Politics And Ignorance Make For A Bad Dating Service

It is often unfair to make over-generalized statement about a particular political/social persuasion. But when things like this keep coming up, it is hard to look away. It also reinforced what I've said repeatedly, and it is an anecdotal evidence for the study that just got published recently.

We have a Tea Party candidate here that won a nomination for the Republican party, and who is going around and denouncing the present US government. However, do you want this person to be in the Senate? It appears that she not only is ignorant of science, but also is does not care of showing off such ignorance. Her denial about Carbon 14 dating is now making its rounds.

Holy crap!

Kathy Griffin once came up with a phrase that best describe such a person : They are proud of their aggressive ignorance.

Yet, there are people who apparently can overlook a candidate that not only have very little knowledge of what they talk about, but also does not mind propagating false information! Again, this is another clear example that when the public is made to choose between facts and beliefs or political persuasion, facts often lose!

Zz.

Nomination Closed For "Most Attractive Physicist Contest"

The nominations for Most Attractive Physicist contest is closed. I'm glad to see so many nominations. Without even knowing who the winner is for each gender, I think this is already a big success, because I can see many good-looking physicists that got nominated.

Anyway, give me a couple of days or so to get the first voting online. I'm as curious as you are to see who will end up on top.

Zz.

The Public Weighs Values More Than Facts

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a piece titled "You need to be Perky, Shallow, and Superficial" when communicating with the public (and politicians). I didn't come up with that phrase. It was a paraphrase from a speech I heard given by Pat Dahmer of the DOE when she talked about communicating with politicians.

While that was a glib statement, it has a lot of truth in it. I've cited examples in that blog entry, and in many of my blog entries on here since then, of situations when the public simply put more emphasis on bells and whistles, and ignored facts and scientific data when they decide on something. When that happens, style will trump over substance. You can easily persuade the masses not with valid facts, but with how persuasive you can present your position. An engaging speaker, a jaw-dropping multimedia presentation, etc. can easily convince a large group of people to your side, regardless of whether you actually have something valid to say.

Well now, a new study has clearly shown just how much the public don't really care about facts. Charles Day's blog in PhysicsToday highlights a new study that shows that the public put more emphasis on their values, even when it contradicts with facts.

Indeed, scientists are so used to giving up cherished theories in the face of contradictory experiments that they sometimes forget that nonscientists are less deferential toward facts. A study published recently in the Journal of Risk Research underlines that difference.

As Day wrote in the blog, I'm not surprised either that the public doesn't put as much emphasis on facts as scientists do. And his statement that scientists are more likely to give up cherished theories (or ideologies) than non-scientists when faced with contradictory experiments and facts is consistent with what Dan Koshland had mentioned earlier that "... science is more receptive to non-conformity than any other segment of our society".

So I think when the next time some public figures rant about science and how it is inflexible, rigid, upholding the status quo, doesn't want to change, etc.. etc., we now have ample evidence to the contrary, and that it is the PUBLIC/non-scientists as a whole that are more susceptible to upholding their beliefs despite being given evidence to the contrary.

Edit: I found a place that has a copy of the manuscipt. Click here. The exact reference to the published paper is D.M. Khan et al., Journal of Risk Research 10 September 2010 (I couldn't find the volume and page number).

Zz.

Ref: 
Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 14, pp. 147-74, 2011
Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 205

Spotlight On Flash

{There was a pun in there.}

Here's a good video to introduce you to FLASH, the FEL facility at DESY.



This, of course, is a counterpart to LCLS at SLAC. It looks like FEL facilities are popping up all over the place as the new "in-fashion" light source. This is almost like 20 years ago when synchrotron centers were the rage as light sources.

Zz.

Last Day To Nominate The Most Attractive Physicist

This is your last day to send in your nomination for the Most Attractive Physicist. Remember, you can nominate as many as you like. It has been fun so far (at least for me), but I see a lot of work ahead in organizing all the nominations and setting up the ballot. We will have separate polls for the male contenders and the female contenders. That much I've decided. The rest are still up in the air.

It'll take some time for the first poll to appear, be patient! :)

Zz.

A Day At RHIC

I mentioned a while back about the Brookhaven Lab's Summer Sunday Tours that they have each year. If you have a chance, this is something you shouldn't miss.

They highlight a particular facility on each of the Sunday tour. In this news report (more like a trip report), the writer went on the Summer Sunday tour that was highlighting the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). It appears to be quite an extensive tours, with a look at the main detectors.

Our group then got on a bus headed for STAR, one of two detectors we would see. STAR stands for Solenoidal Tracker At Relativistic. Xian Li, a brilliant doctorate student, told us how heavy ions are smashed together in a structure that looks like a huge roulette wheel. Even more brilliant was a 12-year-old girl named Mikaela Egbert, who showed me how to use my cell phone to take pictures.

Our next stop was the other detector, PHENIX, which stands for Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interactions eXperiment. Aside from not being in Arizona, PHENIX also is where scientists collide heavy ions. Protons are collided in both detectors as well.

Sounds like fun! Don't you wish you could have been there?

Zz.

What Is The Shape Of A Roller Coaster That Gives A Normal Force Of Constant Amplitude?

I love reading stuff like this. While most people (I'm guessing) are fascinated by the Higgs, Cosmology, Dark Energy, etc., I'm more of a sucker for "simple stuff" that really isn't that simple nor trivial. This is one such example.

The authors of this paper[1] is investigating what they call the "comfortable roller coaster". It is a roller coaster that has a constant magnitude of the normal force acting on the rider. In other words, you don't get multiple g's pressing on you and don't get lifted off your seat.

Abstract: A particle that moves along a smooth track in a vertical plane is influenced by two forces: gravity and normal force. The force experienced by roller coaster riders is the normal force, so a natural question to ask is, what shape of the track gives a normal force of constant magnitude? Here we solve this problem. It turns out that the solution is related to the Kepler problem; the trajectories in velocity space are conic sections.

You can follow the derivation at your leisure. The resulting trajectories are shown in several figures, such as Fig. 1 and 2. Each of the trajectory corresponds to a particular ratio of N/mg. If you look at the trajectory of the loop-the-loop, you'll see that it is more of teardrop shape, rather than a circle or an oval. This shape is what you see at amusement parks and an important design to make sure that the riders are not subjected to unusually high g's during the ride.

A fun paper!

Zz.

[1] A.B. Nordmark and H. Essén, Eur. J. Phys. v.31, p.1307 (2010). You may also obtain the paper for free during the first 30 days of online publication at this link.

Dance Review Article Has Wrong Information

Some time I waste my time and read something that I almost have no interest in. This is one such example. It would not have been memorable had it not been one little but glaring mistake in the report.

The report is a review of a dance that tries to incorporate a lot of physics in it. I never understand why people try to do that, and as if such a thing can actually convey any sense of understanding of physics. (I'd like to see if the audience, without knowing the subtext behind the dance, will actually get what the dance is all about.) Don't get me wrong, I appreciate amazing dance. I just don't have that much of a patience when it is taken to this level of 'seriousness'.

In any case, that's besides the point. I was reading along the review when the reviewer decided to provide more information than necessary, and that's when she made a mistake.

Yet the matter of our origins is only tangentially addressed here. The title is a playful twist on the search for the origins of matter underway in experiments to replicate the big bang at CERN (research now in question, given recent news that the particle accelerators will shut down in 2012, to cut costs).

Er.. hello? The LHC will be shut down in 2010 to make repairs of all the relevant electrical connections they didn't get to during the previous shutdown. This is to allow for the LHC to get to its targeted energy at 14 TeV.

If this was written for some obscure publication, I wouldn't have cared. But the Washington Post? One can only hope that the proof-reading isn't as critical when it is a review of a dance.

Zz.

3 Days Left To Nominate The Most Attractive Physicist

We have 3 days left for the nomination of the Most Attractive Physicist. If you have someone in mind, please click on that link and send in your nomination soon.

I'll compile all the nominations after the deadline has passed. Depending on the number of nomination for each gender, I may change the rules and put all of them up for voting. We'll see after I do a count.

I'm utterly curious to see how this will end up! :)

Zz.

"The Grand Design" Book Review

It is a no-brainer that when The Grand Design was released this week that it would garner a lot of attention and reviews. Still, this review of the already-infamous book has a bit more insight into it. It was written by Sean Carroll and has a bit more clarity to it. In it, he basically stressed almost the same point that I made earlier.

Putting the word "design" in the book's title is the kind of cheeky humor that Mr. Hawking has become known for. The authors' answer to the riddle of the universe has nothing to do with intelligent design or with religion generally. "Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. . . . We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."

The Hawking vs. God debate has featured prominently in the news of late. He and Mr. Mlodinow don't claim to have proved that God doesn't exist; their argument is somewhat more confined, but still important in its implications. We understand enough about the ultimate laws of physics, the authors say, to conclude that we don't need God to understand the universe.

This is what I wrote earlier when I illustrate it with my example of the eclipse. In other words, what we originally do not have a mechanism for (creation of the universe), now we find that we do have such possibility. It is an argument directed towards those who use the "god of the gaps" to prove the existence of god.

As with most things, people get into a tiff over nothing. There are MORE DAMNING books against the existence of god than this one. Vic Stenger's book "God: The Failed Hypothesis" is a lot more "combative" against the existence of God than Hawking's book. Yet, there's hardly a ripple about it when it came out.

Zz.

Hitchhiker's Guide to First Year Physics Labs

I've only skimmed through this quickly, but I think that if you are still in school, and especially if you are in your first year intro physics class, this might be a "book" that you might want to read! It appears to be a supplemental material to accompany the laboratory session at University College Dublin. Nevertheless, it can be read by itself, and has quite a good selection of important basic lessons. But more importantly, a lot of the physics have been reduced to concise description, which makes it a suitable accompaniment to an intro physics text.

Read it, and tell me what you think.

Zz.

Larry King to Host Robert Spitzer Versus Stephen Hawking

I have no idea how this will turn out, especially when Hawking will be severely handicapped {no pun intended} in such a debate. Still, CNN's Larry King will host a debate between Stephen Hawking, and his strong critic Robert Spitzer. It will air on Friday, at 9 pm US Eastern Daylight Time.

Zz.

The Most Attractive Physicist Contest - 1 Week Left

We have one week left in the nomination process for the most attractive physicist contest. If you think you have a candidate for this superficial honor, you do not have much time left to submit your nomination. Please click on the link to the blog entry of the contest, and post your nomination as a comment to that blog entry.

Zz.

The Spontaneous Universe

It looks like Lawrence Krauss decided to join in the fun with regards to Hawking's claim that our universe does not need a creator. Krauss made an even more straightforward argument simply by using energy balance:

The existence of this energy, called dark energy, has another consequence: It changes the picture so that knowing the geometry of the universe is no longer enough to determine its future. While this may be a disappointment, the existence of dark energy and a flat universe has profound implications for those of us who suspected the universe might arise from nothing.

Why? Because if you add up the total energy of a flat universe, the result is precisely zero. How can this be? When you include the effects of gravity, energy comes in two forms. Mass corresponds to positive energy, but the gravitational attraction between massive objects can correspond to negative energy. If the positive energy and the negative gravitational energy of the universe cancel out, we end up in a flat universe.

Think about it: If our universe arose spontaneously from nothing at all, one might predict that its total energy should be zero. And when we measure the total energy of the universe, which could have been anything, the answer turns out to be the only one consistent with this possibility.

This, of course, has more verification than Hawking's argument of using M-theory. At the very least, the presence and nature of dark energy can be tested. So such an argument is a lot more compelling and more difficult to refute than using an unverified theory that has yet to gain wide acceptance among physicists.

Of course, Krauss got into all of of this because he has his own book that will come out in 2011.

Mr. Krauss, a cosmologist, is director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. His newest book, "A Universe From Nothing" will be published by Free Press in 2011.

I bet you the subject matter is as controversial as Hawking, but will it get the same level of attention? Probably not.

Zz.

Gender Disparities in Second-Semester College Physics

This paper is a followup[1] to the authors' earlier paper that described the gender disparity in the first semester intro college physics class. I covered the earlier paper in a previous blog entry. This new paper follows the students in a second semester intro physics class.

Abstract: Our previous research [Kost et al., Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 010101 (2009)] examined gender differences in the first-semester, introductory physics class at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We found that: (1) there were gender differences in several aspects of the course, including conceptual survey performance, (2) these differences persisted despite the use of interactive engagement techniques, and (3) the post-test gender differences could largely be attributed to differences in males’ and females’ prior physics and math performance and their incoming attitudes and beliefs. In the current study, we continue to characterize gender differences in our physics courses by examining the second-semester, electricity and magnetism course. We analyze three factors: student retention from Physics 1 to Physics 2, student performance, and students’ attitudes and beliefs about physics, and find gender differences in all three of these areas. Specifically, females are less likely to stay in the physics major than males. Despite males and females performing about equally on the conceptual pretest, we find that females score about 6 percentage points lower than males on the conceptual post-test. In most semesters, females outperform males on homework and participation, and males outperform females on exams, resulting in course grades of males and females that are not significantly different. In terms of students’ attitudes and beliefs, we find that both males and females shift toward less expertlike beliefs over the course of Physics 2. Shifts are statistically equal for all categories except for the Personal Interest category, where females have more negative shifts than males. A large fraction of the conceptual post-test gender gap (up to 60%) can be accounted for by differences in males’ and females’ prior physics and math performance and their pre-Physics 2 attitudes and beliefs. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that it is an accumulation of small gender differences over time that may be responsible for the large differences that we observe in physics participation of males and females.

Zz.

[1] L.E. Kost-Smith et al., Phys. Rev. ST Physics Ed. Research v.6, p.020112 (2010). This is an open access journal. You may obtain the paper at this link.

Popular Science Books Taking Off

The Telegraph has a very interesting piece on the rise in popularity of pop-science books, including physics.

But since Dennett wrote that in 1995, evolutionary theory has been fighting for shelf space, as quantum physics and relativity mount a comeback. The past few weeks have seen Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, move from the books pages to the front pages with its provocative argument that physicists do not need a creator to explain the universe’s existence. But a reader could equally well pick up We Need to Talk about Kelvin by Marcus Chown; In Search of the Multiverse by John Gribbin; Quantum by Manjit Kumar; Void by Frank Close; and dozens more.

This popularity is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is heartening to know that people are interested in knowing more about subject areas that we, as physicists, are passionate about. We can only hope that these books not only convey some information on the subject matter, but also simulates interest in these areas and gather support from the public.

But on the other hand, pop-science is just that, popular science that lacks the details that separate a knowledge from being superficial to in-depth knowledge. Pseudoscience figures such as Deepak Chopra appear to learn about physics from such books without realizing that they are only seeing the shadow of the animal, rather than the animal itself. Many of the bastardization of physics can be traced to applying such superficial knowledge to justify something that science has never deemed to be valid. The popularity of these pop-science books can easily trigger even more of such bastardization by people who don't know any better.

These books will be most effective if they trigger the readers to ask questions and to learn more in the effort to try and understand these things. It will backfire if it initiates more bastardization by people who think they've understood all they need to know to apply such things to dubious phenomena.

Zz.

Hawking And God

At first, I didn't feel like commenting on all the brouhaha surrounding Stephen Hawking's new book "The Grand Design". Various critics and their grandmother are taking shots either at or with Hawking, and in the process, I've seen some rather ridiculous and downright dumb arguments. All that such controversy has accomplished is to ensure that Hawking's new book will be a top seller, and I wouldn't doubt that the book's publisher has something to do with creating and pumping up this whole thing. It's a great publicity stunt, something that Madonna or Lady Gaga would be proud of.

There are several issues surrounding this that I don't quite understand:

1. Hawking's view of god and the universe isn't surprising. I mean, is this really shocking that such a view came from him now? So why is this suddenly news?

2. His main argument here is to say that (paraphrasing) "Look, something that we didn't have a possible description before, we have that now!" It used to be that people thought an eclipse is some supernatural occurrence. All Hawking is doing is to show that, look, there's a natural explanation for the eclipse.

3. I don't know why people are so up in arms about this. He is using an unverified theory (M-theory) as the foundation for this explanation for the existence of our universe. It is still unverified, and as far as we can tell, can't be verified yet based on what we can do now and in the near future. Theorists have a habit some time to extrapolate beyond what can be verified (see Kaku, Michio), often going into laa-laa land when they are not careful (again, see Kaku, Michio). It is the public who often makes the mistake of not understanding when something is based on speculation versus facts. If I were "religious", I would not give this type of argument even the time of day. It is not worth the effort considering that physics hasn't accepted these theories as being valid yet.

4. Graham Farmelo, I think, wrote the sanest article so far on this whole affair. I wish we can all do what he wrote at the end of his article. Of course, he also indicated that it is wishful thinking:

Even religious scientists never use the God concept in their scientific work. Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on the use of the concept in popularizations, too? I think it wise for scientists and religious believers to keep out of each others' territory -- no good has come out of their engagement and I suspect it never will.

But this is naive. The science-religion relationship, insofar as there is one, continues to be a crowd-pleaser. It seems to be a fundamental law of PR that the God-science debate is a surefire source of publicity. Always welcome when one has a book to sell.

It will never happen because religion (or more specifically, religious zealots) will continue to intrude upon science's domain, while science will continue to be weary of religion based on the historical persecution of scientists. I'd go even further that I also wish pseudoscience should also leave science alone and not try to justify their crackpottery by invoking various principles of physics that they do not comprehend.

One thing is for sure. It will certainly generate a lot of sales for his book this coming week.

Zz.

The Discovery of Superconductivity

This is an amazing historical research of the first few years of the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. In particular, the authors, using archived documents and notes from Onnes lab, try to address the myth that the phenomenon was discovered by a sleepy assistant.

I read this article with utter awe, because we now know what a momentous event this was. But it was even more incredible than what I had known, because it appears that Onnes' lab had discovered more than just superconductivity, but without realizing it.

The experiment continued into the late afternoon. At the end of the day, Kamerlingh Onnes finished with an intriguing notebook entry: "Dorsman [who had controlled and measured the temperatures] really had to hurry to make the observations." the temperature had been surprisingly hard to control. "Just before the lowest temperature [about 1.8 K] was reached, the boiling suddenly stopped and was replaced by evaporation in which the liquid visibly shrank. So, a remarkable strong evaporation at the surface." Without realizing it, the Leiden team had also observed the superfluid transition of liquid helium at 2.2 K. Two different quantum transition had been seen for the first time, in one lab on one and the same day!

That just plan incredible!

Of course, while this was during the throes of the early formulation of quantum mechanics, no one knew at that time that superconductivity (and superfluidity) was the clearest manifestation of quantum effects.

An amazing article. Highly recommended.

Zz.

Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" In PRD Paper

Some time you just have to shake your head and smile.

Symmetry Breaking has a rather hilarious account on how a Lady Gaga song title made it onto the title of a Physical Review D paper. Having the title of "Poker face of inelastic dark matter: Prospects at upcoming direct detection experiments", no one who has an awareness of pop culture could have missed the reference. And it got there all because of a bet.

But just in case you are one of the few who has no clue on any of this, here's "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga.



If you want to read the preprint, you can click on this link.

Zz.

Confronting Fraud In Science

{Reminder: We have an ongoing nomination for the Most Attractive Physicist contest. Submit your nomination today!}

This is a good review of the book titled "On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science" by David Goodstein. It is a good review because Laura Greene, who herself is an acclaimed physicist, gave a few examples highlight from the book that represents the various categories highlighted by the book's author. In the process, Greene conveys a little bit of an idea on how science works and why the idea of reproducibility is utterly crucial in science.

Then, in 1986, Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller reported that they had measured a Tc of about 40 K in a LaBaCuO compound. Their discovery was first made known to most of the community at a Materials Research Society meeting in Boston, where two other independent and eminent scientists, Ching-Wu (Paul) Chu from Houston and Koichi Kitazawa from Tokyo, reported similar findings. Many of those present were convinced enough to repeat the experiments. Within weeks, the results were being reproduced in dozens of laboratories worldwide. The following January, a new compound with Tc ~ 90 K was announced; it too was widely reproduced within a month. Today, any new claim of HTS is met with well-equipped and capable laboratory scientists all over the world, so if the claim is not reproduced broadly and quickly, then it is not taken seriously. We have learned from this field that the most important diagnostic for determining scientific fact is reproducibility.

I think this concept has been severely underemphasized. In 'soft science' areas such as economics, social science, etc., this concept is almost non-existent. In science, it is what distinguish between a valid observation versus a fleeting "accident". It is why Fleishmann and Pons' "cold fusion" didn't make it. It is also what distinguishes anecdotal evidence from scientific evidence. This is an idea that needs a lot more coverage to be conveyed to the public.

Zz.