The Curse Of Being A Physicist

When do you speak up in a social setting and set someone straight?

I think I've mentioned a few times on here of being in a social setting, and then being found out that I'm a physicist. Most of the time, this was a good thing, because I get curious questions about what was on the news related to physics (the LHC was a major story for months).

But what if you hear something, and clearly it wasn't quite right. Do you speak up and possibly might cause an embarrassment to the other person?

I attended the annual Members Night at the Adler Planetarium last night here in Chicago. It was a very enjoyable evening. Their new show that is about to open on "Planet Nine" was very, VERY informative and entertaining. I highly recommend it. We got to be among the first to see it before it is opened to the public.

Well, anyway, towards the end of the evening, before we left, we decided to walk around the back of the facility and visit the Doane Observatory. The telescope was looking at Jupiter which was prominent in the night sky last night. There was a line, so we waited in the line for our turn.

As we progressed up, I and my companions heard these two gentlemen chatting away with the visitors, and then to each other about their enthusiasm about astronomy and science, etc. This is always good to know, especially at an event like this. As I got closer to them, it turned out that they were either volunteers, or were working for Adler Planetarium, because they were wearing either name tags or something. One of them identified himself as an astronomer, which wasn't surprising considering the event and the location.

But then, things got a bit sour, at least for me. In trying to pump up their enthusiasm about astronomy and science, they started quoting Carl Sagan's famous phrase that we are all made up of star stuff. This wasn't the bad part, but then they took it further by claiming that hydrogen is the "lego blocks" of the universe, and that everything can be thought of as being built out of hydrogen. One of them started giving an example by saying that you take two hydrogen and put them together, and you get helium!

OK, by then, I was no longer amused by these two guys, and was tempted to say something. I wanted to say that hydrogen is not the "lego blocks" of our universe, not if the Standard Model of Particle Physics has anything to say about that. And secondly, you don't get helium when you put two hydrogen atoms together. After all, where will the extra 2 neutrons in helium come from?

But I stopped myself from saying anything. These people were working pretty hard for  this event, they were trying to show their enthusiasm about the subject matter, and we were surrounded by other people, the general public, who obviously were also interested in this topic. Anything that I would have said to correct these two men would not have looked good, at least that was my assessment at that moment. It might easily led to an awkward, embarrassing moment.

I get that when we try to talk to the public about science, we might overextend ourselves. I used to give tours and participated in outreach programs, so I've been in this type of situation before. While I tried to make sure everything I say was accurate, there were always possibilities that someone in the audience may know more about something I said and may find certain aspects of it not entirely accurate. I get that.

So that was why I didn't say anything to these two gentlemen. I think that what they just told to the people who were within ear shot of them were wrong. Maybe their enthusiasms made them forget some basic facts. That might be forgivable. Still, it is obvious that I'm still thinking about this the next morning, and second guessing if maybe I should have told them quietly that what they said wasn't quite right. Maybe it might stop them from saying it out loud next time?

On the other hand, how many of these people who heard what was said actually (i) understood it and (ii) remembered it?

Zz.

Still No Sterile Neutrinos

IceCube has not found any indication of the presence of sterile neutrinos after looking for it for 2 years, at least not in the energy range that it was expected.

In the latest research, the IceCube collaboration performed independent analysis on two sets of data from the observatory, looking for sterile neutrinos in the energy range between approximately 320 GeV and 20 TeV. If present, light sterile neutrinos with a mass of around 1 eV/C² would cause a significant disappearance in the total number of muon neutrinos that are produced by cosmic-ray showers in the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere and then travel through the Earth to reach IceCube. The first set of data included more than 20,000 muon-neutrino events detected between 2011 and 2012, while the second covered almost 22,000 events observed between 2009 and 2010. 

I think there are other facilities that are looking for them as well. But this result certainly excludes a large portion of the "search area".

Zz.

Grandfather Paradox - Resolved?

This Minute Physics video claims to have "resolved" the infamous grandfather paradox. Well, OK, they don't actually say that, but they basically indicated why this might be a never-ending loop.



Still, let's think about it this way instead. During your grandfather's time, presumably, ALL the atoms or energy that will make you are already there, only they are all not together to form you. This only happens later on. But they are all there!

But here you come along from another time, popping into existence in your grandfather's time. Aren't you violating conservation of energy by adding MORE energy to the universe that are not accounted for? Now, unless there is a quid pro quo, where an equal amount of energy in your grandfather's time was siphoned to the future where you came from, this violation of conservation of energy is hard to explain away, especially if you invoke Noether's theorem.

I haven't come across a popular account of this issue.

Zz.

"... in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math...."

OK, I'm going to get a bit political here, but with some math! So if this is not something you care to read, skip this.

I've been accused many times of being an "elitist", as if giving someone a label like that is a sufficient argument against what I had presented (it isn't!). But you see, it is hard not to be an "elitist" when you read something like this.

Prominent Guido Menzio, who is Italian, was pulled out of a plane because his seatmate thought he was writing something suspicious while they waited for their plane to take off. She couldn't understand the letters and probably it was "Arabic" or something (what if it is?), and since Menzio looks suspiciously "foreign", she reported him to the crew.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

You can't make this up! But what hits home is what Menzio said later in the news article, and what the article writer ended with.

Rising xenophobia stoked by the presidential campaign, he suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a little other-ish.

“What might prevent an epidemic of paranoia? It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of [Donald] Trump’s voting base,” he wrote.

In this true parable of 2016 I see another worrisome lesson, albeit one also possibly relevant to Trump’s appeal: That in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math.

During this summer months, many of us travel to conferences all over the place. So, if you look remotely exotic, have a slightly darker skin, don't risk it by doing math on an airplane. That ignorant passenger sitting next to you just might rat on you! If by being an "elitist" means that I can recognize the difference between "math" and "arabic", then I'd rather be an elitist than someone who is proud of his/her aggressive ignorance.

How's that? Are you still with me?

Zz.

Scanning Probe Microscopy

The Physical Review is marking the 35th Anniversary of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) and 30 years of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) with free access to notable papers from the Physical Review journals in these two experimental techniques.

So check them out!

Zz.

Walter Kohn

Walter Kohn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has passed away on April 19.

He is considered as the father of Density Functional Theory (DFT). If you have done any computational chemistry or band structure calculation in solid state physics, you will have seen DFT in one form or another. It has become an indispensable technique to be able to accurately arrive at a theoretical description of many systems.

Zz.

ITER Is Getting More Expensive And More Delayed

This news report details the cost overruns and the more-and-a-decade delay of ITER.

ITER chief Bernard Bigot said the experimental fusion reactor under construction in Cadarache, France, would not see the first test of its super-heated plasma before 2025 and its first full-power fusion not before 2035.

The biggest lesson from this is how NOT to run a major international collaboration. Any more large science projects like this, and the politicians and the public will understandably be reluctant to support science projects of that scale. The rest of us will suffer for it.

Zz.

LHC Knocked Out By A Weasel?

You can't make these things up!

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest particle accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland, lost power Friday. Engineers who were investigating the outage made a grisly discovery -- the charred remains of a weasel, CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier told CNN.
If you are a weasel kind, be forewarned! Don't mess around at CERN!

Zz.

Online Students - Are They As Good?

This is essentially a follow-up to my post on Education Technology.

So, after doing this for a while and trying to put two-and-two together, I'm having a bit of skepticism about online learning and education. I know it is in-fashion right now, and maybe in many other subjects, this is effective. But I don't see it for physics.

I've mentioned earlier on why students who undergo online learning via the online interface that they use often lack problem-solving techniques, which I consider as important as understanding the material itself. However, in this post, I also being to question if they actually know what we THINK they know. Let me explain.

My students do their homework assignment "online", as I've mentioned before. They have to complete this each week. I get to see how they perform, both individually, and as a group. I know what questions they got right, and what they got wrong. So I can follow up by going over questions that most students have problems with.

But here's the thing. Most students seem to be doing rather well if I simply base this on the online homework scores. In fact, just by looking at the HW statistics, they understand 3/4 of the material rather well. But do they?

I decided to do some in-class evaluation. I give them short, basic questions that cover the material from the previous week, something they did in their homework. And the result is mind-boggling. Many of them can't answer the simplest, most basic question. And I let them open their text and notes to answer these questions. Remember, these are the topics that they had just answered in the HW the previous week that were way more difficult than my in-class questions.

For example, a HW question may ask for the magnitude and direction of the electric field at a particular location due to 2 or more charges located at some distance away. So for my in-class question, I have a charge Q sitting at the origin of a cartesian coordinate, and I ask for the E-field at a distance, say 3 cm away. And then I say that if I put a charge q at that location, what is the force acting on it that charge? Simple, no? And they could look at their notes and text to solve this.

If the students could manage to solve the more difficult HW problem, the question I asked should be a breeze! So why did more than half of the class gave me answers as if they had never seen this material before?

This happened consistently. I will ask a very basic question that is way simpler than one of their HW question, and I get puzzling answers. There appears to be a huge disconnect between what they did in the online HW, and their actual knowledge of the very same material that they should have used to solve those HW problems. They performance in completing the online HW has no correlation to their understanding of the material.

All of this becomes painfully obvious during the final exam, where they have to sit for it in class, and write down the solution to the questions the old-fashion way. The majority of the students crashed-and-burned. Even when the questions were similar to the very same ones they solved in their HW, some did not even know how to start! And yes, they were allowed to look at their notes, texts, and their old HW during the finals.

So what are the reasons for this? Why is there such a disconnect between their performance online, and what they actually can do? While there might be a number of reasons for this, the only one that I find most plausible is that they had some form of assistance in completing their online work. This assistance may be in the form of (i) previously-done HW from another source and/or (ii) another person who is more knowledgeable or had taken the course before. The online performance that I see often does not accurately reflect the level of knowledge the students actually have.

So this led me into thinking about all these online courses that many schools are beginning to offer. Some even offer entire degree that you can get via online courses. I am well-aware of the conveniences of these forms of learning, and for the right students, this may be useful. However, I question the quality of knowledge of the students, on average, that went through an online course or degree. If my haunch is correct, how does one know that the work that has been done online was done purely by that student? Sure, you can randomize the questions and insert new things in there, but there is still the question on whether the student had an external assistance, be it partially or entirely.

I asked on here a long time ago if anyone have had any experience with students in physics who went through an online program, either partially or for an entire degree program. I haven't had any responses, which might indicate that it is still not very common. I certainly haven't encountered any physics graduate students that went through an online program.

Like I said, maybe this type of learning works well in many different areas. But I don't see how it is effective for physics, or any STEM subject area. Anyone knows how Arizona State University does it?

Zz.

Debunking Three Baseball Myths

A nice article on the debunking of 3 baseball myths using physics. I'm not that aware of the first two, but that last one, "Swing down on the ball to hit farther" has always been something I thought was unrealistic. Doing that makes it more difficult to get a perfect contact, because the timing has to be just right.

This is no different than a serve in tennis, and why hitting the ball at its highest point during a serve gives you a better chance at getting at the racket's sweet spot.

Zz.

"Fart Detector" Wins Chinese Physics Prize

OK, there are many aspects this story.

When I first read the title, I honestly read it as "Fast detector", which is reasonable, because fast detectors are useful. But when I read it again, I did a double take. So of course, I had to open the link to the story and figure out what this is.

Turns out that that wasn't the original intent of this detector. Rather, it is trying to sniff any odor in a moving air and to locate the source. Of course, the media, even in China, took it to its most obvious "application" such as sniffing (pun intended) the source of a fart. Question is, what do you do when you find the culprit? Is it unlawful in China for someone to fart in public? Do you shame this individual for such an act?

Finally, it turns out that the prize given is the "Pineapple" prize because "...the fruit which in China is said to be so ugly that only the brave and curious would explore its delicious interior..."

Whaaaaaat????!!!!

I guess this is another example of beauty in the eye of the beholder. I had never, even a second, consider the pineapple to be an "ugly" fruit. In fact, if you've been in to Hawaii or the tropics (especially in South East Asia where the fruit is abundant), it is considered to be beautiful enough to be used as decorations!

In any case, I don't think this research work is "useless" to even qualify for an Ig Nobel prize.

Zz.

Education Technology - Is It All Good?

First of all, I'm sure I'm a dinosaur as far as education technology is concerned. I come from an old school where HW assignments are done on paper, and students submit them to a TA or instructor to have them graded. Or a situation where students do their quizzes or exams by writing them on paper and submit them after completion.

I'm still not used to an education system where students do their HW online, and even do their weekly quizzes and exams online. I'm sure there are many different systems and ways of doing this. However, I still see two things from the students perspective: (i) it is tedious to draw a sketch, which is often needed in tackling physics problems, and (ii) it is tedious to write mathematical equations.

Because of this, a lot of online exercises often simply ask you to enter just a number, or pick from a multiple choice of solutions. This is what I often deal with right now with students' homework assignment. Oh sure, I have the option of assigning my own HW questions if I wish, but the majority of the instructors opt for the former, and I need to be consistent with others.

So what problems do I see with this education methodology? First of all, you do not get to see how the students approach the problem. All you see are answers, and if they get them right, or wrong. You don't know if the students don't know where to start, or if they simply make some silly math error along the way. You cannot diagnose if they have a serious problem or not in understanding the material.

Secondly, despite my strong recommendations that they actually write down and work out the problem till they get the answer, and then enter that answer online, most students simply scribbled out their work to get an answer and once they are done, the scribble is either discarded, or they can't comprehend what they did when they go back to it later on. They do not have a clear detail on what they did, be it right or wrong, that they can learn from later on. So how exactly do they revise for their exams?

Seeing and understanding how problems are solved, and learning from mistakes, are the most effective means of understanding a topic and being able to solve problems. I think I kept most, if not all, of my upper/graduate-level physics class homework assignments (they are somewhere in boxes in the basement). So I don't know how the new generation of students learn and more importantly, RETAIN the stuff that they had learned and done.

The consequence from all of these is that, when they had to sit down for an exam, where they had to write down all the work, many students crashed! Despite being shown how to properly solve problems in class (I did numerous examples), many students still can't properly sketch out a problem (some didn't even bother to do one), and it was jaw-dropping how many still start off their work by writing in just numbers in an "equation", without first writing the symbolic form.

I've been trying to remedy that in subsequent classes that I taught. I have weekly written quizzes to get the students into the habit of solving problems properly, etc. But I think most of them already have the mindset of doing things online, because many of their other classes adopt this method of education. So my way of doing things are more of the "ancient" method of education. I continue to let then do HW assignments online just so they cover the same type of material as students in other similar classes, but I'm insisting that they do their quizzes the old fashion way.

I'm not a techno-phobia. In fact, I posted a blog entry on the easiest way to do lab notebooks using tablets. But in this case, technology may be a hindrance to learning. It may work in many other subject areas, but I somehow don't see it working in physics and mathematics (and maybe the rest of the STEM subjects). These are often not a plug-and-chug subject areas, and it is not conducive to online interface.

Zz.

Has Bill Nye, The Science Guy, Lost It?

Or did he ever had it in the first place?

My attention was brought to this via Hamish's blog at Physics World. He pointed out the sharp critique against Nye in Sabine Hossenfelder's "Back Reaction" blog entry. It all stemmed from Nye's video answering a question regarding quantum entanglement, where it appears that Nye got tangled in it himself.

You may read the criticism yourself (be warned, there are some "colorful" language being used in there).

I think that while Nye has done quite a bit in the media to popularize science, I often find his off-script or unscripted responses a bit suspect at times. This is another one such example. It is my impression that he knows the pop-science version of science, but not the intimate detail. Of course, you often do not need the intimate detail when dealing with the general public, which is why he could manage to do this for this long. But when confronted with something that requires a bit more in-depth knowledge, especially in physics, this is where he trips.

I don't know why he doesn't consult an expert when he responded to this person in this video clip. After all, I'm sure it isn't "live", and he could have easily checked if what he was saying was accurate, or nonsensical. Unfortunately, he went into the realm of nonsensical, and he didn't even realize it.

Zz.

Solve QM Particle-In-A-Box Problem Using Code

Rhett Allain shows you how to solve the standard 1D infinite square well problem using numerical method.

I know he is using this as a simple illustration, but it is more useful, especially to physics students, if he solves this for a finite square well.

But still, for the general public, this might be complicated enough. I wonder if someone with just computer coding but little physics can code this successfully. If you fall under this category, let me know how you did if you took up this task.

Zz.

Simple Physics?

I'm all for explaining things in simple terms that the general public can understand. I do that frequently, especially when I'm doing an outreach project or hosting visitors to the facility.

So when I read a review of this book, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff In Simple Words by Randall Munroe, it sounds like something that can be recommended to a lot of people who are curious about how various things around them work.

However, this author, and the reviewer of this book, fall into the same cliche trap that is one of my pet peeve.

There’s a nice quote attributed to the physicist Ernest Rutherford (or is it Einstein?): “If you can’t explain your physics to a barmaid, it is probably not very good physics.” There are variations of the theme, such as, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother”. In essence, keep it as simple as possible.

I had already addressed the fallacy of this statement (and yes, I am challenging Rutherford or Einstein if they actually said such a silly thing). I have plenty of evidence to point to the contrary. I wish people who keep repeating this would actually read my counter point, but hey, what are the odds?

Zz.

Professional Climate for LGBT Physicists

Many different issues have been discussed regarding challenges faced by women and minorities in physics. Unfortunately, very little effort has been dedicated to the challenges faced by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender physicists. And yes, there ARE LGBT physicists, even if you are not aware of their existence.

The APS, to their credit, has taken steps to address this. This study is the first such report to discover the state of the profession and how LGBT physicists fare in the current climate.

In the general membership survey demographic question (sent to a random sample of society members), just 2.5 percent of total respondents identified as LGBT over all, and 14 percent preferred not to provide such information. But U.S. respondents were twice as likely (3 percent) to answer as non-U.S. respondents. Respondents between 18 and 25 years of age were significantly more likely than the overall population to identify as LGBT, at 16 percent, suggesting a generational shift in comfort disclosing their status (just 6 percent of respondents in that age group declined to provide an answer).

Committee members found that LGBT physicists face uneven protection and support for legislation and policies, both in the U.S. and abroad. Some 50 percent of survey respondents rated their campus or workplace policies as “highly supportive” or “supportive,” while 30 percent characterized them as “uneven,” “lacking” or “discriminatory.” Only 40 percent of transgender respondents said their workplaces were supportive to some degree.

I personally have not observed any hostility towards LGBT physicists or even LGBT personnel in my professional career. Of course, the environment where I worked (US National Labs and Universities) already have policies strictly prohibiting discrimination and harassment against such group. I am sure others in various situations, such as private industries, will have a different atmosphere to deal with, So this study is definitely needed to have a snapshot of the situation at this point in time.

Zz.

In Praise Of APS March Meeting

The APS March Meeting is the LARGEST yearly gathering of physicists in the world. Yet, as Chad Orzel has stated, it is hardly covered by the media.

In this article, Orzel writes why this is so, and why the media and the public should pay more attention to this gathering.

As with lots of things, though, the primary reason for the difference is probably money. Which, in a way, goes back to the irony noted above. Particle physics as a discipline puts a lot more effort into popularization because they have to in order to get funding. Fundamental physics experiments produce some spin-off benefits, but those are second-order effects, difficult to predict and harder to monetize.

Condensed matter research, on the other hand, leads to a more direct payoff, and thus comes with a more secure funding stream. You don’t have to work all that hard to convince wealthy industrialists that it’s worthwhile to spend money on developing new materials that will lead to new and improved commercial products. The funding stream for the field is a little more secure, thanks to the more direct path to applications, and thus there’s less need to make the effort to explain a complicated subject. Which then feeds back into the first two reasons.

This is kind of a shame, because when you dig into it, a lot of what goes on in condensed matter is just as amazing as what you see in particle physics. In fact, a lot of effort goes into creating analogues of exotic systems. And if you look at it the right way, there’s some quantum magic in the most basic aspects of the ways solid objects come together.

Certainly, the sexiness of the topic makes a big difference. But as I've stated many times on here, physics isn't just the LHC and the Big Bang. It is also your iPhone and your MRI. And it is about time the public is more aware of this.

Zz.

"That Physics Show" Opens Off-Broadway

I mentioned this a while back. It is certainly an ambitious and daring move, to do a stage presentation of nothing but a series of physics demonstration. Would this get an audience, much less, a paying audience?

In any case, "That Physics Show" has opened off-Broadway in NY City.

That Physics Show officially opens March 9 for an open-ended run at the Elektra Theater Off-Broadway. The show, which began previews February 26, features "scientific magic" by physics demonstrator David Maiullo.

A regular on The Weather Channel, Maiullo brings more than 20 years of experience teaching physics at Rutgers University. The show is directed and produced by Eric Krebs. 

However, an early review of it hasn't been too enthusiastic.

Maiullo is not a natural performer, but once he starts igniting hydrogen balloons, smashing beer cans with ping pong balls, dunking fresh flowers into a deep freeze, and using a bowling ball as a pendulum, you don’t mind.

But that’s the extent of the “show” in “That Physics Show.” Maiullo pretends that his his geeky explosions and frenetic motion are meant to demonstrate several of the laws of physics, but he moves between the displays so quickly that he doesn’t end up connecting any dots.

We will have to see how successful this is. I'm more interested in finding out if people actually LEARNED anything from seeing this show. It is hard to produce an entertainment but also trying to teach people something new.

Zz.

Did Physicists Failed To Explain Clearly To The Public About The LIGO Discovery?

OK, this came out of left-field, because I didn't read the Nature Physics editorial.

This is a Physics Today comment on an editorial that appeared in Nature Physics regarding the recent LIGO discovery of gravitational wave. In it, the Nature Physics editors seem to indicate that physicists have failed to clearly convey to the public what gravitational wave is and how the discovery was made.

In “a triumph of ingenuity and perseverance,” exulted the thumbnail summary atop a 1 March Nature Physics editorial, physicists “have finally detected gravitational waves.” The summary continued: “And now we need to explain them to the general public.” The editors charged that the public’s response was largely summed up in this Daily Mash satire headline: “Scientists completely fail to explain ‘gravitational waves.’” The editorial declared that physicists “should learn to explain the physics of these spectacular events to non-physicists.”

But that is where things get rather interesting and puzzling at the same time. You see, as the Physics Today comment indicated, there has been NO evidence that physicists have failed to clearly convey this discovery to the public. What Nature Physics editors have used as their "evidence", which is from the Daily Mash, is actually a satirical piece, very much like The Onion here in the US. The Physics Today comment brought up its own evidence on how this discovery has been covered and explained many different times and many different ways by a number of prominent physicists appearing in several media forms.

So, not only did Nature Physics editorial not able cite a single, valid evidence to back their claim, but there are clearly evidence to the contrary! For a "science" journal, this is a serious lapse, because the very basic method of having evidence to support one's claim is fundamental to having a valid idea or conclusion.

I'd like to hear Nature Physics response to this charge.

Zz.

Socio-Economic Impact of the LHC

This is an interesting analysis of the impact of the LHC, especially in terms of economics.

I think many politicians and the general public do not realize that even for something that is built to study something that appears to be esoteric and no direct and immediate application, there can be immediate benefits socially and economically.

That is why I continue to be surprised and appalled that the US continue to not "care" about their loss in having any kind of high-energy physics particle collider on their soil anymore. This is especially puzzling in light of the fact that other parts of the world are seriously pursuing having such experiments within their borders, even if it is under an international collaboration. Certainly China is pursuing having such facilities, and Japan just announced the start of an electron-positron collider. As far as I'm aware of, Japan is the leading contender for hosting the International Linear Collider (ILC), something that Fermilab has also been pursuing.

But with the devastating budget issues in the US, this is looking to be very bleak. People seem to only see the money being spent on such facilities, without realizing the significant impact not only on the intellectual aspect of it, but the economic impacts, both short-term and long-term. An analysis done in this preprint may not make it to the people who hold the power, but it is certainly there to be seen.

Zz.

Physics First

It is interesting that something  like this that has been pushed for for years, can still make the news.

A middle school in New Jersey has revised its curriculum and puts physics first, ahead of biology and chemistry, for students taking science classes.

Egg Harbor City is part of a movement to rethink how science is taught. Instead of taking biology, chemistry, then maybe physics in high school, students will take algebra-based physics first, at the same time they take algebra, then take biology and chemistry.

That's radical, dudes!

Or is it? Anyone who has followed the field of physics education would have remembered way back in the end of the last century and into this one of this effort to put physics first, championed by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman.

Of course, it is easier said than done. The ability to do this is very much tied to the ability of the teachers that conduct these classes. I believe that there were extensive training programs for these teachers in trying to implement this concept, and I don't know to what extent this is continuing, or even if this concept is even practiced anywhere else.

I've always told my students that out of the three science subjects, which are physics, chemistry, and biology, physics is the one they are most familiar with and should come naturally to them. Of  course, they look at me as if I said something outrageous, because everyone has the impression that physics is the most difficult out of the three sciences. I tell them that they are already familiar with the workings of physics, that the concept of mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity, etc. are something they use everyday and even take for granted.

I tell them that they already have some QUALITATIVE idea of physics. What we do teach in physics classes is a way to describe these familiar phenomena QUANTITATIVELY. This is where we go beyond "What goes up, must come down" and add "where and when it will come down". That is physics. The mathematical description of many of these familiar events is what separate a pedestrian understanding of something and a physics description of it.

But these events and phenomena are familiar things. In chemistry and biology, you have to deal with things that are not often common, everyday encounters. Maybe if you cook everyday, then chemistry is indirectly something you commonly do. But still, you deal also with a lot of thermodynamics and mechanics. Physics is something you deal with every day and almost every second of the day. You are just not aware of it.

So it should be familiar, not foreign. And putting it first is logical, because it is that familiar.

Zz.

A Tale Of A Particle With Two Names

Physics Focus this week has a brief but fascinating history of the J/Psi particle and its discovery that led to it having two different names.

When two separate groups, using different types of accelerators, get practically the same result, it is difficult not to be convinced by something like that. Ah, but back then, way back in the 70's, the US had several high energy physics colliders like this where multiple facilities were producing results.

Now, the US has none, not even one (RHIC and CEBAF are nuclear physics facilities/colliders).

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If The Laws Of Physics Don't Apply....

"... what would the law of physics say about such-and-such?"

I've heard of many dumb and stupid things online over the many, MANY years I've been on the 'net (since 1989, if you have to ask!), but somehow, this one caught my eyes more than others.

I'm not going to point out where I recently read it, but this issue is not about physics, but rather with how irrational certain things are, and how irrational people can be without realizing it. If you are in the US and being immersed in the General Election fever, I'm sure you'll understand this. But it doesn't lessen the impact and the surprise for me, because many of these things are so obviously ridiculous. But yet, the people who muttered them don't seem to care how foolish they sounded.

BTW, when this person in question was told that since he is discarding the laws of physics in the first place, why not make up any kind of rules that he wants? And guess what? He didn't want to. He still wanted a "rational" explanation on how physics would explain something that doesn't follow the laws of physics.

Precious!

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LIGO Discovery And The Nobel Prize

Inevitably, the discussion that follows after the LIGO announcement of the detection of gravitational wave is the Nobel Prize. If there is a sure thing with regard to the Nobel Prize, is that this discovery will get someone this prize.

But just like the issue surrounding the discovery of the Higgs, the question comes up on who should deserve the prize for this discovery. Just like the Higgs, thousands of people were responsible in the work, both theorists and experimentalist. And typically, the Nobel committee will give the award to the individuals who either headed the collaboration, or made the most significant contribution to the physics that led to the discovery.

This news article lists the three most likely individuals who might be the front-runner for the Nobel Prize for this LIGO discovery.

"I think that most of the community would agree that the three pioneers of what became LIGO would be Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ronald Drever," the head of one of LIGO's observatories in Hanford, Washington, Fred Raab, told Business Insider.

Weiss — who is a professor at MIT's Department of Physics — and Drever — now retired — are both experimentalists who made significant contributions to the concept, design, funding, and eventual construction of LIGO.

On the other hand, Thorne is a theorist, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at CalTech. Together with his students, Thorne conducted much of the work on what the detection of a gravitational wave would actually look like and how to identify that signal within the data

Unfortunately, Ronald Drever is in poor health, and the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously. They may also have missed the deadline for this year's Nobel prize.

The news article discuss on whether the Nobel prize should increase the number of recipient from the maximum of 3 for each prize (outside of the Peace price). I think the change should be more on awarding the prize to deceased individuals. So what if that person is dead? If he/she did make a major enough contribution to warrant a prize, then it should be done. This is especially true for many women scientists who never received their recognition while they were alive back when women were not encouraged or had severe restrictions on their careers as scientists. Posthumous awards can correct these injustices.

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LIGO Reports Detection of Gravitational Wave

LIGO has officially acknowledged of the detection of gravitational wave.

Now, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters on February 11, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo collaborations announce the detection of just such a black hole merger — knocking out two scientific firsts at once: the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of the merger of so-called binary black holes. The detection heralds a new era of astronomy — using gravitational waves to “listen in” on the universe.

In the early morning hours of September 14, 2015 — just a few days after the newly upgraded LIGO began taking data — a strong signal, consistent with merging black holes, appeared simultaneously in LIGO's two observatories, located in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana.

Notice that this is the FIRST time I'm even mentioning this here, considering that for the past 2 weeks, at least, the rumors about this have been flying around all over the place.

Looks like if this is confirmed, we know in which area the next Nobel prize will be awarded to.

There is also a sigh of relief, because we have been searching for this darn thing for years, if not decades. It is another aspect of General Relativity that is finally detected.

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This Educational Video on Accelerators Doesn't Get It

OK, before you send me hate mail and comments, I KNOW that I'm hard on this guy. He was probably trying to make a sincere and honest effort to explain something based on what he knew. And besides, this video is from 2009 and maybe he has understood a lot more since then.

But still, this video is online, and someone pointed this out to me. I get a lot of these kinds of "references" from folks online, especially with Wikipedia entries. And try as I might to ignore most of these things, they ARE out there, and some of these sources do have not only misleading information, but also outright wrong information.

This video, made presumably by a high-school science teacher, tries to explain what a particle accelerator is. Unfortunately, he described what a particle accelerator CAN do (i.e. use it in high energy physics colliders), but completely neglected the description of a "particle accelerator". This is a common error because most people associate particle accelerator with high energy physics, and think that they are one and the same.

They are not!


As I've stated in an earlier post, more than 95% of particle accelerators on earth has NOTHING to do with high energy physics. One of these things might even be in your doctors office, to generate x-rays to look at your insides. So using high energy physics experiment to explain what a particle accelerator is is like using creme brulee to describe what a dessert is. Sure, it can be a dessert, but it is such a small, SMALL part of a dessert.

A particle accelerator  is, to put it bluntly, a device to accelerate particles! Period. Once they are accelerated, the charge particles can then be used for whatever they are needed for.

Now, that may sounds trivial to you, but I can assure you that it isn't. Not only does one need to accelerate the charge particles to a set energy, but in some cases, the "quality" of the accelerated particles must be of a certain standard. Case in point is a quantity called "emittance". If these are electrons, and they are to be used to generate light in a free-electron laser, then the required emittance, especially the transverse emittance, can extremely low (in fact, the lower the better). This is where the study of beam physics is crucial (which is a part of accelerator physics).

The point I'm trying to make here is that the word "particle accelerator" is pretty generic and quite independent of "high energy physics" or "particle collider". Many accelerators don't even collide these particles as part of its operation (in fact, many do NOT want these particles to collide, such as in synchrotron radiation facilities).

What this teacher neglected to describe is HOW a particle accelerator works. The idea that there are these accelerating structures with a wide range of geometries, and they can have either static electric field, or oscillating electric field insides of these structures, that are responsible for accelerating these charged particles, be it electrons, protons, positrons, antiprotons, heavy nucleus, etc... And even for high energy physics experiments, they don't usually collide with a "fixed" target, as implied in the video. Both LEP, the Tevatron, the LHC, etc. all collide with beams moving in the opposite direction. The proposed International Linear Collider is a linear accelerator that will collide positrons and electrons moving toward each other in opposite direction.

So while the intention of this video is noble, unfortunately, the information content is suspect, and it missed its target completely. It does not really explain what a particle accelerator really is, merely what it can be used for. It also perpetuates the fallacy that particle accelerators are only for these exotic experiments, when they are definitely not.

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The Physics of Mirrors Falls Slightly Short

This is a nice, layman article on the physics behind mirrors.

While they did a nice job in explaining about the metal surface and the smoothness effect, I wish articles like this will also dive in the material science aspect of why light, in this case visible light, is reflected better off a metal surface than none metalllic surface. In other words, let's include some solid state/condensed matter physics in this. That is truly the physics behind the workings of a mirror.

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Wendelstein 7-X' Comes Online

ITER should look over its shoulder, because Germany's nuclear fusion reactor research facility is coming online. It is considerably smaller, significantly cheaper, but more importantly, it is built and ready to run!

Construction has already begun in southern France on ITER, a huge international research reactor that uses a strong electric current to trap plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device long enough for fusion to take place. The device, known as a tokamak, was conceived by Soviet physicists in the 1950s and is considered fairly easy to build, but extremely difficult to operate.

The team in Greifswald, a port city on Germany's Baltic coast, is focused on a rival technology invented by the American physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1950. Called a stellarator, the device has the same doughnut shape as a tokamak but uses a complicated system of magnetic coils instead of a current to achieve the same result.

Let the games begin!

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Will You Be Doing This Physics Demo For Your Students?

I like my students, and I love physics demos, but I don't think I'll be doing THIS physics demo anytime soon, thankyouverymuch!



It is a neat effect, and if someone else performed this, the media would have proclaimed this as "defying the laws of physics".

Maybe I can do a demo on this on a smaller scale, perhaps  using a Barbie doll. And if you ask me how in the world I have a Barbie doll in my possession, I'll send my GI Joe to capture you!

Zz.

2 Most Dangerous Numbers? Phooey!

Baloney!

This is a report on a TED talk by a CERN physicist Harry Cliff. In it, he discussed the conundrum theoretical physicists are facing with the current knowledge of the Higgs and dark energy.

At the core of Cliff's argument are what he calls the two most dangerous numbers in the universe. These numbers are responsible for all the matter, structure, and life that we witness across the cosmos.

So in the attempt to make this story more "sexy", we of course have to make sound as if we are reaching an apocalyptic problem that will spell "the end of physics" (how many times have you heard that already?). There are several problems with this reporting:

1. The degree of certainty on the validity of ANY of these theories is LOW. Anyone wants to argue that? So while it is certainly important to pursue it, the TED talk can only be seen as being a very quick and superficial snapshot of an ONGOING and still preliminary investigation! Our knowledge of the Higgs and dark energy are still in the extreme infancy when compared to many of the more established areas. This is like groping in the dark and then pronouncing that we're doom because someone  heard something moving.

2. The claim that "getting answers could be impossible" is false. In that section of the report, nothing that was described is impossible. The limit on the energy of the LHC isn't a limitation on the physics or our ability. We can certainly build a bigger, more energetic collider (the Superconducting Supercollider that was supposed to be built in Texas in the 80's would have had a higher energy than the LHC!). New research on advanced acceleration scheme, led by a slew of wakefield-type accelerators, has the potential of boosting particle energy even higher while making the accelerator more compact. So no, there is no ceiling yet, in terms of the physics, in going to higher and higher energies. What is hindering the building of such machines is the economics! This is not a physical impossibility, but rather a social "impossibility".

I am always skeptical whenever someone, or even a scientist, claim of "maybe" we might reach the end of something, or that we'll never get beyond such-and-such. Again, we seem to have never learned what happened when we claim that, with the state of our knowledge of superconductivity in the early 1980's being a prime example. Almost everyone thought that the field was fully matured, and that there's nothing left to discovery there other than refining our knowledge and the production of the material. Then high-Tc superconductors were discovered and all hell broke loose!

Scientists need to be aware that talks like this can be latched on by the public because news reporters like to over-emphasize the "dramatic" parts. Without intending it, something that many of us know to be still very much a "work in progress" becomes a "fact" to many people outside the field.

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Quantum Field Theory

So you want to know what "Quantum Field Theory" is? It is not going to be easy, I tell ya!



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What Makes A Solid .... Well.... Solid?

The title of this Don Lincoln's video is "The Nature of Matter", but I'm re-titling it as "What Makes A Solid Solid", and you'll know why when you watch the video.

Still, while it is informative, what's with the planetary picture of the atom again? I hate to think that we will perpetuate this nasty picture and people who don't know any better will keep holding on with such an understanding.



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APS Physics Highlights of 2015

APS's Physics lists its highlight stories of 2015.

I need to point out something important that a casual reader might miss. The story on the 3D imaging  of a virus may appear to be an advancement in biology or medical science. And it is, because this allows us to understand a virus better than before. However, it should be pointed out that this capability came into being because of advances in accelerator  science. The imaging was done at SLAC's LCLS, which is a free-electron light source. This involves an advancement FIRST in accelerator science. Only after that are we able to create such a FEL that can produce light sources to do the imaging.

The point I'm trying to make here is that, if you value the field of biology and all the medical advances to help you live better, you should look at how these fields are able to accomplish such a thing. Just look at the National Institute of Health's funding projects, and see how many of them use instruments and facilities that all started out as something a physicist would use. Only later on were they adopted for use in other fields.

So without proper funding and support for the very basic research in physics, which in turn drives not only knowledge, but also the advancement in instrumentation and facilities, these new techniques and technology will not trickle down to the field of biology, chemistry, and medicine.

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The Physics of Car Crashes

I hope you never have to figure out the physics in this context, but it is still a nice scenario in basic mechanics.



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What Good Is Particle Physics?

I've tackled this issue a few times on here, such as in this blog post. In this video, Don Lincoln decides to address this issue.



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Hot Cocoa Physics

Just in time for the cold weather, at least here in the upper northern hemisphere, APS Physics Central has a nice little experiment that you can do at home with your friends and family. Using just a regular mug, hot water/milk, cocoa mix, and a spoon, you can do a demo that might elicit a few questions and answers.

For those celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I wish you all a happy and safe celebration.

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Symmetry And Higgs Physics Via Economic Analogy?

Juan Maldacena is trying to do the impossible: explain the symmetry principles and the Higgs mechanism using analogies that one would find in economics.

I'm not making this up! :)

If you follow the link above, you will get the actual paper, which is an Open Access article. Read for yourself! :)

I am not sure if non-physicists will be able to understand it. If you are a non-physicist, and you went through the entire paper, let me know! I'm curious.

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What Is Computational Physics?

Rhett Allain has published his take on what "computational physics" is.

Many of us practicing physicists do work in computational physics. Some very often, some now and then. At some point, many of us have to either analyze data, do numerical modeling, or solve intractable equations. We either use pre-made codes, modify some other computer codes, write our own code, or use commercial software.

But certainly, this is less involved than someone who specializes in computational physics. But many of us do have the need to know how to do some of these things as part of our job. People who have to simulate particle beam dynamics, and those design accelerating structures are often accelerator physicists rather than computational physicists.

Hum... now I seem to be rambling on and can't remember the point I was trying to make. Ugh! Old age sucks!

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100 Years Of General Relativity

General Relativity turns 100 years this month. The Universe was never the same again after that! :)

APS Physics has a collection of articles related to various papers published in their family of journals related to GR. Check them out. Many are fairly understandable to non-experts.

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The Physics Of Sports That "Defy Physics"

I love this article, and it is about time someone writes something like this.

Chad Orzel has a nice article explaining why the often-claimed event in sports that "defy physics" actually happened BECAUSE of physics.

Of course, as several physicists grumbled on Twitter this morning, “defied physics” is a silly way to describe these plays. These aren’t happening in defiance of physics, they’re happening because of physics. Physics is absolute and universal, and never defied– the challenge and the fun of these plays is to explain why and how these seemingly impossible shots are consistent with known physics.

What is being "defied" is one's understanding and expectations of what would happen and what looked seemingly impossible to happen. This is DIFFERENT than discovering  something that "defies physics", and that is what many people, especially sports writers and TV heads do not seem to understand. The fact that these people often lack any deep understanding of basic physics, but somehow seem to clearly know when something they don't understand well is being "defied", appears to be lost in all of this. It is like me, having never visited France or know much about the French people, making a claim that something isn't consistent with that country or people simply based on what I understand from watching TV.

I wish they stop using the phrase "defy physics" in situation like this the same way I wish reporters stop using the phrase "rate of speed" when they actually just mean "speed"!

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Kamioka, Japan

With the recent Nobel Prizes in physics going to various discovery related to neutrinos, this Nature article is highly appropriate. We usually do not get a glimpse of the site where many of these experiments are performed. So it is nice to have a bit of a background on Kamioka, Japan, and also the various neutrino detectors and experiments that had gone on there. Considering that this is the place where Kamiokande, Super-Kamiokande, and the KamLAND experiments were done, this is a major site for neutrino-based studies.

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The Particle Physics Of You

You are made up of a lot, and I mean, A LOT, of elementary particles. This Symmetry article reveals a bit more of what particles formed you, and their basic properties and history.

But what I'm sure many of you do not realize is that you are also the source of radioactivity.

Your body is a small-scale mine of radioactive particles. You receive an annual 40-millirem dose from the natural radioactivity originating inside of you. That’s the same amount of radiation you’d be exposed to from having four chest X-rays. Your radiation dose level can go up by one or two millirem for every eight hours you spend sleeping next to your similarly radioactive loved one. 

So next time you run into someone who is rabid anti-radiation and claims that no amount of radiation is safe, tell him/her to ban him/herself.

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Leo Kadanoff

This past week marked the passing of a giant in the field of physics - Leo Kadanoff. The public won't know  him, but those of us in physics, especially in Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics, will have heard of him and his numerous contributions to these field of studies.

“Leo was a prodigious scientist,” said his longtime UChicago colleague Sidney Nagel, the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in Physics. “His work on statistical mechanics is one of the great achievements of 20th-century theoretical physics. It laid the conceptual and mathematical foundations for some of the most insightful and effective tools on which our modern understanding of nature is based.”

Kadanoff’s work has applications throughout physics, ranging from condensed matter (liquids and solids) to elementary particles, Nagel said, with the reach of his work extending to mathematics and other sciences.

I mentioned about the review paper that he wrote phase transition and the mean-field theorem quite a while back. And of course, those of you who had subscribed to Physics Today for a long time would have read his rather critical review of Stephen Wolfram's book "A New Kind of Science", in which in the end he said "... I cannot support the view that any “new kind of science” is displayed in NKS. I see neither new kinds of calculations, nor new analytic theory, nor comparison with experiment...." That rather sealed the deal for me.

He will be sorely missed.

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"I Want To Do High Energy Physics"

So you are a physicist in the US, and you're having a casual conversation with a bunch of new physics graduate students. When you ask them what they intend to major in (a very obvious question to ask in a situation like this), some of them say "I want to major in high energy physics".

What do you say in return? Do you just say "Well, good luck!" and leave it at that? Or do you feel a sense of responsibility to tell these students of the prospect that they will face here in the US for someone with that major?

This issue is nothing like the issue with students wanting to do "theoretical physics", because these students, presumably, a smart enough to know the area that they are going into. However, while they have a good idea of the nature of the subject matter, they have very little idea of the funding, job prospects, etc. of those people who graduated with that degree. And for HEP, the outlook is even bleaker than a lot of the other areas in physics for someone who wants to have a career in that field. The US funding for HEP has consistently been cut year after year, and especially more so after the Tevatron at Fermilab shut down. While many in the US collaborate on work done at the LHC, funding for the HEP division of DOE's Office of Science continues to shrink, and it doesn't look any better in the future.

So, knowing all this, what would you say to such students? Do you try to persuade them to change their minds and tell them that it is not to late to switch to a different field of physics? Do you lay out the reality of the situation? Do you tell them that if they still wish to continue, they need to be prepared for the possibility that they will not be able to pursue a career in such a field?

In my case, walking away and not say anything is not an option. I somehow feel some level of "paternal" responsibility towards these kids, and I can't just let them go into something blindly without at least giving them some dose of reality. Whether they listen to it or not is an entirely different matter, but at least I tried.

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Local Realism - Is It Dead Yet?

There have been several tests that have been conducted that pointed to the violation of local realism and consistent with quantum mechanics. I've indicated at least two recently (this, and this). Now come the most spectacular demonstration yet of such violation, and this one comes from what the authors claim to be an experiment free of the detection loophole and locality loophole.

The preprint appeared a while back on ArXiv, but the paper has finally been published in this week's issue of Nature (Oct. 21, 2015). So even if you don't have access to the Nature article, you should be able to read the preprint.

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What Is A Multiverse?

Good question. This video might address that:



I must say that the majority of instances that I come across a discussion of Multiverse is online, in a forum where non-physicists are more apt to be impressed by it and to even consider it seriously. Maybe I don't hang around too many physicists who are working in this area, but the overwhelming majority of physicists that I encounter couldn't be bothered by this topic.

Now, it is not that they, and I, are dismissing it. Like Don Lincoln in the video, I think I'll pay more attention to it, and put time and effort to try and appreciate it ONLY when there are strong indications that such an idea might be right. This means that there are signs of observational/experimental agreement that distinguish  it from other theories. Until that happens, Multiverse is nothing more than one of the numerous ideas out there that cannot be tested and have no experimental verification.

That isn't harsh, is it?

Zz.

Come Out, Physicists. Come Out Where Ever You Are!

This post came about after I heard one of my colleagues introduced himself at a party. Someone asked him what he did for a living. His answer was "Oh, I'm a College Professor". Which is true. But he is a physics professor, and more often than not, he is also a physicist. But I found it rather fascinating that he would introduce himself as a college professor first. I suppose that is more understandable to most people than telling them you are a physicist.

So when you see the word "Occupation" on a form, what do you write? I suppose if you are a physicist working in a lab, and that's all you do (i.e. you're also not a college instructor), you may write "Physicist" in that section. Or do you write "Scientist" instead, to make it more descriptive?

I have described myself as a "Physicist" when someone asked for my occupation. Half of the time, people kinda knew what it was, although their impression  of it may be wrong ("Oh, you work with nuclear bombs?" or "Oh, you work with at that big particle lab?"). But the other half of the time, I get this blank, puzzled look and I get asked "Oh? What is that?" The last person who had that reaction  was a new dental hygienist at my dentist. I didn't feel like explaining  too much because she was about to work on my mouth.

So let's face the fact. There aren't a lot of us out there. The general public does not bump into a physicist very often. In fact, in my wide circle of friends who are not connected with work, I know of no other physicist. I had never, EVER, bump into another physicist in a social setting that is not related to work, or not related to a colleague from work. The probability of one physicist bumping into another physicist outside of work/conferences/mutual work friends is almost as low as detecting a neutrino.

To their credit, some of the people that I've bumped into, when told about my occupation, were  curious enough about some of the stuff they've read to ask me questions. I don't mind that at all. I am fully aware that most people have never met a "physicist", and the fact that they have read these things and curious enough to ask me about it was an opportunity not only to educate, but also to correct any misconception and misunderstanding that most people have about many things.

But what if you were minding your own business, and you accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation that was full of inaccurate or outright wrong information? What if, say, you were riding on a train, and the people behind you were talking about the LHC and all the doomsday brouhaha that it would do based on what they've read in the news? Do you just ignore it and let them continue on with their lives with such ignorance, or  do you put down the iPad you were reading, turn around, and tell them all the wrong information that they've learned?

Guess which one I did?

Someone once asked me, at a social gathering, if we all should be worried that Fermilab might explode like a nuclear bomb just like a nuclear reactor. This was when the Tevatron was still running. After I recovered from my shock at that question, I asked this person what made him think that such a scenario was even possible? He just shrugged and said that he thought all nuclear experiments were like that and had that possibility.

After I told him that (i) Fermilab is not a nuclear facility; (ii) it doesn't have a nuclear reactor; and (iii) the experiments cannot, in principal, explode like a nuclear bomb, I proceeded in explaining to him what the experiment was about and why, really, in terms of safety, it is rather benign, especially with how difficult it was to maintain the colliding proton-antiproton beam. But it got me to think that, if someone who is above-average in education like  him can have such an impression, how do others think and understand all these things?

And that is why, I believe that physicists need to come out of the closet and make themselves known to the average Joe and Josephine. There aren't that many of us when compared to other profession. The general public needs to bump into one of us on a personal level. Wear that "Kiss Me, I'm a Physicist" t-shirt with pride!

But please, comb your hair and leave behind that pocket protector.

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Physics Demo As An Off-Broadway Show?

It is ambitious, but it is so crazy, it might just work.

"The Physics Show" has been put together as an off-Broadway theatrical presentation, with the hopes of not only informing people about simple concepts in physics, but also be entertaining enough that people will pay to see it like any ordinary Broadway or off-Broadway show.

The idea to turn the show into a play came after Maiullo did his demonstrations in a theater appreciation class taught by Krebs, he said.

Krebs, a Rutgers alumnus and founder of the George Street Playhouse, strives to make theater more accessible to people who are not familiar with it, he said. He has been involved with the business for nearly 50 years.

Krebs saw Maiullo doing a demonstration and thought to present it to his theater appreciation class as a theatrical piece instead of a science demonstration. Maiullo did his demonstrations for multiple semesters, and the two have been thinking about making it an off-Broadway show for years, Krebs said.

I think the most important aspect for this thing to be successful is if it can be entertaining enough. And that requires showmanship and a lot of bells and whistles. Whether it can be educational in return, that remains to be seen. After all, how many people actually understood the physics involved in "Copenhagen" after seeing the play? Still, this particular presentation has a bit of an advantage because the entire show involves explanation of the physics. So maybe it will be different.

This is not too far out there. Physics demo shows such as Wonders of Physics that originated out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have been quite a hit with its traveling show. So maybe people will pay to be entertained and informed at the same time. We shall see.

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More On Neutrinos

People seem to want to learn more about neutrinos! With the latest Nobel prize being awarded to the discovery of neutrino mixing, it is a good time to have some general article on what we know about neutrinos. John Beacom has written a rather nice article here that should give you an idea of the physics of neutrinos and why it is an important study.

It just struck me as a rather interesting development. When SNO and Super-K were discovering all this, there was hardly any neutrino experiment in the US. Oh, there was plenty of US participation, but neutrino experiments were not big or a priority. This is understandable because, back then, the Tevatron was still going strong and LHC hasn't completely come into force yet. Now, how things have changed considerably. With the Tevatron gone and the center of high energy physics collider having shifted to CERN, the US is now trying to be a major player in neutrino studies, with MINOS, NOvA, and the proposed LBNE. In DOE/funding lingo, the US has abandoned the "Energy Frontier" and has gone into the "Intensity Frontier".

I believe there are still huge amount of amazing physics to be discovered from neutrinos. So it will be interesting how all these new generation of neutrino detectors will pan out.

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2015 Nobel Prize Work Free To Read

As a follow-up from yesterday's announcement of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics, the APS has made available the publications that are directly related to award to the two recipients this year.

Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos

Measurement of the Rate of ν_e + d → p + p +e ⁻ Interactions Produced by ⁸B Solar Neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Notice my earlier point, as you look at the authors list on each of these papers, that they were a huge amount of collaborators on these projects.

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2015 Nobel Prize For Neutrino Oscillation Discovery

The 2015 Nobel prize in physics went to Art McDonald and Takaaki Kajita for the discovery of neutrino oscillation at SNO and SuperKamiokande, respectively.

Now, for those readers who are not familiar with all this, do not get the impression that these two were working all by themselves and then discover these. They did not. There were huge number of people who were working on these projects, and the papers they produced listed a large number of authors. However, these two were either the leading scientist or the most prominent/significant figure representing each group. This is not unusual for an experimental discovery, especially in elementary particle physics, where the most prominent figure is singled out for the award.

When I read this, I must admit that I was a bit surprised. Not surprised that they are awarding it for the discovery of neutrino oscillation - it IS a major discovery. I was surprised because I somehow thought that this discovery had already been awarded the Nobel prize already! I mean, it was such a significant moment, and it is now already accepted that neutrino oscillation is a fact, that I somehow assumed the  Nobel prize had already been awarded for this discovery years ago. Obviously, I hallucinated that one.

Maybe the Nobel committee were debating all this time on who should deserve to receive the prize, considering the huge number of people involved, with several prominent physicists deserving it on each group.

In any case, the prize for this discovery was long overdue.

Zz.

Physical Review Letters Tightening Its Standards

If you have submitted a manuscript to Phys. Rev. Lett (PRL) lately, or have been asked to referee a paper for the journal, you would have noticed an additional emphasis on the nature of the material that PRL considers to be "publishable":

To be publishable in PRL a paper must do at least one of the following: Substantially advance a particular field; open a significant new area of research; solve a critical outstanding problem and therefore pave the way for notable progress in an existing field; be of singular appeal to all physicists.

While this guideline isn't new (I kinda assumed that this is the standard that PRL had been adhering to all along), it is rather interesting that this is now clearly and explicitly emphasized. And, I must add, enforced, because I think I am an unfortunate recipient of the enforcement of this policy when one of our submission was rejected by the PRL editors.

Now, of course I'm biased since I was a coauthor, but before this, the manuscript would have been strong enough to have made it to the referees. After all, the original theory was published in PRL, and an experimental paper that partially tried to show a proof-of-principal demonstration also made it into PRL. Our paper showed not only a demonstration of a very critical aspect of the theory, but also where it deviated from our measurement. So we thought it was important enough, and certainly, important enough to make  it to the PRL referees.

But nooooooo.....

The rejection from the editors basically said that the content was not up to standard or not suitable. I know they are busy and inundated with tons of these stuff, but these are the times where you wish they could be specific and tell you exactly what they mean and what they were referring to rather than just some standard response. But of course, all of us listed on the paper were surprised that it didn't even make it past the editors. Usually, unless your manuscript is badly written, is clearly out of whack, or it can be seen that it is of a rather obscure topic, it will make it to the referees. But with their new policy, and also trying to lighten the burden on the referees, the editors have become a more significant gatekeepers.

So essentially, PRL is slowly becoming Nature and Science. :)

Now, don't get me wrong. It is not a criticism. I'm all for raising the standards, and the submission rate to PRL is  huge. Keeping things they way they were is simply not sustainable and they will run out of referees who would be willing to perform the review. Still, I wish the editor would briefly provide a reason why, because I'm sure we could easily provide a counter argument; or maybe that is why no reason was provided.

In any case, rather than continuing on to purse this with PRL, we sent it to another publication.

Ironically, a couple of weeks after the PRL rejection, I was contacted by PRL to referee a paper! :)

Zz.

25% Of Physics Nobel Laureates Are Immigrants

The people at Physics World have done an interesting but not surprising study on the number of Physics Nobel laureates who are/were immigrants. They found that this number is more than 1/4 of all Physics Nobel winners.

They discussed what they used as a criteria of an "immigrant", and the chart they showed certainly is very clear that there is a huge influx of these  talents into the US.

Still, it would be nice to see how many of these immigrants did their Nobel Prize winning work before they migrated. And I definitely want to see this statistics for the next 10-20 years, especially now that they US is severely cutting budgets into basic physics research, the effects of which will not be felt immediately.

In any case, it is that time of the year again where we all make our predictions or  guesses on who will win this prize this year. I am still pinning hopes that a woman will win this, considering that we have been having very strong candidates for several years.

Zz.

Football Physics and Deflategate

This issue doesn't seem to want to go away.

Still, anyone who has been following this (at least here in the US) have heard of the "Deflategate" controversy from last year's NFL Football playoffs.

Chad Orzel has another look at this based on a recent paper out of The Physics Teacher, this time, from the physics involved with the football receivers.

Most of the coverage of “Deflategate” has focused on Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, and speculation that he arranged for the balls to be deflated so as to provide a better grip. The authors of the Physics Teacher paper, Gregory DiLisi and Richard Rarick look at the other end of the problem, where the ball is caught by the receiver, thinking about it in terms of energy, an issue with major implications for the existence of atomic matter.

It certainly is another angle to the issue. I hope to get a copy of the paper soon and see what it says.

Zz.

Why Do We Put Telescope In Space?

Here's the Minute Physics explanation:



Zz.

Quantum Cognition?

A lot of researchers and experts in other fields have tried to use various principles in physics in their own field. Economics have tried to invent something called Econophysics, to varying degree of success. And certainly many aspects of biology are starting to incorporate quantum effects.

Quantum mechanics has been used notoriously in many areas, including crackpottish application by the likes of Deepak Chopra etc. without really understanding the underlying physics. I don't know if this falls under the same category, but the news report out of The Atlantic doesn't do it any favor. I'm reading this article on quantum cognition, in which human behavior, and certain unpredictability and irrationality of human behavior, may be attributed to quantum effects!

Now, the reason why I don't think this article is that good is because it makes a number of either misleading, or strange errors.

Take, for example, the classic prisoner’s dilemma. Two criminals are offered the opportunity to rat each other out. If one rats, and the other doesn’t, the snitch goes free while the other serves a three-year sentence. If they both rat, they each get two years. If neither rats, they each get one year. If players always behaved in their own self-interest, they’d always rat. But research has shown that people often choose to cooperate.

Classical probability can’t explain this. If the first player knew for sure that the second was cooperating, it would make most sense to defect. If the first knew for sure that the second was defecting, it would also make most sense to defect. Since no matter what the other player is doing, it’s best to defect, then the first player should logically defect no matter what.

A quantum explanation for why player one might cooperate anyway would be that when one player is uncertain about what the other is doing, it’s like a Schrödinger’s cat situation. The other player has the potential to be cooperating and the potential to be defecting, at the same time, in the first player’s mind. Each of these possibilities is like a thought wave, Wang says. And as waves of all kinds (light, sound, water) are wont to do, they can interfere with each other. Depending on how they line up, the can cancel each other out to make a smaller wave, or build on each other to make a bigger one. If “the other guy’s going to cooperate” thought wave gets strengthened in a player’s mind, he might choose to cooperate too.

So you tell me if that made any sense or if this person has actually understood QM beyond what he read in a pop-science book. First of all, when wave cancellation occurs, it doesn't "make a smaller wave". It makes NO wave at that instant and time. Secondly, this person is espousing the existence of some kind of a "thought wave" that hasn't been verified, and somehow, the thought waves from the two different prisoners overlap each other (this, BTW, can be described via classical wave pictures, so why quantum picture in invoked here?).

But the fallacy comes in the claim that there is no other way to explain why different people act differently here without invoking quantum effects. Unlike physics systems where we can prepare two systems identically, we can find no such thing in human beings (even  with twins!). Two different people have different backgrounds and "baggage". We have different ethics, moral standards, etc. You'll never find two identical systems to test this out. That's why we have 9 judges on the US Supreme Court, and they can have wildly differing opinions on the identical issue! So why can't they use this to explain why people react differently under this same situation? Why can't they find the answer via the human psychology rather than invoking QM?

But it gets worse...

The act of answering a question can move people from wave to particle, from uncertainty to certainty. In quantum physics, the “observer effect” refers to how measuring the state of a particle can change the very state you’re trying to measure. In a similar way, asking someone a question about the state of her mind could very well change it. For example, if I’m telling a friend about a performance review I have coming up, and I’m not sure how I feel about it, if she asks me “Are you nervous?” that might get me thinking about all the reasons I should be nervous. I might not have been nervous before she asked me, but after the question, my answer might become, “Well, I am now!”

Of course, this smacks of the crackpottery done in "The Secret". Let's get this straight first of all, especially those who do not have a formal education in QM. There is no such thing as "wave-particle duality" in QM! QM/QFT etc. describe the system via a single, consistent formulation. We don't switch gears going from "wave" to "particle" and back to "wave" to describe things things. So the system doesn't move "from wave to particle", etc. It is the nature of the outcome that most people consider to be "wave-like" or "particle-like", but these are ALL produced by the same, single, consistent description!

The problem I have with this, and many other areas that tried to incorporate QM, is that they often start with the effects, and then say something like "Oh, it looks very much like a quantum effect". This is fine if there is an underlying, rigorous mathematical description, but often, there isn't! You cannot says that an idea is "complimentary" to another idea the same way position and momentum observables are non-commuting. The latter has a very set of rigorous mathematical rules and description. To argue that "... quantum models were able to predict order effects shown in 70 different national surveys... " is not very convincing because in physics, this would be quite unconvincing. It means that there are other factors that come in that are not predictable and can't be accounted for. What is there to argue that these other factors are also responsible for the outcome?

Again, the inability to test this out using identical systems makes it very difficult to be convincing. Human behavior can be irrational and unpredictable. That is know. Rather than considering this to be the result of quantum effects, why not consider this to be the result of a chaotic behavior over time, i.e. all of the various life experiences that an individual had all conspire to trigger the decision that he/she makes at a particular time. The "butterfly effect" in an individual's time line can easily cause a particular behavior at another time. To me, this is as valid of an explanation as any.

And that explanation is purely classical!

Zz.

A Physics App To Teach Physics

A group of educational researcher has created an app for iOS, Android, PCs, and Macs, that teaches physics to 9-graders.

The app, Exploring Physics, is meant to take particular physics curriculum already being taught in a number of public school districts, including Columbia's, and make it available digitally. The Exploring Physics curriculum app is designed to replace traditional lecture-based learning with discussions and hands-on experiments.

“The idea in the app is to have students learn by doing stuff,” said Meera Chandrasekhar, the co-creator of the app and a curators' teaching professor in the MU Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Even though it’s a digital app, it actually involves using quite a lot of hands-on materials.”

I haven't look at it. If any of you have, and better still, is using it, I very much like to hear your opinion.

Zz.

12-Year Old Girl Has More Sense Than The Media

I couldn't help it. When I saw a headline on CNN that said "British 12-year-old smarter than Einstein, Hawking", I had to look at this silliness. Turns out my initial guess was right. It was based on the outcome of some "intelligent test."

Lydia Sebastian achieved the top score of 162 on Mensa's Cattell III B paper, suggesting she has a higher IQ than well-known geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Now, lets dissect this just a bit, shall we (since I obviously have nothing better to do at this moment)? First of all, it has NOT been shown that such tests actually measure anything significant, much less, someone's "intelligence".  Secondly, how does one compare something to  something else that doesn't exist? Both Einstein and Hawking never took such tests, so who knows how well they would do. The article got away with this by "suggesting" that she has a higher IQ than those two people. That bullcrap!

Finally, such measure has nothing to do with one's ability to produce the same caliber of  work at Einstein and Hawking. In fact, even the 12-year old girl said as much:

The comparison doesn't sit well with the British student, who's currently in Year 8 at Colchester County high school, a selective girl's grammar school in Essex, England.

"I don't think I can be compared to such great intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. They've achieved so much. I don't think it's right," Lydia told CNN.

You are so right, Lydia! Something isn't right, but somehow, the media didn't get this, even after you mentioned this to them! They are claiming that you are intelligent, and yet, they didn't pay attention to you when you told them that all this brouhaha isn't right.

We have at least shown one thing here. 12-year old Lydia has more intelligence and common sense than the media.

Zz.

Another Discovery of Weyl Fermions

We had an earlier report out of Science by the Princeton group on the discovery of the Weyl fermions in TaAs. This looks like another confirmation of that discovery on the same material using the same technique, out of a group in China.

In their experiments, Hasan and colleagues and Ding and colleagues used angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to detect the Fermi arcs, characteristic of Weyl nodes, on the surface of TaAs. ARPES is an ideal tool for such a purpose. The technique involves shining light on a surface and measuring the energy and momentum of ejected electrons. This allows for the explicit determination of both bulk nodes and the Fermi-arc surface states. Ding’s team used an interesting strategy to identify a Fermi arc and distinguish it from a more conventional closed Fermi surface (Fig. 1). They defined a closed contour in the momentum space spanned by their measurements and investigated how many times surface states at the Fermi energy crossed this contour. Such a contour will intersect a regular Fermi surface an even number of times. But it will intersect a Fermi arc an odd number of times if the arc encloses the projection of a Weyl point, thus providing a clean signature.

Click the link to get a copy of the actual paper.

Zz.

The Physics of BB-8 Star Wars Toy

Did you get caught up with the release of the new Star Wars toys and merchandise this past week?

It turns out that one of the toys, the BB-8, is quite astonishing. Rhett Allain has an interesting article on how this toy works.

The last part on inductive charging shouldn't be a puzzle anymore, should it? I've had a tea kettle for at least 6 years that used inductive heating. So inductive charging shouldn't be unusual anymore, I would think.

Still, like he said, this might be a toy that could be a very good physics class demo.

Zz.

Higgs Mass Refined

The combined data from ATLAS and CMS from LHC Run 1 has produced a Higgs mass with greater accuracy.

ATLAS reported the mass of this new boson to be in the mass region of 126 billion electronvolts, and CMS found it to be in the region of 125. In May 2015, the two experiments combined their measurements, refining the Higgs mass closer to 125.09 GeV.

But what is important is the report on the measurement of the coupling strength in the Higgs interactions.

This particular analysis focused on the interaction of the Higgs boson with other particles, known as coupling strength. The combined measurements are more precise than each experiment could accomplish alone, and results establish that the Higgs mechanism grants mass to both the matter and force-carrying particles as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
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In the Standard Model, how strongly the Higgs boson couples to another particle determines that particle’s mass and the rate at which a Higgs boson decays into other particles.
For instance, the Higgs boson couples strongly with the bottom quark and very weakly with the electron; therefore, the bottom quark has a much greater mass than the electron and the Higgs will commonly decay into a bottom quark and its antiquark.

This is why there is still a lot more to be measured and refined in Run 2.

Zz.