Category Archives: Other science
By Gum it's Glass!
The hover tag on the recent xkcd cartoon Misconceptions mentions the common glass mistake, that it is a slow moving fluid (also seen: supercooled fluid). I remarked to a colleague that part of the foundation for that was not understanding that there is a glass transition, while the more common observation is a first-order phase transition from liquid to solid. He mentioned a good example of a glass transition:
Take a cold piece of chewing gum. Break it in half. That’s a material in the glassy state.
Put the gum in your mouth and wait a short time. Then bite. Elastic and rubbery, but still a solid. Somewhere in that temperature span is the glass transition,
No Lambs Were Harmed in the Making of This Post, as Far as You Know
Silencing demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance. Simply by changing the retinotopic coordinates— moving the object or the eyes—it is possible to silence awareness of visual change, causing objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.
Here, Fishy Fish!
Firs for the Fish (and the Fishermen)
Leftover Christmas trees used as fish habitats in lakes, somewhat like old ships being sunk and used as artificial reefs.
The trees are taken to a different lake each year, where volunteers bundle them and secure them to the lake bed. Within days, the newly denuded branches become covered with algae, which attract aquatic insects, fish and, ultimately, fishermen.
The incentive to get volunteers?
“If they help, we give them the GPS coordinates of the trees,” Mr. Mitchell said of the volunteers, many of whom are anglers. “You can go right to the spot, and it’ll be good fishing there.”
It's Not the Worlds Smallest Violin Playing the World's Saddest Song?
Guaranteed to Be Pauly Shore Free
Constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed greenhouse containing a miniature rain forest, a desert, a little ocean, a mangrove swamp, a savanna, and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1”—Earth—and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on Mars. A May 1987 article in DISCOVER called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 80 percent of their food, something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their sewage and effluent, drinking the same water countless times, totally purified by their plants, soil, atmosphere, and machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total water recycling on the International Space Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier.
Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment seized upon the ways in which the project had failed.
I suspect the way the project was treated was because the basic operation was presented as a given — the inhabitants will be sealed inside and the system will be self-sustaining. In that sense it was not a great experiment, but it was a grand experiment: it was large-scale, and we did learn things we did not previously know. When physicists build a bigger and better accelerator, the operation of it is pretty much a given, because we have a long history of building bigger and better accelerators. Even the LHC, with the well-publicized superconductor quenching and baguette bombing, the setbacks in operation were relatively minor and fixable — it’s not like the problems would prevent searching for the Higgs, they just delayed it a little.
But nobody had attempted an isolated man-made biosphere before. So I think they got a raw deal on the collective raspberry that the media blew when it didn’t work out as hoped. It’s nice to see it has served as a scientific platform, even if it is in a more limited way.
Top Science of 2010
Science: The Breakthroughs of 2010 and Insights of the Decade
Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics. Back in March, however, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics—the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. In recognition of the conceptual ground this experiment breaks, the ingenuity behind it, and its many potential applications, Science has called this discovery the most significant scientific advance of 2010.
The Gospel According to Bruce
I had an epiphany while was watching the movie Jaws recently: it occurred to me that the movie is an allegory for some of the science vs ideology political battling we have going on, especially if one looks at the "debate" surrounding anthropogenic global warming. It sounds weird, I know. But the really strange part is that the parable of the shark predated the AGW debate by about three decades, and that alone should be able to convince one of its divine truth.
Larry Vaughn is, quite simply, a denialist. As the Mayor of Amity Island, he's responsible for its well-being, and to him, this means primarily the economic well-being. As long as the people on the island are making money from the tourists, his job is secure. A shark attack is bad for business, so it simply cannot be allowed to be true. So the first death becomes a boating accident; all it takes is a small change in the coroner's report. Hey, we’ll just change the wording of this study’s conclusions
The story of the first attack has gotten out, so when the locals catch a shark, it is assumed that it’s the shark. When he’s presented with the opportunity to obtain actual evidence by cutting open the shark, he declines. But at least now it’s acknowledged there is (or was) a shark. Well, there is warming. But it’s natural! No reason to spend money on it.
When Hooper gets a shark tooth from Ben Gardner’s boat, it’s not enough that he has seen this — he can’t actually show the mayor the tooth, so at that point, the evidence doesn’t exist as far as Vaughn is concerned. He gets people to go in the water and downplays the shark attack with a reporter. Warming stopped in 1998!
*Bruce was the name given to all of the mechanical sharks from the movie. I am not sure if any of them taught Hegelian philosophy.
The Other Java Jive
Photographer Olivier Grunewald has recently made several trips into the sulfur mine in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java, Indonesia, bringing with him equipment to capture surreal images lit by moonlight, torches, and the blue flames of burning molten sulfur. Covered last year in the Big Picture (in daylight), the miners of the 2,600 meter tall (8,660ft) Kawah Ijen volcano trek up to the crater, then down to the shore of a 200-meter-deep crater lake of sulfuric acid, where they retrieve heavy chunks of pure sulfur to carry back to a weighing station. Mr. Grunewald has been kind enough to share with us the following other-worldly photos of these men as they do their hazardous work under the light of the moon.
Burning liquid sulfur. Wow.
Attack of the Math Monster
Uncertain Principles: Two Cultures Within Science
[No equations in a paper] is almost completely inconceivable to me (at the risk of leaving myself open to the Vizzini joke). In my part of science, a paper without an equation is suspect, and I’m not exactly the world’s most mathematically inclined physicist. Physics is so intimately connected to math, and the business of doing physics is so inherently mathematical that its difficult to imagine a scientific paper about physics that doesn’t contain at least one equation. A press release or popular article, sure, but to a physicist, the equations aren’t some offal to be avoided en route to the science. The equations are the science. Objecting to the presence of an equation in a scientific paper is like objecting to the presence of meat in a steak sandwich.
I had the serendipity of reading another post just before reading Chad’s, related to the closing remarks concerning physicists sometime needing to learn some less “standard” math to do the physics they are interested in pursuing:
Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
My more reasonable friends claim that this abstract isn’t really as amusing as I make it out to be. And to be sure, they’re right.
Murray Gell-Mann developed the “eight-fold way” to explain the spectrum of hadrons in the 1960s. It wasn’t until after he’d developed this formalism that he discussed his model with mathematicians, who then told him that he’d rediscovered group (representation) theory. This ushered ina new era in the history of particle physics where symmetry became our guiding light and group theory became a necessary tool for any particle theorist. Though, to be fair, in the 1960s group theory—unlike calculus—wasn’t something that physicists were expected to take during high school.
I’m also aware of a few instances of some of my colleagues struggling through some new way of analyzing clock performance, only to find out that the math is standard analysis of some other sort of problem. As they say, math is the language of physics.