of which you can download free of charge – we offer a snapshot of just some of the many innovative ideas that exist for learning and teaching physics. It’s not an exhaustive selection, but includes topics that we felt were interesting or novel.

 Zz.

Physics Talk With No Powerpoint Slides?

Oh, say it isn't so!

In an effort to get a better interaction between speaker and audience, organizers at a biweekly forum on the LHC at Fermilab banned the use of any Powerpoint presentation by the speaker.

“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”

In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.

It is definitely a development and a change that I find interesting and support... so some extent. You see, something like this will be amazingly fun and useful IF the speaker is engaging and actually pays attention to the audience. I'm sure you've been in seminars (or even a class) where the speaker simply rambled on and on looking at the screen, without even looking behind him/her to see if the audience was even there! So how well something like this goes depends very much on the speaker.

Still, not having the powerpoint slides will force these speakers to be more creative and inevitably, will create a less formal atmosphere during such a presentation. And from the report, having more of a dialog than a monolog is exactly what the organizers were trying to accomplish.

It is interesting to note that while these physicists are going back to the "primitive" form of communication, others in the education field are trying various technologies and techniques to get away from the primitive form of teaching. It is now almost common that college lecturers use Powerpoint in their lectures, and other forms of teaching techniques and technologies are being used in the classrooms. Yet, at the top, we go back to chalkboard/whiteboard to communicate.

Zz.

What Happens When You Cross A Bicycle With A Tricycle

Is this another case against cross-breeding and genetic modification? :)

Those crazy folks at Cornell produced a hybrid between a bicycle and a tricycle, and ended up with a vehicle that has a very weird steering capability.

Similarly, he wanted to see if the bike/trike dichotomy was really true in practice: A vehicle perfectly balanced between tricycle and bicycle would negate the effect of gravity by both preventing it from exerting force with its rear wheels like a trike, and by allowing the rider to lean the bike at any angle without shifting her center of mass.

Ruina’s “bricycle,” as he calls it, is a bike equipped with two training wheels attached by means of a spring. When the spring is stiff, the bricycle turns like a trike. When the spring is loose, the bricycle turns like a bike. But at a certain point when the spring is just stiff enough, the training wheels and rear wheel offset the force of gravity on each other. At that stiffness, the bike becomes unsteerable and falls over if the rider tries to turn, Ruina reported today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver.

More info on this can be found at the YouTube page where they have uploaded a video of this device.

The bricycle is really the same as the gravity-free pendulum. Assuming friction and so on are negligible, if we start from an upright position, the lean and the sideways displacement of the ground contact point are always in proportion to each other. So changing direction would cause both an ever-growing distance for the original line of travel, and an ever-growing lean angle. The riders don't tolerate this. Instead, they maintain balance and thus are stuck going about straight.

So gravity, superficially the thing that makes it hard to balance a bicycle, is the thing that allows you to steer it.

Here's the video:



Zz.

Checking On Antimatter

This is a rather nice, short summary on the study of anti-atoms, and in particular, CERN's effort to study the properties of anti-hydrogen and why it is so important.

With a big enough sample of anti-hydrogen, one can make detailed studies of the energy levels that the positron can occupy in its journey around the antiproton. These energy levels have been measured very precisely for hydrogen, and the expectation is that they should be identical in antihydrogen. But we won’t know until we look.
.
.
The symmetry principle which these experiments are designed to test is whether physics, and therefore the whole universe, would look the same if we simultaneously swapped all matter for antimatter, left for right, and backwards in time for forwards in time. This is called a CPT (Charge/Parity/Time) inversion. The Standard Model of physics, and almost all variants on it, require that indeed the universe would be identical after such an inversion.

Now pay attention, kids. In physics, even when some of our most cherished theories have been used, and known to be valid, we STILL go out and test out many of its predictions. Here, the Standard Model says that antihydrogen should behave the same way as hydrogen. While the Standard Model certainly has been useful, and has been correct in many aspects, we do not simply accept its predictions for the behavior of antihydrogen. We still want to test it! In fact, many physicists are hoping that we see something the Standard Model can't explain, that something "weird" is going on that might give hints of new physics. This is what many of us in this field look gleefully for!

This is how science works. We verify an idea, a theory, etc., but we continue to test its RANGE OF VALIDITY, i.e. how far out does this thing work? It works here, but does it work there? It works when you do this, but does it work when you do that? This is how we expand the boundaries of our knowledge.

Zz.

"Dropleton" Makes News

I've given up on trying to figure out why certain things from science make the news, while others don't. My feeble guess would be that a good, catchy name or phrase often can captivate a news reporter or agency more than having an actual importance.

Not that I'm implying the "dropleton" is not not important. After all, it made the cover of this week's Nature! Still, what makes the Los Angeles Times take note of it? I think it is a combination of the name and the sleek image on Nature's cover. Still, I don't think people who read the LA Times article on this thing would know what it is and why it is important enough that it made the cover. Besides, I don't think they would care.

It isn't often that a "new quasiparticle" makes the news. I probably won't see another one again in my lifetime, I would think.

Zz.

The Reincarnation of the Superconducting Supercollider?

This blog entry at Physics World presents an intriguing prospect at resurrecting high energy particle collider experiments in the US by reusing and re purposing the existing grounds in Texas that was meant for the failed Superconducting Supercollider facility.

However, a group of US physicists from Texas A&M University and Michigan State University is now proposing to wrestle back the energy frontier by constructing a huge accelerator in the US.

In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server today, the researchers outline plans to use the partly constructed tunnel of the axed Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) just outside Dallas, Texas. Conceived in 1983, the SSC was to be the next big particle collider with a circumference of 87 km and a maximum collision energy of 40 TeV. But 10 years later the all-American project was cancelled, largely on grounds of cost, leaving a few buildings on the surface as well as tens of kilometres of tunnels deep underground.

Most of the cost of a new collider would be in excavating the tunnel, but the researchers claim that around 46% of the SSC tunnel has been already bored and some facilities built, such as the linear accelerator that feeds particles into the collider. This would then make it much cheaper than the CERN proposal.

If you continue reading the article, there are really seriously BIG proposals being mentioned here, up to a 270 km tunnel and 300 TeV machine!

I will admit that I am highly skeptical that the US will consider such a thing, at least, not under the current funding climate. I think they are a lot more organized at CERN, and with the wishy-washy political situation here in the US, having a center in Europe that is more "stable" is so much more preferred, especially considering that whatever this facility will be, it will involved a multi-national endeavor due to its expected astounding cost.

I'd love to be wrong with this one.

Zz.

Sochi Physics Homework

The Sochi Olympics may be over, but Rhett Allain has a nice set of "homework" for you on the physics of several Winter Olympics events. See if you can tackle them.

Zz.

Not The Type Of Substitute Teacher You Want In You Physics Class

A high school substitute teacher in Michigan started spouting bizarre conspiracy theories when he should have been teaching physics instead.

Sources who wish to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from school officials have told The Daily Caller that the incident occurred on Jan. 16, 2013 at Grosse Pointe North High School in a ritzy suburb of Detroit, Mich.

Where do they find these people? We still don't know if this sub can actually teach physics. For all we know, the school hired a crackpot.

From the article, it appears that the students had a lot more sense than the adult in question . Unfortunately, it sounds like this sub teacher is still "teaching" at that school.

Zz.

And Then, There Will Be One

Rush Holt, one of the two remaining physicists in the US Congress, has announced his retirement from the US House of Representatives at the end of the year. This leaves Bill Forster as the only remaining physicist in the US Congress.

Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), a plasma physicist, didn’t reveal why he has decided to leave Congress after eight terms, or what lies in his future. “This is not the time to discuss next steps in my career; that can come later,” said Holt, who was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory before coming to Washington in 1999.
.
.
.
Holt was once part of a triumvirate of Ph.D. physicists in the House. But longtime Representative Vern Ehlers (R-MI) retired in 2010, and Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) returned to the House only last year after losing his one-term seat in 2010.

As of now, I don't see any new blood from the physics community to run for office in the US Congress.

Zz.

Synchrotron Radiation Center Set To Close

Another important science facility in the US is set to be shut down for good. The Synchrotron Radiation Center at the University of Wisconsin is set to close its doors for good on March 7.

After funding cuts from the National Science Foundation and the lab announced its preparations for closure, UW provided the lab with short-term funding as alternatives were sought. Bisognano said he has been looking for other sources for funding over the past several years, but with a shortfall of approximately $5 million, he has announced that the lab will be forced to close in March.
.
.
“Over the past few years, we’ve developed an infrared beam that can measure the structure and the chemical identity of the target material at the same time,” Bisognano said in a statement. “This device is the best in the world, and that’s probably the saddest part about shutting this down.”

I believe if you also look at the incredible body of work out of the Campuzano's group at Argonne/UIC on ARPES measurement on high-Tc superconductors in the late 80's, 90's, and well into the early 2000's, you'll find that these were done at the SRC. This small facility, with barely a drop in the bucket in terms of funding costs, was a workhorse!

While many other countries, especially China, are racing to add scientific facilities within their countries, the US is tripping over itself to close one after another. At what point will the public and the politicians make this realization?

Zz.

How Modern Light Bulbs Work

A summary of how our modern light bulbs (beyond the incandescent light bulb) work, all in one place.



Zz.

NIF Achieves Milestone

Finally, some good news out of the National Ignition Facility.

In a paper published in Nature, Hurricane and colleagues report results from experiments carried out last September and November – the former producing 14 kJ of fusion energy from a single laser shot and the latter 17 kJ. The researchers point out that since the energy delivered to the fuel is about 10 kJ, both shots generated a fuel gain. They also calculated that as much as half of the energy output from these shots originated in alpha-particle heating. This is significant because such heating is a prerequisite for ignition.

They haven't achieve ignition yet, but this is certainly a necessary step towards understanding this whole process. Now, they have the difficult and unenviable task of delivering on the promise.

Zz.

Figure Skaters and Newtonian Physics

With the Sochi Olympics going on now, it is inevitable that articles on the physics of the various sports at the winter games will appear. This is one such article with an instructive video of Walter Levin explaining the physics of figure skating.

Zz.

Electron Neutrino Appearence In Muon Neutrino Beam

Another and clearer detection of the appearance of electron neutrino from muon neutrino beam due to flavor mixing. This one is from the T2K collaboration. The link give you access to the actual paper in PRL.

Writing in Physical Review Letters, the T2K collaboration reports the strongest evidence to date for the appearance of electron neutrinos from a pure muon neutrino beam. Their measurement allows them to determine a fundamental parameter of the standard model of particle physics, called θ13, which can in turn be used to make an early estimate of CP violation in neutrinos. Although this estimate has a large uncertainty, it will serve as a guide to future, more definitive neutrino experiments that are directly sensitive to CP violation.

Zz.

The Big Guns

In case you missed it from 2 weeks ago, this Nature article (Nature, v.505, p.604 (2014)) on X-ray FEL is similar to the article I highlighted earlier. The major difference here is that they are really highlighting the "trees", in this case, the XFEL facility and physics themselves.

In the foothills above Palo Alto, California, physicists have set up an extreme obstacle course for some of the world’s fastest electrons. First the particles are accelerated through a 3-kilometre vacuum pipe to almost the speed of light. Then they slam through a gauntlet of magnets that forces them into a violent zigzag. They respond with a blast of X-rays so fierce it could punch through steel.

But the scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have no interest in weaponry. Their machine, one of the world’s most powerful X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), is a tool for studying challenging forms of matter, whether compressed to the kind of pressures and temperatures found deep inside a star, or folded into the complex tangle of a protein molecule.

Again, this is possible due to advancement in accelerator physics, which is now a separate field of physics in itself. Only when the "instrument" is available can scientists from other fields use it to look deeper and in greater detail at many of the things they study.

Zz.

The Hunt For Axions

Axions, which in some circles is a Dark Matter candidate different from WIMPs, is the focus of this news story.

This is kind of a Cinderella story – the story of a favorite and an underdog, in what may be the world’s most esoteric sport. The leading candidate for what might make up dark matter is called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. It gets most of the research money and most of the ink.

But there’s another candidate, a bit of an also-ran, called the axion. Its profile is lower, but for Rosenberg, it just seems to fit in with how the universe works.

Of course, as with WIMPs, the search for axions has also been fruitless so far, as I've mentioned at least a couple of times earlier. We just have to sit back and wait to see how this develops in the next few years.

Zz.

The Awesomest Physics Cake Ever?

I don't know if it is, but it certainly takes the cake (pun intended) for being quite creative! I wouldn't mind getting a cake that looks like that, or some variation of it with some condensed matter theme or accelerator physics theme......

Hum... I think I've come up with an idea for something. Wonder if my local bakery can make it?

Zz.

Don't Miss Looking At The Trees Due To The Forest

This is a report on a proposal to enable us to view a "movie" of a Rydberg atom:

In addition to having a large electron cloud, an unusual feature of a Rydberg atom is that its highly excited electron can exist as a coherent superposition of several different atomic orbitals. These orbitals interfere with each other, which means that the electron cloud changes shape with time. These fluctuations are much slower than the movement of electrons nearer the atomic nucleus, which is why Kirrander and Suominen argue that the fluctuations could be tracked by firing intense and coherent pulses of X-rays at the atoms.

Such pulses can be produced at accelerator-based free-electron lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California or the X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), which is set to come online at DESY in Hamburg, Germany in 2016. Kirrander and Suominen have also calculated that the motion of the corresponding "electron hole" in the atom – the superposition of inner orbitals that the electron has left behind – can be visualized as well. As the inner electrons are involved in chemical reactions, the new technique could therefore be a powerful tool for chemists.

When I said not to miss looking at the trees, most people reading the article will be enamored by the proposal that we can actually view such a thing in real time, that we can see the evolution of such an atom, and the potential that we can view the dynamics of a lot more system having such short time-scale. These are the "forest".

The trees here, which *I* am more interested in, and what most people will have missed, is the advancement made in accelerator physics that allows the ability to make such a measurement. The instrument being used is within the realm of accelerator physics, and specifically, the study of beam physics and engineering. This field of physics is often the unsung hero that enables the advancement in many other fields of physics. Think of what the LHC and the Tevatron could do without advanced knowledge of accelerator physics.

And this brings us to a very important point here. Many areas of science can only advance in knowledge when they have the ability to perform the experiments that they want. Inevitably, this means that that they have the equipment and tools to be able to do these experiments. This ranges from high-spatial-resolution instrument to high-temporal resolution detectors. In other words, they depend on others to provide them with the instruments to advance their knowledge.

It also means that if you kill research in these grass-roots areas, you are killing more than just one area. When a lion killed the nursing mother of deer, for example, that lion took not one, but two lives with that kill. When funding for many of these areas of physics is severely reduced, the chain reaction and impact can trickle very quickly down stream. It affects the advancements in many other fields that would have gotten the benefit from it. Think of how many different usage of facilities such as a synchrotron light source or a free-electron laser.

So when you read an article such as this, don't miss paying attention to the fact that these proposed abilities to do such-and-such are benefiting from the advancement and investment in another field that you might have not realized. The interconnectedness of science is never more apparent than in an example such as this.

Zz.

"A physicist examines the Kennedy assassination film"

With the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination recently, a slew of TV shows and articles on that tragic event came into being. One of the more fascinating documentary was on NOVA. One of the biggest source of controversy, and the source for many conspiratorial theory that there was more than one shot at the President on that day was the examination of the way the President's head moved upon impact of the bullet. Many believe that the fact that the video showed the head moving backwards, i.e in the opposite direction that the Oswald bullet entered, showed that there must be another bullet that entered from the front.

The NOVA documentary appeared to have ignored a physics explanation that had been put forward to explain this many years ago. David Jackson, the editor of AJP, expressed his surprise that a well-respected documentary such as NOVA let this observation stood unanswered. He wrote his commentary on this in the Jan 2014 issue of AJP.

But not only that. Due to the anniversary, and wanting to make sure the public knows that there's a perfectly valid explanation to account for what was observed using just a single bullet from the back picture, AJP is making Luis Alvarez paper from 1976 freely available.

Maybe someone from NOVA might get to read it!

Zz.

Ingenious Quantum Physics Essay?

I don't think so.

Sometime people are impressed by the wrong thing. A toddler can sometime be more fascinated by the box  rather than the toy itself. This time, it is almost the same thing.

A physics student (didn't say at what level) wrote an essay on "quantum physics" and did something that is called "Rickroll", whereby he included the lyrics of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the essay. You are welcome to read the tedious essay at the link.

And for that, he gets notoriety, not for the poorly-written essay, but for his ability to stick such nonsense into it. And let's say it for what it is, this is an awfully-written essay. It is devoid of paragraphs, and the "story" here is extremely disjointed. The history of quantum physics and Bohr's contribution was chopped up, there never really a clear description on what Bohr's major accomplishment was. But then, he was focusing more on trying to match up on the lyrics rather than paying attention to the material. I wonder if his teacher gave him a D- for something like this? I would, but then I'm a curmudgeon.

So yeah, I was more interested in the toy rather than the box. Unfortunately, in this case, people are so enamored by the box, they didn't realize how awful the toy was.

Zz.

The Ghost Particle

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

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

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

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

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

Zz.

No Evidence of Time Travelers From Scouring the Internet

I mean, really!

As my first candidate of the year for the Ig Nobel prize, we have a couple of physicists who went looking for evidence of time travelers by examining the internet. Their work, which I think is still unpublished yet, was covered here.

Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson from Michigan Technological University’s physics department developed a strategy for tracking down time travellers by trawling the internet for references to prescient information posted before it should be possible.

For instance, they searched for mentions of “Comet ISON” prior to its discovery in September 2012, theorising that it was a large enough event that it would be known to those even far in the future and possibly mentioned online by accident after they travelled back in time.

Similarly, they looked for mentions of “Pope Francis” proper to March 2013, as the current pontiff is the first to have ever had the name.

The researchers scoured popular search engines such as Google, but also turned to Twitter and Facebook.

To cut an amusingly long story short, they found none.

Unfortunately, they were forced to conclude that no time traveller has ever come back from the future and left visible clues online.

“Although the negative results reported here may indicate that time travellers from the future are not among us and cannot communicate with us over the modern day internet, they are by no means proof,” they said.

“There are many reasons for this. First, it may be physically impossible for time travellers to leave any lasting remnants of their stay in the past, including even non-corporeal informational remnants on the internet. Next, it may be physically impossible for us to find such information as that would violate some yet-unknown law of physics.

“Furthermore, time travellers may not want to be found, and may be good at covering their tracks.”

They forgot one other reason. These time travelers knew that these two will be trying to trace them via such means and thus, made sure they did not make any such comments as to give themselves away.

:)

Zz.

Where To "Apply"?

Last last year, the American Physical Society (the publisher of Phys. Rev. family of journals) announced that they are soliciting submission for a newly-created journal under their wing. Called Physical Review Applied, the call for papers reads:

The editors are encouraging scientists to submit their theoretical or experimental work on materials science, surface and interface physics, device physics, condensed matter physics, optics and any intersection of physics and engineering. The journal will publish both short letters as well as longer journal articles.

Now, of course, those of us who are familiar with the various physics journals will wonder, is this new APS journal competing directly with the American Institute of Physics's family of Applied physics journals? The AIP already has a couple of established applied physics journals, namely Applied Physics Letters, and Journal of Applied Physics. From the description of Physical Review Applied, it looks like they are looking for the same type of papers as APL and JAP.

For those of us (including me) who do work in the applied fields, we certainly won't complain that another journal, especially from the well-established organization such as the APS, providing another avenue for us to consider for publication. We just have to figure out the level of standards that they will adhere to for publication in the new journals.

Zz.

Particle Fever

It looks like there is a documentary film about the search for the Higgs making its way around film festivals. Other than the uninspiring title, Particle Fever seems to be getting a rather good review. I am more impressed that the people responsible for the production of the movie are really physicists themselves.

It’s crucial for starters that the subject is second nature to the filmmakers: director Mark Levinson earned a doctoral degree in particle physics from Berkeley before veering into film, and producer David Kaplan, a professor of theoretical particle physics at Johns Hopkins, has also been active on History Channel and National Geographic science programs. They’re able to simplify and synthesize without dumbing down the material and put non-science-oriented viewers at ease by drawing a smart parallel between science and art: Both endeavors ultimately represent attempts to explain our existence and our place in the universe.

I'll have to check and see if and when they'll show that in my neck of the woods. Have you seen it? If you have, what did you think of the movie?

Zz.

Starting Fire In Water

The ISS might be useful after all, in addition to having the AMS. From this video, you get to at least learn about some of the properties of supercritical water.



Zz.

"Telling You the Answer Isn't The Answer"

I made a blog post earlier on why it is not advisable to help anyone who simply claimed that he/she doesn't know where to start, at least not in the sense of giving the person the starting point without first figuring out where the problem lies.

In a related blog post, Dr. Allain Rhett wrote about why Telling You the Answer Isn’t the Answer. Here, he clearly described the process of learning, at least in science, and why simply giving you a set of information does not make you understand anything. In fact, the process and the struggle of trying to learn something IS, in fact, the necessary part of learning and understanding. Note also that the exercise he gave was quite similar to how I want to revamp the undergraduate intro physics lab, whereby the students are really not told on how to do things, but rather simply given a task to find out about certain behavior and relationships.

I've always emphasize this notion that being aware of the learning process in science has benefits that extends beyond science itself. I see this way too often in our world where people simply accept things being told to them, without even making evaluations of the validity of these things. Even less, they can't even make the logical connection from one to the other (see Rhett's example on why it is warmer in the summer and how students can't explain why even when it is told to them!). This is an extremely clear example where one has all the facts that one needs, but one simply is unable to make a logical and sequential connection of cause-and-effect. It is an extremely clear example where just because one has the information, it doesn't mean that one knows what to do with it!

We only need to look around us at stuff happening in the news, and the things being uttered by talking heads on TV. Try it some time. Figure out, if you are able to, how many of the numerous statements that you see being uttered in the media actually (i) have  verified, supporting evidence and (ii) have  logical connection in which A causes B.

Proper science education is needed not to turn people into scientists, but to teach people to think and analyze!

Zz.

Highlights Of The Year

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

Zz.

Q&A With John Pendry

This is a quick question and answer with John Pendry, the person responsible for many of the physics behind metamaterials. I can totally understand why he gets tired of having being repeatedly asked about the "invisibility cloak".

Valerie Jamieson: Invisibility cloaks can guide light around objects as if they weren't there. It is awe-inspiring physics. So why the frustration?

John Pendry: It's when I give talks, particularly popular ones. Of all the things I am interested in, I am always asked about invisibility cloaks. I think, "Oh God, not another invisibility cloak lecture." I still enjoy giving them, but there are many other things I'm working on that are more profound; they just don't have that fertile soil which J. K. Rowling prepared for us.

Zz.

More Update On Feynman Lectures Online

I've been posting updates on the availability of the infamous Feynman Lectures online. Mike Gottlieb has posted a new update on Vol. 2 at Physics Forums.

I have just posted FLP Volume II at The Feynman Lectures Website and at it's speedy Caltech mirror. This more or less completes the online edition of the book, though there are still some improvements to be made that I will be working on as time allows. For example: in Volume II you will notice under the title of many chapters (linked) recommendations for review of chapters or sections in Volumes I or II, references to other books and papers, and helpful reminders such as, "In this chapter c=1." Though this kind of supplementary information was never present in Volume I, it is present in (the printed and PDF editions of) Volume III but is currently missing from the HTML edition, and I intend to add it. I also plan to improve the tables, and the typography of the text and mathematics in Volume I, and to improve figure and table placements throughout all volumes.

In addition to posting Volume II, I have made some systemic style changes. Previously the pages had margins 70 pixels wide on each side. I have reduced that to 10 pixels (max) on the left, and 65 on the right to make room for the floating menu, which is slightly narrower and now also includes a "style changer," implemented mostly for the sake of iOS users who wrote to inform us that our text was un-readable on their devices: too small. The default font sizes are the same as before (12 pt body text), but now you have a choice: you can scale the size of all fonts up by 125% or 150%, and when you do so the left margin becomes narrower and the text is no-longer justified, which saves screen space. You're style preference is remembered between pages and between sessions, so you should only have to choose once on each device you use to read FLP. (There was another problem too on tablets: our pages were sometimes not opening zoomed to fit the device width: now they should.)

I would also like to inform you that Dr. Rudi Pfeiffer and I have (finally!) completed the manuscript for our edition of "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics," which was started in 2008. It's 306 8.5"x11" pages include approximately 1000 exercises covering the main sequence material in all three volumes of FLP, with 28 pages of answers/solutions in the back. According to our Executive Editor at Basic Books, the exercise book will be available in paperback online and in stores in the summer of 2014. We will also offer a PDF edition in our "Desktop" format (the same as the printed book, but with margins all on the right). My next project will be to produce a "Tablet" edition of the new exercise book to go with our recently released Tablet Edition of FLP.

In closing, I would like to thank all those people who have written to us. You're appreciation and interest in FLP is very rewarding and encouraging. I wish to particularly thank those who informed us of _problems_ with our web interface, or errors in the text or equations of the online edition of FLP; you're input helps make FLP more accessible, and more comprehensible. So, please keep those emails coming!

Best regards,
Mike Gottlieb
Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics New Millennium Edition
---
www.feynmanlectures.info
www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

There ya go!

Zz.

Phil Anderson 90th Birthday Symposium

A symposium in honor of Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson's 90th birthday was held at Princeton this week.

The workshop to honor Anderson, the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics, Emeritus, and a senior physicist, was held Dec. 14 and 15 at the Frick Chemistry Laboratory on campus. About 150 colleagues and former students from as far away as India and Japan attended, as well as five fellow Nobel Prize winners and one Fields Medal recipient. The gathering was organized by N. Phuan Ong, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton, and Piers Coleman, professor of physics at Rutgers University.

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while would have seen me mentioned Anderson's name a few times. He, of course, had a huge role to play in the formulation of the Higgs mechanism. And the discovery that bears his name, the Anderson Localization, has been a ubiquitous presence in condensed matter physics. But of course, he also championed the notion that More Is Different, an influential essay that started other physicists to question the reductionism philosophy.

The general public may not know him, but he has inserted his influence into our modern world.

Zz.

Making Better Fog With Dry Ice

In case you are ever in a school play that requires a lot of fog.....



Zz.

The Physics, And Metaphysics, Of Santa

We get this kind of articles popping up at this time of the year. So why not another one. This one has a bit more detailed description of what Santa has to do to accomplish what is said that he does (for a living). For example:

• How long would it take Santa to deliver presents to every child in the world?

Considering the 3.5 billion children on Earth (without regard to religion) and 500 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface, Santa would need 14 years if he traveled at the speed of our fastest jets (Mach 10). Santa could finish the job in about 80 minutes assuming he travels at light speed — a timeline that even Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with his experimental army of delivery drones would find difficult to match.

Now, the more important message in this article is not really about Santa, or his reindeer, or even the problem being tackled. Rather, it is one aspect of science that is often neglected and what many in the general public aren't able to do. It was described as the "Fermi problem".

For non-geeks: Enrico Fermi was the landmark Italian-American physicist of the 20th century who discovered nuclear fission. “Fermi problems” are (in the succinct words of Wikipedia) “justified guesses about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available information.”

In other words, this is the wacky trivia that physicists love to debate after a couple of glasses of spiked eggnog. Santos calls them “back-of-the-envelope questions” and scratches out a typical solution within 5 or 10 minutes. He loves “the idea of being able to come up with something using as little information as possible.”

“It doesn’t tell you what the answer is,” he clarified of this more stringent estimation game. “But it tells you what the answer can’t be.”

This is often a crucial step whenever we think of something, especially when it is new. We make gross estimate of what the result should be, so that we know that at the very least, it can't be either bigger, or smaller, than such-and-such a number. But this requires, as you can see, a QUANTITATIVE understanding of it. You make an estimate and produce a value, rather than just a qualitative idea. It tells you of the SCALE of things.

For many people, this is what they do not have a feel for.

Zz.