How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Coming This Christmas
Release date is December 22 and is available for pre-ordering at Amazon
Anyone who follows Uncertain Principles knows how well Chad writes and has seen some excerpts already.
Category Archives: Physics
Speak the Geek!
It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!
I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:
I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”
I used “collapse the wave function” to denote resolving something, as in “the election collapsed the presidential race wave function”
resonated — already in common use
a short amount of time became “a small delta-t”
a wide variety of something I called a spectrum
I refer to a rumor (aka nebulous information) as “Nth-hand information”
I didn’t forget, I “expunged this from the buffer”
An either/or situation is a Boolean state
Happy New Year’s Day was “Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver”
When something came close to me, it was at perigee
And of course, the blogging community is called the blogohedron
I also like making up measuring devices, like the cringe-o-meter to measure how painful something looks, or the Geekmeter. “Pegging the Geekmeter” is a large signal, and means you’re in a maximal “Talk Like a Physicist” state.
Made-up “elements” I’ve used in the last year
Politicium
Grinchonium
Quiltonium
Elephantium
Nerdonium
And some new vocabulary and ways to use it:
Incompatible things are “out of phase.” “Pi out of phase” is the ultimate in being out-of-step, which leads to destructive interference.
Something that is close is “within epsilon”
We physicists quantify relationships — something that is complicated is “nonlinear,” or even “highly nonlinear.” Opposites are “inversely proportional”
Two different things happening at once can be said to be in a superposition (That’s a superposition of painful and funny!)
If something doesn’t happen, you can say the wave functions just didn’t overlap
It’s not unclear, it’s opaque
A situation that’s impossible to resolve has overconstrained boundary conditions
It’s not a hill/ditch, it’s local maximum/minimum
ZZ Top Physics
Electrons in Rydberg states exhibiting behavior like classical orbits — Lagrange L points.
Rumour spreadin a-round in that Texas town
’bout that shack outside Lagrange
An astronomical solution to an old quantum problem
When a small satellite moves in a sun-earth system there are five stable points at which the satellite remains fixed with respect to the rotating sun-earth system. These are the famous Lagrange L points. In 1994 Bialynicki-Birula et al. showed that stable Lagrange points could be produced in the atomic electron problem by applying a circularly polarized microwave field rotating in synchrony with an electron wave packet in a highly excited state (a so-called Rydberg atom). The electron wave packet then remains localized near the Lagrange point while circling the nucleus indefinitely. Effectively the atom is made to behave quite classically.
Hindenberg Studies
You're the Top
Fermilab collider experiments discover rare single top quark
Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and happens almost as often as the strong force production, is harder to identify experimentally. Now, scientists working on the CDF and DZero collider experiments at Fermilab achieved this feat, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery at Fermilab in 1995.
Those Kinky Alkali Atoms
Cross-dressing Rubidium May Reveal Clues For Exotic Computing
In their experiment, they cause a gas of rubidium-87 to form an ultracold state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Then, laser light from two opposite directions bathes or “dresses” the rubidium atoms in the gas. The laser light interacts with the atoms, shifting their energy levels in a peculiar momentum-dependent manner. One nifty consequence of this is that the atoms now react to a magnetic field gradient in a way mathematically identical to the reaction of charged particles like electrons to a uniform magnetic field. “We can make our neutral atoms have the same equations of motion as charged particles do in a magnetic field,” says Spielman.
Cross-Dressing? Someone has broken into the liquor cabinet again.
Pipe Down!
As computer chips shrink ever smaller, the background flicker of electronic noise threatens to undermine the vital precision of digital processing. Unlike ordinary circuits, a newly designed digital circuit element only works properly when the noise level is sufficiently high. The circuit, described in the 13 March Physical Review Letters, is not only well-suited for noisy nanoscale operations, but it can also be changed on the fly to perform different logic functions–a property that could lead to reconfigurable computer processors.
Michael Faraday's GUT
Michael Faraday, grand unified theorist? (1851)
The common thread of many of [Faraday’s] discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, ‘universal’ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faraday’s time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ørsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a tantalizing dream. Faraday went further than any of his contemporaries in realizing that dream, and experimentally cemented the link between electricity and magnetism and light. Faraday was by no means done, however, and in 1851 he published the results of his attempts to demonstrate that electricity and gravity are related!
Another Condensed Matteron
Another in my continuing series trying to explain some condensed matter concepts in comparatively jargon-free language. So far I’ve talked about electron-like quasiparticles, phonons, and plasmons. Now we consider magnons, also known as “spin waves”. A magnon is another collective excitation, like a phonon or a plasmon, that may be described by a wavelength (or equivalently a wavevector) and an accompanying frequency.