Understanding AdS/CFT
I'm often inspired by reading complex posts from bloggers that I don't really understand. Take, for example, a post from Peter Woit about a young string theorist who questions the psychological reasons why string theory has taken hold of so many scientists, despite its own lack of traditional testability. Woit, one of the more vocal opponents of string theory, mentioned something that caught my eye: Continue reading…
May 28, 2009, No comments
Disagreements for the Omega-sub-b
The two major experimental detectors at Fermilab's tevatron, DZero and CDF, have analyzed recent data and determined that the Ωb particle is appearing as predicted by the standard model.
Okay. A particle shows up as predicted. Not so exciting, right? Not quite.
DZero and CDF show that the particle exists by determining a certain mass that the new Ωb particle can have. Except DZero and CDF disagree on this mass, and the predicted mass of each experiment is outside the error range for the other experiment. Someone is wrong, and it could be one or both experiments.
Breaking Car Windows With Soft Drinks
I enjoy this kind of stuff way too much. The interactions between science and the mass populace continue to be fueled by interesting questions such as "Can you break a car window with a styrofoam cup filled with soda?". Of course you can if you propel the cup (or car) fast enough, so there are some constraints added, maths figured, conclusions drawn and other effects discussed. This is just like a lab report, but on TV.
Along the lines of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, I think we need a list of physicists willing to do a really solid rundown of the physics of news stories. Diandra should clearly be on the list.
Earth Work Starts on the NOvA Experiement
The NOvA detector, a neutrino detector placed 50 feet underground near the US-Canada border in Ash River, MN, is slowly ramping up. Crews have started clearing away the location where the facilities and detector will be located, and soon they'll start blasting their way down to the depth that will eventually allow the detector to operate without all the electromagnetic noise that is so prevalent on the surface of the Earth. More about NOvA and it's partner neutrino generator, NuMI, can be found here.
Given the recent death of Michael Jackson, it was clear that the blogs were going to revisit all manner of MJ-related esoterica (and that one of those was mostly likely going to be Rhett). Thusly, Dot Physics provides us all with the physics of the moonwalk. It may be the one and only time you see free body diagrams attached to MJ, so get it while it's hot.
We've heard before that REM sleep is important to solidifying memories and experiences in your brain between days but what if you need to learn something in the morning and then use it the same evening? Jonah Lehrer filters some new research which suggests that mid-day naps which include REM sleep are very effective at bumping your testing results (in word association tests, at least). How much more effective than a pre-nap performance? Try 40%.
I suppose this means that your best bet before a test is not cramming, as usually attempted, but napping. Yet another win for naps.
Photos of the Experiemental Process
Two Swans on Tea links in one day! Tom takes a look at some old lab photos from his graduate work. I really like the candid look into the process of creating experiments in the lab, mostly the errors and mistakes that are fixed in novel ways. These photos and experiment descriptions have this stuff in spades.
In my mind, Bad Astronomy is the megamart of blogs - a firehose of content, highly impersonal to readers and with slightly more politics than I care to read about. That's not to say that there's no good content, in fact, the content is what makes BA so popular. I am glad that the really neat stuff filters down to me through other blogs though.
Swans on Tea links one of the more fascinating optical illusions I've seen recently, conveniently on Bad Astronomy. Don't trust your eyes!
The Most Popular Physicists (by Google)
Ever wondered how Einstein stacks up against Max Planck on the popularity scale? OK, perhaps that's not the best comparison to make. Einstein is clearly the most popular physicist on name recognition alone, but a list of the 9 next most popular physicists might surprise you.
Researchers sifted through Google searches for Nobel Laureates and ranked them according to their results. You can check the original PDF paper for results extending beyond number 10, and be sure to note their "achievement number", quantified with the unit Einsteins. Unfortunately, some scientists were unable to be ranked because of their too-common names. Poor Charles Wilson!
Using Your Readers to Search 450 000 Documents
An interesting account of how the Guardian (the London newspaper) was able to sift through ~450 000 (mostly boring) government documents in a couple days using their online readership.
I've always been fascinated by mundane tasks that can be spiced up by adding some game elements to them, and this is right along those lines. Given enough pictures of the night sky, shouldn't we be able to search for wayward asteroids through these means as well?
Tolkien's Elvish Optics Lesson
I'm a fan of the sort of physics that Rhett deconstructs at Dot Physics. It usually consists of some extraordinary feat claimed by a nutjob or shown on TV and ends with Rhett showing that this feat is / is not possible within the limits of mathematical physics. This brings us to Chad at Uncertain Principles (neither a nutjob nor on TV, sadly) who doesn't do these types of posts very often but when he does they're very interesting and quirky.
Today he's discussing a limiting factor in optics, based on a passage from Tolkien's The Two Towers where Legolas spots some riders on horseback at 5 leagues (approximately 25 000 meters). There's a point that Legolas' eye (based on a normal pupil size) simply cannot resolve any more detail at a distance, regardless of how sensitive his retina might be. I'll let you head over to discover the results yourself.
The Steorn 300 Return Empty Handed
Remember six months ago when free energy company Steorn touted their new magnetic torque device that would provide clean, baby-kissing energy to power the Earth? Yeah, I had tucked it back in the recesses of my brain as well.
At the time, they wanted to gather a panel of 300 independent scientists to evaluate their claims and report back on the feasibility. It looks like they got all of 22 scientists to evaluate their device, and they have (thankfully) returned the verdict that the device is not producing energy. Naturally, Steorn is ignoring this not-so-subtle clue and still plans to release their device some time in 2009.
Here's a road trip I'd love to take: a writer and photographer are making a summer out of visiting sites of past and future high-energy physics research across the US all while keeping track of their visits via their new blog. Their first stop is a restored cyclotron.
Carroll and Trodden on the Universe
If you keep up on enough physics blogs you've undoubtedly seen conversations between bloggers on Bloggingheads.tv before. The web site is devoted to showcasing the newest conversations between bloggers but all sorts of bloggers are featured, from politics to history to journalism. The most recent physics conversation is between Sean Carroll and Mark Trodden (both bloggers at Cosmic Variance) on the current state of physical understanding of our universe. It's an excellent episode and you should watch or, as I do, download the mp3 and listen while doing something else.
The Future of the LHC With Ed Witten
Ed Witten, mathematician, string theory champion and all-around very smart guy, has been spending the last year on sabbatical at the LHC. Obviously, this was timed in preparation for the first planned results from the giant particle collider, although that date has been skewed quite a bit after the explosive mishap of last year when a number of magnets needed replacing. Witten is planning on heading back to Institute for Advanced Study soon but CERN was sure to get a video interview of his thoughts on what the LHC will find in the coming months as it is slowly turned on again.
Not to ruin it, but he doesn't say anything incredibly surprising about the LHC. The most fascinating thing about the video, perhaps, is to watch his manner of speech. I think it's always fascinating to watch how scientists speak to the public about their work, especially when their work is so bleeding-edge like Witten's is.
I've seen a couple other demos of a toy maglev train from IFW Dresden before, but this one is the longest one I've seen to date. For something so simple (it's a train going in a circle), these videos are really mesmerizing.
Can anyone explain why the superconducting magnet has to be cooled down at the target height on the track? The suggestion in the video was that the train "memorized" its position on the track but that doesn't really explain what's going on.
Radiolab, a staple of any science podcast listener, has two of my favorite science bloggers in a new episode about Stochasticity, or randomness. If you've never listened to Radiolab, though, you'll want to know that it's not just a discussion about a vague 5-syllable word. Radiolab goes out of their way to get great scientists like Jonah Lehrer and Carl Zimmer to talk about the real world implications of what people think of randomness. Plus they splice it together in a way that makes for a really entertaining hour of listening.
Interesting conversations from last week's World Science Festival in NYC are still slowly leaking out onto the blogs, and one particular note struck my fancy. Frank Wilczek was part of a panel on Nothing, essentially trying to describe the vacuum in lay terms. Last year I saw Wilczek on his book tour in San Francisco which was really good and interesting, so I imagine the WSF panel must have been a joy to watch in full.
It's not very often that the worlds of video games and science collide in such a way that I see fit to blog about it, but today is just one of those days. Jim Rossignol writes about the Fermi Paradox and how all these aliens we're supposed to be communicating with might just have stayed home and played video games. I wrote something similar about the future of innovation almost two years ago, although to get the same effect you'd have to equate the next generation of virtual world-embracing kids to aliens. Not too far of a stretch, right?
A couple things about this: does this presume that spaceflight is so abstract that travel beyond our solar system isn't viewed as critical to the survival of our species? Do we have to hit another major milestone in energy production before we can really afford to give up on the real world?
And how do we classify the creators of this final virtual world? Destroyers of our spaceflight dreams or visionaries of the future? It's a nice coincidence that this shows up close enough to my birthday that I'm starting to think I sound like some crazy old guy doing the equivalent of telling kids to get off my lawn. You kids and yer damn worlds of warcrafting.
I'm out on a very short break until Monday, likely without more than a cell signal worth of internet access. Rest assured, updates will continue upon my return. Perhaps all this time away will help me spend less time browsing the web and more time writing about it.
With all sorts of different particle mass measurements coming from experiments all over the globe, it's a wonder that anyone can ever agree on the accuracy of any of the measurements. Enter the Particle Data Group. Murray Gell-Mann and Art Rosenfeld started compiling particle masses in 1957 and since then it's grown to a 320+ page monstrosity of particle information. The whole thing is probably a little dense for the coffee table, but perhaps just the summary section would be appropriate?
Before the Milky Way Fades From the Sky
Cosmos magazine is reporting that light pollution has caused over one-fifth of the human population to lose their ability to see the Milky Way with the unaided eye. Now, obviously the Milky Way doesn't just blink out of existence as light pollution increases, it just gets fainter and fainter on a lighter sky background and I would guess that this study is a very liberal interpretation of those who have completely "lost" their ability to see the Milky Way.
That said, seeing the Milky Way in the complete darkness is a very different thing to seeing it faintly on a bright sky. I would highly suggest getting out to a low-light pollution area to see the Milky Way before it really does disappear from the sky - and it will, eventually.
Today brings us an interesting article on Bose Einstein Condensates which can be manipulated into creating "acoustic black holes" which trap all sound waves within a certain radius of the BEC. The interesting part is that the article suggests that these acoustic black holes should exhibit Hawking Radiation which doesn't really strike me as making any sense at all. How do you get quantum vacuum fluctuations of sound waves? I'd appreciate any ideas in the comments.
I've been spending some time recently thinking about different "modes" of brain function, like creative daydreaming and less creative, more focused work mode and how one can conjure up these modes rather than being subjected to them whenever they occur. It behooves me, then, to keep track of interesting notes on Jonah Lehrer's blog of a similar nature. In this particular post he talks about how alcohol causes the mind to wander - usually considered a good thing if you're trying to be creative - but also makes it more difficult for you to tell that your mind is wandering, and thus unable to distinguish good creative ideas from bad ones.
I stole the title of this post from a particular passage in his post, mostly because I would read an entire book on the effects of alcohol on the brain, especially if it had the wonderfully alliterative title "By Beer or Bourbon".
Up on the arXiv as of Sunday are notes from a graduate-level course on particle physics, the first of two courses from University of Wisconsin, in all 200+ pages of PDF glory (or postscript, if you must). This is the perfect first addition to your new Kindle DX which is finally shipping this week with native PDF support.
I don't know how Zapperz picks this kind of awesome material out of everything that goes up on the arXiv, but it's always appreciated!