It’s amusing when nonphysicists discover how much fun lasers are
Category Archives: Other science
Now Robots Have Gone to the Dogs
It took me more than a few seconds to be convinced that it wasn’t just two people with a box over their torsos.
Much less time to figure this one out
(’twas the feet that gave it away)
Hat tip to Patrick
Random Nonphysics Link
The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You
Pay special heed to #5.
Frame This!
Over at Cosmic Variance, a discussion about getting the message of science out, in the context of the recent EXPELLED! brouhaha.
To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.
There is a more basic motivation: telling the truth.
I keep trying to add commentary, and deleting it. The post nails it, as far as I’m concerned.
An Enigma, Wrapped in a … Web Page
A paper Enigma machine. No, it’s not just ROT13.
This machine is compatible with the original 3-rotor German Enigma used during World War II. For simplicity it omits the “ring settings” and plug board, but the primary workings of the machine are captured in this model. Great as an educational tool, or just for fun!
I don’t have the brain for understanding advanced encryption, but I’ve read a couple of books about Enigma/ULTRA/Bletchley Park. Neat stuff.
From Where Will Our Energy Come?
I ran across this blog post on future energy concerns — Less heat, more light: solving the energy crisis, and while much of it seems solid and there are some very good points in it, there are some things that are very, very wrong. And there’s this whole problem with conclusions drawn from invalid premises — you can’t claim they are valid, even if they happen to be correct; you can’t be sure if the correctness is accidental.
Basically, a discussion of how much energy will we be demanding in the future and where will we be getting it. World-wide we use about 14 TW of power (terawatts, or 10^12 watts) — for an idea of scale, that’s like having fourteen one-terawatt light bulbs — and if one assume a 2% annual increase in use, that will double by 2050.
The first issue I have is that the “let’s get more efficient” isn’t first — if the new real demand isn’t actually going to be 14 TW, then let’s use the real number as our target. So the conclusions about nuclear
A two gigawatt plant needs to be built every month from here to 2050. That will get us all of one (1!) terawatt out of the fourteen needed.
is a little off if fourteen TW isn’t actually needed. Also, the conclusions about how much uranium we have available to us
There’s lots more U in sea water, but if you think we should try the environmental disaster of mining seawater — to get 1TW of radioactive energy — you probably got that idea via the fillings in your teeth.
well, sorry, but snark isn’t science. Since we’re basically talking about filtration (technically adsorption on a polymer), the “disaster” part isn’t leaping out at me.
Dog Ballistics
I guess it’s a dog-day. No, not dogs as projectiles — what a horrible thought. (I used cats in my physics examples when I was teaching. Or smurfs, if I had blue chalk)
And a wiener dog, no less. Very Gary Larson.
Notice how the dog takes off as soon as the launcher draws back, making a distinctive sound. Pavlovian ballistics.
Sowing and Reaping Science
ZapperZ discusses Public Impatience With Science, or the importance of doing basic research now so that people can do applied research later and bring new and useful technology to market in the future.
This ties in what I was talking about in my last entry, (and earlier than that) because while there are the funding organizations and agencies out there trying to drive applied research who also fund some basic research, it is usually in a narrow scope. Funding, overall, needs to expand in breadth and depth. What needs to be remembered is that advances and discoveries have a way of expanding and being adopted by other researchers, even crossing the traditional lines between disciplines, but it takes time to diffuse.
Even within the sciences themselves, many forget that some of the advancement in biochemistry, for example, were brought about because of something that was developed in physics years before. Synchrotron light sources came out of research in high energy physics, and it took many decades before the field of biochemistry, medicine, and pharmacy realized that such facilities can be valuable to their work.
And what is originally a heroic effort to observe some result will eventually become a standard lab practice or tool (BEC being a good example), allowing more advanced inquiry, but again, it takes time for this to happen.
Random Nonphysics Link
The Backyard Arthropod Project
“A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI”
Bugs, not in close proximity to me, so I don’t mind so much. Apparently many of them are attracted to or otherwise like to hang out on graph paper. I had no idea…
A Boatload of Atomic Physics
Chad’s been busy blogging about his recent lab visits to NIST and U. Maryland, and the writeups are, as usual, top-notch. Cavity QED (a subfield I find fascinating and something I might have pursued had the right opportunities arisen when I was looking for a postdoc), Cold Plasmas, Biophysics (you might have a “what the?” reaction, but it uses optical tweezers, which is why this doesn’t really fall under “one of these things is not like the other,” Four-Wave Mixing (another field I find interesting, and the summary is definitely worth a read if you’ve ever wondered if things you learned in QM were ever actually applied to anything. You’ve got electrons moving between states without ever exciting the atom, and squeezed states, which is an exploitation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle)
Last but not least one on this list (so far, anyway) is about trapping Francium. As I mentioned in the U.P. comments, I was a postdoc in the group that tried to trap Francium at TRIUMF several years back, and when we started discussing plans to do it, we were hoping to trap before the Stony Brook lab did so. Well, they succeeded while we … met some obstacles. As I recall, we weren’t the first in line to use the target; there was another experiment that went first, and so we only had a short time to try. And trying to trap something that has no stable isotopes is a special challenge. You have to reference your laser to something, so that you know he frequency of the light you are generating. With an existing stable isotope that’s straightforward, since you can use an absorption line, and the frequency of the radioactive isotope would be close by. Otherwise you do something like locking to an iodine transition, or some other reference cell used in spectroscopy. And you have to know the frequency you want to generate — with no stable or at least naturally-occurring isotopes the spectroscopy information would be very sparse in comparison to other alkalis, so your calculation of where you expect the transition to be has some uncertainties, meaning you have to search frequency-space until you find something. And we ran out of beam time before we saw anything.
And, as I had mentioned, we (well, someone at TRIUMF) got a call from a watchdog station that tries to detect nuclear fallout, wanting to double-check on things. They knew the signature they were reading wasn’t from a bomb, but they knew something was up and guessed our target material: Thorium. When you blast that with energetic protons, you get lots of heavy isotopes.