Category Archives: science

Name That Particle!

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As a followup to the post on Roz Chast’s Symmetry magazine cartoons, I get to tell you about a fun competition! The prize? A Roz Chast autographed copy of the May edition of Symmetry magazine (yes, that’s the one she did the cover for) and an appearance in a later edition of the magazine!

You can find the entry details at Symmetry magazine here, and I quote:

roz chast on physicsFlerbs? Marteenies?? Tom, Dick, and Harry???

Cartoonist Roz Chast has busted the field of particle physics wide open with her pioneering cover for this issue of symmetry. We say it’s about time: Why limit ourselves to the same old list of particles that have actually been discovered, or at least properly theorized? So here’s the challenge: Invent an elementary particle and tell us what it does in 30 words or fewer. A drawing would be nice, but not mandatory. […]

So go ahead and send in your entries! If you like, come back here and tell us about […] Click to continue reading this post →

Roz Chast On Physics

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I learned from Often in Error that Roz Chast, whose work some of you may know from the New Yorker, had some physics-themed cartoons in the May edition of Symmetry Magazine (one of them the cover). Here they are (click for larger):

  roz chast on physics   roz chast on physics

I like the one on the left, I have to say. (A pseudoparticle called “poserino” is just […] Click to continue reading this post →

Reality Calls

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american inventor logoIn a bizarre twist, after a satisfying day of calculating I switched on the television, accidentally pressed a wrong number, and ended up on ABC just as a program called “American Inventor” was starting. I’m not really up on all these “reality” format shows, so I’ve no idea how long this has been in existence, but I must say that it was good to see a program in this format that was primarily about using one’s brain, inventiveness and engineering/construction skills! The format is a bit too gimmicky for my tastes (I’m not partial to all the forced drama and overwrought background music), but that’s probably because I don’t watch much of this sort of thing, so I probably won’t be a regular viewer. But again I must say it was good to see that such a show exists. Perhaps there are more that I don’t know about. It seems that I just saw the phase where they filter out all the silly ones (and goodness were some silly!) and pick the finalists from each city who get $50,000 worth of development money. They did LA and SF in this show, and apparently they’ll be doing the North East next. Questions you might be able to help me with: Do all these shows have a British judge on the panel to play a sort of mean guy? Is it a sort of requirement? The one other such show I’ve seen, American Idol, has that, and like a good theorist I am extrapolating wildly from two data points.

logo for design squadSeeing a reality show based on some intellectual skill actually reminds me. Even though I got a reminder from some of the people behind the show, I’m embarrassed to say that I completely forgot to tell you about the show on PBS for youngsters aged 9 – 12 called “Design Squad”. From the “about” part of their site:

Borrowing from the hugely popular reality competition format, DESIGN SQUAD is aimed at kids and people of all ages who like reality or how-to television. Its goal is to get viewers excited about engineering!

Over 13 episodes, eight high school contestants tackle engineering challenges for an actual client—from building a machine that makes pancakes to a “summer sled” for LL Bean. In the final episode, the top two scorers battle for the Grand Prize—a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel® Foundation.

I think it has now concluded, but you can watch all 13 episodes online here. Did anyone see it? (I did not.) What did you think? You can get more involved with Design Squad by following up on this part of their website.

Design Squad was co-sponsored by the IEEE, which is excellent to see. So will the American Physical Society (and other science societies) be doing something similar, one wonders? It’s a potentially good way of getting people interested in participating in science – on prime time television. We could, for example, have members of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Otherworldly Top Ten!

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extra solar planet GlieseAfter reading an article about how the “trickle of planet discoveries” as become a “flood” -referring to the many discoveries of extrasolar planets that are being announced these days, since they first started being discovered in 1995 1988/9 (there are more than 200 known now)- I looked at space.com’s “top ten most intriguing extrasolar planets”.


[Update: First detection of extrasolar planets is probably more accurately to be dated 1988/9. The first confirmed one was in 1995, but the planet Gamma_Cephei_Ab, detected in 1988(9) by two separate teams, took until 2002 to be confirmed. See e.g. here for more. Thanks commenter molliska!]

Have a look at that interesting article about the pace of discovery, and then when you’re done, peruse the top ten here. You’ll find:

  • 10: 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed (see above update) one found, 1995;
  • 9: Epsilon Eridani b, the closest known one (only 10.5 light years away);
  • 8: the class of planemos, the extrasolar planets which are not orbiting any stars;
  • 7: SWEEPS-10, a “zippy” planet, that orbits its star every 10 hours as opposed to our sluggish 365.25 days;
  • 6: Upsilon Andromeda b, a planet which is tidally locked to its star so that it presents only one face to it all the time. So one side is always super hot, while the other is very cold;
  • 5: The youngest one known (it’s been in existence a bit less than a million years), orbiting the star Coku Tau 4;
  • 4: PSR B1620-26c, the oldest one known (12.7 billion years…wow!);
  • 3: The “shrinking one”, HD209458b, that orbits so close to its star that it’s

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Amusement With Physics

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I learned from an NPR report today on Day to Day (by Robin Sussingham) that around the country there’s a nice combination of physics and fun going on in various amusement parks! You can hear the story here. From the website:

roller coasterPhysics students in Utah recently attended an event where they learned about concepts like acceleration, velocity, magnetism, and centripetal force.

But this was no boring science fair: It was Physics Day at the Lagoon Amusement Park, north of Salt Lake City. The kids tested theories by riding roller coasters and dropping raw eggs from the towering Sky Coaster ride.

One Utah high school that takes part in “amusement park physics” reports that it now needs three full-time physics teachers to meet growing student interest.

(“Boring science fair”. The cheek. Science fairs can be fun! Anyway, moving on…) It’s an interesting report. It’s been going on for some time, and this event is organized by the Utah State University Physics Department. I also found a report in the Deseret Morning News by Tammy Walquist, which was quite informative. (Photo above by Laura Seitz, of Jessica Rocha (left) and Shelese Sheffield, Kaysville Junior High eighth-graders, is from the article.) An extract: […] Click to continue reading this post →

TASI@Home

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This year’s month-long Theoretical Advanced Study Institute -TASI- looks especially good, from my point of view, with a great combination of topics and lecturers. As usual, it is held in Boulder, Colorado. It’s all about current ideas and experiments and observations in particle physics and cosmology. Three USC students are there and I’ve heard from them that things have been great so far.

raphael bousso at TASIWell, the great news is that the TASI people are making the lectures available online a fairly short time after their delivery. The link is here. So even though not there, you can schedule some time to take these lecture courses if you like. I glanced for a while at Raphael Bousso’s first lecture in the series “Cosmology and the Landscape”, and it was clear and very well presented. (This is not entirely surprising – Raph is always an excellent lecturer.) […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hunting the Higgs is not a (D)Zero Sum Game

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D0 data shotWriting in Slate magazine, James Owen Weatherall seems a little confused about how particle physics works. Based on a rumour that there’s a new and significant signal seen at the DZero detector at the Tevatron at Fermilab (Illinois), one of the article’s titles is “Why the rumored discovery of the Higgs Boson is bad news for particle physics”. Supposedly, the big new machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC – see more about it here, and what physicists are hoping for from it), about to switch on later this year, would have nothing to do, and would be a waste of billions of dollars. You can read about the original rumour here.) (Above right: A random collision event I grabbed from the DZero experiment.)

Well, this is wrong for so many reasons. It is hard to know where to start with this. The major fallacy with the whole thing is that these machines are just somehow discovery devices (in the most naive sense) of some sort. You build it, switch it on, see what’s there, write the paper and the press release (not necessarily in that order) and then you’re done. Completely neglected is the notion of such an experiment as a device for […] Click to continue reading this post →

Wave It Like You Just Don’t Care

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Although we care deeply. It’s just late, I’m a bit woozy as I write this, and so I’m stretching a bit for a good title. This post is about gravitational waves. More accurately, it is about a rather good BBC programme about gravitational waves: What they are, why they are important, why we care, and what we’re doing to detect them. It’s Melvin Bragg and some guests on the “In Our Time” prime time programme. I recommend it as a pleasant, unscripted chat which has quite a bit of good introductory information. Even if you’re a bit busy, you can listen to it while doing some other task. Go on. Also, even if you know this stuff, it’s always amusing to hear the host apparently getting terribly confused and hung up on some points while trying to get to grips with the material. I can never tell if he’s faking it because he has decided that he has to reinforce the cliché -it’s physics so it must be hard, especially at this time in the morning- or whether he’s for real at these points. Either way, it makes for a rough-and-tumble conversational feel to the programme which is not altogether disagreeable.

Anyway, the key thing is this (and you’ve probably not heard this here first): In the entire history of science, every time we’ve figured out a new way of looking up at the sky, we’ve revolutionized our understanding of the universe. We’ve every right to expect the same of gravitational waves, once the technology matures. It’s exciting just thinking about it!

ligo detector

I’ll end with some relevant things to look at. Above is part of the LIGO detector (photo from NASA’s website). Here’s a link to the LISA detector that everyone hopes will […] Click to continue reading this post →

That Ain’t Workin’

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Remember the Tune “Money for Nothing”, by Dire Straits? It was a big hit in the 80s. (Remember those?) Well, Warren of the new blog A Strange Universe wrote a rather brilliant physics version of it, to be sung to the same tune. The “stringer” is the object of the ridicule of the song’s character. The original post is here, where he’ll tell you his thoughts on the song. I can’t resist (I hope he forgives me) posting the entire thing here, rather than an extract, which would break up its impact. (Original song’s lyrics are here, by the way, for comparison.)

So here it is: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Masterclass, II

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Don’t forget to catch the latest installment of Joe Polchinski’s rather thorough deconstruction of the nonsense, obfuscation, selective memory, and other confusions that constitute the bulk of Lee Smolin’s attack on string theory.

All the points I’ve had the energy to raise have been made here on Asymptotia […] Click to continue reading this post →

Poor Pluto!

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Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:

poor pluto mathias pedersen


You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.

Poor Pluto indeed!

(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other features of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

NASA’s Wrong Stuff?

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Have a listen to Greg Easterbrook (of Wired) in conversation with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. The issue is whether NASA’s focus on setting up a manned base on the moon, and then heading for Mars, is really the right focus for a huge (multiple billions of dollars) expenditure, given other scientific priorities. The link is here. See also his Wired piece here, entitled “How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It)”.

That was yesterday. Today, also on NPR’s Morning Edition, I heard NASA’s chief administrator Michael Griffin attempts to defend the policy. There’s a link to audio here, and be sure to listen to the audio (the transcript offered there is only partial, for a start). I find it revealing. He seemed to have a great deal of difficulty answering certain key questions, such as “Do you think it is the best use of money or not?”. “Are there priorities that you have had to cut…?” His answers on climate change and global […] Click to continue reading this post →

Griffith Observatory: Entertainment, Education, or Both?

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partial view of and from griffith observatory at night, by c.v. johnsonYou may recall a post I did some time ago about a worrying development at Griffith Observatory, just before it reopened after the splendid three year refurbishment. (See here for my long post -with pictures- of my visit to the facility around the time of its reopening.) Various reports said that they’d decided to hire actors (not trained in the subject of astronomy) to largely replace the lecturers (trained in the subject of astronomy) for the new planetarium show. This seemed a very disturbing turn of events, and so I did the blog post about it.

Well, I’d put the issue out of my mind until a few weeks ago when Jerry Weil, one of the show’s creators, showed up in the comments section (I love Google) and made his case for why the new show was just fine. Among the things he said in his comments were:

With the new structure of the shows, there is no time for a Q&A period, so there is no need for the lecturers to have any knowledge of astronomy. It is important to keep the show exciting and entertaining, but the star of the show should be the visuals.

Now, I have not seen the show, and so cannot comment in detail on its contents, or the setting, but I am -to say the least- very worried about such a statement. So I asked him to unpack the statement a bit more, thinking that I may have misunderstood. His clarification:

As far as the role of the lecturers, I was certainly one of the people who originally thought it was an unnecessary burden to have live lecturers when a canned narration would work just as well. After seeing the show, I have to say that having someone there live really adds to the excitement of the show. It makes it “feel” more interactive, and it certainly keeps your attention knowing there is a live human there speaking. However, since it is all scripted and there is no Q&A, it is not necessary for the lecturers to have any knowledge of astronomy. I am also an actor myself (in fact I had coincidentally worked with the actor/lecturer at the show I saw), and I have certainly played many roles in areas where I had no prior knowledge. In this situation it’s more important to have people who can convey the excitement and wonder of the Universe than to have a deep understanding of the subject matter.

Not wanting to repeat my often-made point that education and entertainment need not be thought of as mutually exculsive, I made a mental note to see the show and revisit this issue if I thought I could contribute further.

Remarkably, a few days later I was at a party at a neighbour’s house (Cinco De Mayo), and it was a great opportunity to meet some more neighbours. Among those were […] Click to continue reading this post →

Parthenogenesis, II

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bonnethead sharkRemember Flora? The Komodo dragon? I blogged about her here and here. She produced offspring using parthenogenesis while in captivity last year. Well, there was a news story earlier this week about a bonnethead shark in in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska giving birth to a pup. (Interestingly, zoo-keepers and news reporters seemed uninterested in giving our subject shark a name, as happened for the reptile.)

It was a puzzle for a while as to how she did it (as I learned in a BBC article):

At the time, some theorised that a male tiger shark kept at the zoo could have been the father – but the institution’s three bonnethead females had none of the bite marks that are usually inflicted on their gender during shark sex.

Some even suggested that one of the females could have had sex in the wild and stored the sperm in her body – but the three-year period in captivity made this explanation highly unlikely.

But eventually DNA tests resolved the issue:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →