Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Prof. Higgins Sings

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Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

An interesting article on the gender-representation issue in the sciences. Many assume it’s all sexism, but whenever somebody checks to see if that’s really the case, two things seem to happen: they come to the conclusion, “Not so much,” and they are often attacked for raising the question. Congress has gotten into the act, with a push for a “Title IX for Science.” I’m all for removing barriers that might prevent women from pursuing a career in a science discipline, or shunt them into some other discipline against their desire, but if you don’t ask the question of how we know it’s sexism, such a path is, well, unscientific. (of course, that’s not surprising, since politics and political-correctness is involved). But the Title IX analogy fails, because science doesn’t have a men’s league and women’s league.

There is another essential difference between sports and science: in science, men and women play on the same teams. Very few women can compete on equal terms with men in lacrosse, wrestling, or basketball; by contrast, there are many brilliant women in the top ranks of every field of science and technology, and no one doubts their ability to compete on equal terms.

I think one of the problems in this issue is that some people are taking “men and women are equal” and subtly (or not-so-subtly) taking that to mean “men and women are identical.” And assuming that because the former is true that the latter must be as well.

via Twisted One 151

There’s also a new book, reviewed at the NY TImes, related to this topic. The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker.

Pinker parks herself firmly among “difference” feminists. Women’s brains aren’t inferior, she argues, but they vary considerably from men’s, and this is the primary explanation for the workplace gender divide

Traffic

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One of the neat things about traffic is how it can be analyzed in terms of some physics parameters. You get density waves that can propagate, and end up getting slowdowns that can persist long after the original cause is gone. Or, as this video shows, there doesn’t have to be a real cause, like an accident or scantily-clad jogger distracting the drivers. Just statistical fluctuation can be enough to send a shockwave through the traffic.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

There’s a short article as well

(via Cognitive Daily)

UPDATE: more on this at Backreaction. Actual analysis.

The plot shows nicely how the perturbation – the zone of zero velocity (aka the jam) – travels at constant speed in the direction opposite to the traffic flow.

What Everyone Should Know About Science

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The topic being adressed at Uncertain Principles, based on an idea from Michael Nielsen

1) Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts

2) Science is an essential human activity.

3) Anyone can do science.

infer some ellipses between those items; Chad goes into some detail about all of them.

Perhaps what science is not is important, too.

– Science doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Good thing, too, since we’d all be doing something else with our lives if everything had been answered.

– Science isn’t about faith (of the religious variety). Related to the above, but it’s important to know that science quantifies certainty and uncertainty. Having some uncertainty is not the same thing as having no certainty at all.

(what everyone should know about blogging: When in doubt, link to someone else)

Leap Day

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Phil Plait runs down the numbers about leap days, and why the Gregorian calendar has them every 4 years but skip every 100, except when we unskip every 400.

And if you find that confusing, you’re still probably not as confused as we Swedes are. The old Julian calendar didn’t have the rules about skipping (or not) years divisible by 100 or 400, so that’s why it got off track and countries started changing to the Gregorian. And while most countries just bit the bullet and dropped the 10 or 11 days (depending on when the change was made), Sweden tried to think different … and screwed it up. Miserably.

To avoid the havoc of just obliterating the large chunk of days, the Swedes decided to do it this way: just say no to leap days for 40 years, and then their calendar would be in synch with the Gregorian calendar. The problem of not lining up with either calendar didn’t dissuade them from this plan. It started out well enough — they began this in 1700, which was a leap year for the Julian but not the Gregorian calendar, so there would have been no Feb 29 with either method of adoption. But something went terribly wrong: somebody (no doubt addled by overconsumption of herring) forgot the master plan, so 1704 and 1708 both had a leap days. Rather than just go ahead with the Gregorian adoption, it was decided to go back to the Julian calendar, but an extra day would be needed, since one had been dropped in 1700. Solution? A leap day! It was added in 1712, and since 1712 was already a leap year, that meant there was a Feb. 30.

The Swedes went ahead with the Gregorian calendar in 1753, adding in the 11 days all at once.

The Great Deception

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Over at Pharyngula there is a link to a talk summary (not surprisingly, related to evolution) that says

Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.

Wait. I thought Anthropogenic Global Warming was the greatest deception in the history of science

But, whither physics? Surely physics has foisted deception upon mankind, somehow. Ah, relativity to the rescue. Even worse than the evolutionary deception of Piltdown man, apparently

By now, science seems to be
so heavily invested in Relativity and Einstein, that it will be very
hard to admit Relativity has been so obviously wrong. It would be
like admitting to a crime.

Lies in science have happened before virtually on the level of
relativity. In England a claim was made that the origin lay in
Britain, perpetrated by leading experts in the field of paleontology.
What they did was to use a fairly modern skull, filed off key
evidence from an ape lower jaw (joints, teeth), put them together
and claimed they had found it like that. This deception has lasted
for a long time, but not as long as the Relativity deception has.

And in addition

It is simply incredible that a theory with so many deceptions has held the attention of so many of physicists and other scientists from the field of natural and technical sciences for so long, and has managed to retain acceptability and even enter the textbooks for secondary schools and universities.

Actually, relativity and evolution are deceptions that follow from the Copernican deception. Evolution was the followup, and relativity was the third blow.

Once the Copernican Revolution had conquered the physical sciences of Astronomy and Physics and put down deep roots in Universities and lower schools everywhere, it was only a matter of time until the Biological sciences launched the Darwinian Revolution.

And then, after the Michelson-Morley experiment

Einstein’s Relativity hypothesis rescued heliocentricity from the findings of over 200 experiments which showed that the earth was not moving.

I always enjoy the conspiracy angle. We have so much invested in the deception of relativity that we just can’t afford to abandon it at this point. It takes tremendous effort, covering up such a theory that doesn’t actually work. Good thing it’s just a blind alley of physics, and no science or technology actually uses it.

Interestingly, I couldn’t quickly find the same vitriol-induced confusion over quantum mechanics. Perhaps it’s just that QM is so openly bizarre that despite the fact that there are those out there that decry it, it’s not considered deceptive.

Thoughts on Teaching

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Over at The Blog of Doom, the Cap’n makes some good points, namely

Labs are not ways to reinforce your teaching. Labs are ways to teach.
…
The goal of labs should be to let students figure things out for themselves. Let’s not tell students to verify Schmoe’s Law. Let’s tell them, “there might be a relationship between these two variables. Find out what it is and if there’s an equation that can describe the relationship. You get to design your own experiment to do so.”

That would be real learning.

(emphasis in original, though it doesn’t seem to show up in the block quote)

Yes! I agree. One problem I see, though, is that it’s difficult to recreate the atmosphere of having the science be an unknown, since the students can simply read ahead and know what the answer is supposed to be. One possibility is with simulations. You could, for example, have a computer simulate a CRT with a new and different magnetic and electric field — instead of having the Lorentz force law hold (F = qE + qv X B) you would make things nonlinear and have the students deduce the law. The source might be limited to just a few energies (you could pretend they are monoenergetic radioactive samples), and maybe the source particles are “mysterions” that don’t have an integral charge. Let them have a taste of what it’s like to do an investigation where you don’t know what the answer is supposed to be.

I think simulations fail in some circumstances, though. I recall a computer program that simulated single-particle interference building up over time to give the familiar pattern. But it didn’t actually prove anything, since the pattern will be whatever the programmer wants it to be. New and different science probably needs to be more involved with the actual apparatus. When I was a TA for a “modern physics” class I was a little surprised at how neat the students found the labs to be, even those not majoring in physics, even though it wasn’t as “hands-on” as the introductory/general physics labs were; you were relying on some measurement apparatus to show electron diffraction, or radioactive decay but that didn’t matter. The results weren’t necessarily expected — even though you saw the Bragg equation in class, seeing the rings actually show up and change when you changed the accelerating potential was far more satisfying than confirming the value of g.

Another example — a colleague of mine was describing a lab one of his kids had recently. It was a black box, with some items inside that were taken from a list of possibilities, and the students had various investigative tools at their disposal (perhaps a scale and a magnet, among other things) and they had to determine what was in their box. Nobody knew the answer ahead of time, and the students had to go through and explain their reasoning for why a test confirmed or excluded a potential item on the list as being in the box. I wish I had had labs like that in school.