Category Archives: science

The Antikythera Mechanism

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So, I have questions.

About what? Well, by now you’ve heard about this wonderful machine that was found 100 years or so ago, which after a lot of research, has been found to be a remarkably sophisticated mechanical computer designed and built in ancient Greece about 2,100 years ago. There’s a nice LA Times story on it by Thomas H. Maugh II here, and a New York Times story* by John Noble Wilford here and a Reuters article by Patricia Reaney here. (The image to the right (click for larger) is from the University of Cardiff.)

From the articles you can learn that the machine was able to perform computational tasks 1400 years or so before the time when machines of this sort (but less sophisticated) were thought to have appeared. What sort of tasks? Well, using 37 gears or so it can do subtractions, multiplications and divisions to show the cycles of […] Click to continue reading this post →

Shocked Reaction

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For a refreshingly straightforward point of view from a young person in the field who just wants to get on with doing some good physics with what seems like a promising approach, read Jonathan Shock’s description of his recent attendance of meetings (including the one to which I earlier referred) on heavy ion collisions and related physics. (See also an interesting comment by Xin-Nian Wang on the comment thread of my earlier post.) Jonathan gives some useful links to presentations on some of the attempts to model some of the new physics using string theory models.

The title? Oh, yes, he gets beaten up a bit by those around him for working on strings. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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On Friday and Saturday of this week (December 1st and 2nd), the next Southern California Strings Seminar will be happening! It’s a regional meeting for people doing research in string theory and related topics, and as I’ve said before, I’d especially like to see more young people come out and take part. We make a special effort to ask the speakers to spend a little time at the beginning of their talk setting the scene (speaking about motivations, what has gone before, etc) so that the series can be of great value to people who are trying to learn what’s going on in a particular topic at research level (this can be students, postdocs, or faculty, in fact).

If you’re doing this kind of physics research anywhere in the Southern California region, and want to take part, please come. See the website for details, and try to let […] Click to continue reading this post →

See Six

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The good people at the US Postal service do produce some splendid sets of stamps on quite a regular basis. Today, to my delight, I was offered this set as one of my choices at the post office:

[image: stamps/snowflakes]

There’s so much physics behind the microscopic lattice of H2O molecules underlying such a lovely shape, with the pleasant C6 symmetry of the macroscopic result – the snowflake. I found a lovely “morphology diagram” showing the sorts of shapes you get depending upon temperature and supersaturation of the water vapour that condenses to […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tee Time On The Space Station

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Before I point you to the link about the latest important activity on the International Space Station, I’d like to ask for your help: – This might be a bit impolite, but may I ask what is the actual point of the International Space Station? I spent a bit of time (not a huge amount, I admit) at NASA’s site, for example, and can’t really find an overall scientific or engineering statement of purpose. There’s a bit of chatter about learning about the effects of long spaceflights on the physiology of human beings, and how to meet engineering challenges of various sorts, but that seems to be it. The weekly science reports that you can read on there don’t sound very encouraging either, but I imagine I’m seeing the digest for the media and non-experts.

[Update: – Ok! I found some interesting sites here and here. They do help a bit.]

I’m not being sarcastic here…. I’d really like to know. I’m sure that there must be a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Nuclear Guy Goes Nuclear

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star rhic goldFollowing on from her earlier post (with Stefan) on the research effort to understand Brookhaven’s RHIC physics with string theory, Bee reports some things she heard about a nuclear physics conference in Shanghai (Quark Matter ’06). Apparently Larry McLerran -who is at Brookhaven- did a 20 minute anti-string (and anti-Brian Greene) rant. You can see some slides etc, over there.

(Note for the non-expert:- RHIC means “Relativisitc Heavy Ion Collider”. Picture on right (click for larger): Tracks from collision of two beams of gold nuclei -the heavy ions- recorded by the STAR detector at the RHIC experiment. More here. In a sense, a new form of matter is formed in these conditions – the issue is how to understand its properties.)

This sort of thing is rather funny, so far (apparently Brian Greene was given a “Pinocchio award” in the talk?! ). Let’s hope it does not turn into something serious.

In moving forward: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fusion In Our Future?

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Tuesday saw the official agreement between a consortium of countries to construct a fully functional fusion reactor, at a cost of 12.8 billion dollars, or thereabouts. The project is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER. It is indeed a huge undertaking, and we could end up with nothing to show for it, but on the other hand it would be a miniscule price to pay if we were to get the scheme off the ground. The promise of an abundant source of energy that is (supposedly) less polluting and safer to run than fission and does not add to our upcoming woes caused by climate change is too tantalizing not to pursue.

In case you’re wondering, the image to the right (click for larger) is a schematic representation of the 500MW reactor. It is of the classic “Tokamak” type, in which there is a torus (doughnut) shaped region where the plasma will be magnetically contained, at a temperature of 100 million K. To learn more about fusion, you can go to the article from the UKAEA here, and the article on ITER here at their website. From the latter, you can learn about the specific scientific objectives of ITER:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Will People Please Stop Saying God Particle?

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While looking for something else I’ll blog about in a short while, I stumbled upon one of the most annoying of the articles on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (or any other particle physics experiment) that I’ve read in a long time. This is because of this utterly ridiculous business of calling the Higgs particle the “God particle”. Who started this? It really is so misleading and annoying. The title of the Guardian article is “In the beginning: scientists get ready to hunt for God particle”, and it is by Ian Sample. Some random bits:

It should certainly discover what some call the “God particle”, finally answering the embarrassingly simple but elusive question of why things have mass.

and…

Finding the Higgs boson will confirm scientists’ most complete theory of the universe and the matter from which it is created. “It’s probably the closest to God that we’ll get,” said Jos Engelen, Cern’s chief scientist.

Aaaaargh!!!

Some?! Who are these people who call it the “God particle”?! If you know anybody in the field who calls it the “God particle” (or even out of the field, for that matter) please […] Click to continue reading this post →

Poincaré In Our Time

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I don’t know whether you caught this already, but if not, do consider listening to the 2nd November edition of BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time”. It is about Poincaré, his work, and the famous conjecture. From their website’s page on the programme:

The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré declared: “The scientist does not study mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living. And it is because simplicity, because grandeur, is beautiful that we preferably seek simple facts, sublime facts, and that we delight now to follow the majestic course of the stars.”
Poincaré’s ground-breaking work in the 19th and early 20th century has indeed led us to the stars and the consideration of the shape of the universe itself. He is known as the father of topology – the study of the properties of shapes and how they can be deformed. His famous Conjecture in this field has been causing mathematicians sleepless nights ever since. He is also credited as the Father of Chaos Theory.

So how did this great polymath change the way we understand the world and indeed the universe? Why did his conjecture remain unproved for almost a century? And has it finally been cracked?

It is a particulalry good programme this time. This is a programme that focuses mostly on philosophy, and is often accused of being only rather superficial when it comes to covering the more hardcore and up-to-date science, but not this time. The guests are […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tales From The Industry, IX

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Friday saw me involved in the shooting of two more segments for a television show. Seems that the ones from last time did not work out too badly, so the program makers wanted to do more. Hurrah!

[image from Friday shoot]

This session was also a lot of fun, and one of the segments (especially) could end up being a particularly good example of getting a good chunk of a whole science story – showing the actual processes involved in doing science – on TV, er, depending upon how it is edited, of course. This is one reason I do this sort of thing. At least as important (in my opinion) as talking, as I also sometimes do, to the press about the fancier things we do (perhaps involving the origin of mass, and whether the universe may or may not have extra dimensions, etc) is the process of getting involved with people in the media to help them bring the cornerstones of all of science to a general audience. No fancy stuff, just the basic but ever so important connection between the physical world around them and simple scientific reasoning. This achieves some very important things, which I bet will last longer in a person’s mind and everyday life than […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Lion’s Share

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Remember the Orionids? Well, it is the turn of the Leonids. These comets are the result of us passing through the debris left by comet Tempel-Tuttle. The peak will be on the 19th November…. Viewing and other information here (Armagh Observatory), here (a NASA site), and here, from Gary W. Kronk’s site (as is the diagram below). Here’s a nice Space.com article by Joe Rao.

There is expected to be quite a spike in the viewing rate this year… enhanced by a factor of ten to maybe as many as 100 or 200 per hour. This is for the lucky viewers in Western Europe (and the British Isles 🙂 ), North Wester Africa, North Eastern USA and Eastern Canada, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Further Information on Dark Energy

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So the press conference is over. I did not listen to it, but the gist of it, from the press release, seems to be that they’ve observed several more supernovae to pin down even more accurately what the universe’s expansion rate was at very early times (up to nine or ten billion years ago). Image below from their site:

[image]

From the site we learn (for background): Click to continue reading this post →