Doomed to Fail

A while back I posted some links to anti-relativity sites and gg suggested that it would be fun to debunk the claims. Sometimes that’s fun, but often — and especially after doing it a number of times — I find that it’s tedious. An error is present, and one has to find it in a morass of often awkwardly defined and unnecessarily complicated scenarios (hey, let’s use three trains, and multiple clocks which will be juggled by a clown on each train!) set up by the author. Sometimes with some horrific ASCII “art,” to boot, though some do have fancy animated gifs.

The reason one knows that an error is present in these thought experiments is because a contradiction has been found. One might think that this is a dogmatic BESS (Because Einstein Said So) argument, but it isn’t — the issue here is that the ultimate authority, and the only authority one is allowed to quote, is absent from the problem: nature. These are thought experiments, and it all boils down to doing coordinate transformations and calculations. Special relativity consists of Lorentz transformations, which are derived from the hypothesis that the speed of light is invariant; all inertial reference frames will measure the same value. This has the admittedly strange consequence (especially to the uninitiated) of time and length not being absolute quantities, which runs counter to most peoples’ everyday experience. We think in Galilean terms which serves us reasonably well in everyday experience, and the differences presented by Lorentz transformations are not apparent to us under these conditions.

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Classic Physics: Light is an EM Wave

Classic Science Paper: Otto Wiener’s experiment (1890) at Skulls in the Stars.

By 1890, then, scientists were interested in seeing whether similar results held for light waves: it seems that a number of scientists remained unconvinced that light truly was just another manifestation of electromagnetic waves! One big obstacle stood in the path of such studies: the smallness of the wavelength of light. Hertz’s radio waves had a wavelength of meters, but visible light has a wavelength on the order of 500 nanometers, or 500 billionths of a meter! Such distances cannot be directly observed with the naked eye, so experimental ingenuity was required – and Otto Wiener provided it.

(My own summary of some “classic” physics is progressing)

Odd Odds

I have an odd sense of humor, bordering on the macabre. OK, it’s pretty much an open border and I visit there often, because I don’t need a passport.

I read the results of the Kentucky Derby and the unfortunate news of Eight Belles. But because I don’t really follow horse racing much and when I hear about it always seems to be about an injury to a horse and how you deal with that, what flashed through my mind (along with Gary Larson’s cartoon about veterinary medicine, where the chapter on horse ailments was so easy) was along the lines of

The 3-1 favorite, Big Brown, won the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby Saturday in commanding fashion, paying $6.80. Eight Belles finished second and paid $10.60, and later buckled, collapsed and was euthanized, which went off at 26-1 and paid $52.50.

Doing a NUMB3R on Non-Newtonian Fluids

On NUMB3RS the other night, Charlie and Larry run over a pool of a non-Newtonian fluid, comprised of cornstarch and water. (Larry sinks in the teaser segment, but is successful at the closing). Non-Newtonian fluids are those that have a viscosity that changes when you apply a force. In this case it is shear-thickening, so it behaves much like a solid when pressure is quickly applied.

Here’s a video of a quite similar scene
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Sportsmanship

OK, it’s technically sportswomanship.

Pop quiz, hotshot: What do you do when a senior who has hit the only home run of her career gets injured — she was so excited she missed first base, and when she turned to tag it, messes up her knee to the point she can’t complete the circuit?

Umpires confirmed that the only option available under the rules was to replace Tucholsky at first base with a pinch runner and have the hit recorded as a two-run single instead of a three-run home run. Any assistance from coaches or trainers while she was an active runner would result in an out. So without any choice, Knox prepared to make the substitution, taking both the run and the memory from Tucholsky.

What do you do? What … do … you … do?

Well, if you’re the other team, you aren’t forbidden from assisting her. So you carry her around and let her touch all of the bases. ‘Cause you’ve got loads of class.

Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky off the ground and supported her weight between them as they began a slow trip around the bases, stopping at each one so Tucholsky’s left foot could secure her passage onward. Even with Tucholsky feeling the pain of what trainers subsequently came to believe was a torn ACL (she was scheduled for tests to confirm the injury on Monday), the surreal quality of perhaps the longest and most crowded home run trot in the game’s history hit all three players.

ESPN story
via Bit & Pieces

Required Reading

The Nerd Handbook

OK, it’s a little bit slanted toward the computer nerd, but many things apply to general geekage.

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.

The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.

Scary Nonphysics Geek Stuff: Animal Robo-Porn

Mechanical squirrels, robot lizards jump into research

In Indiana, for instance, a fake lizard shows off its machismo as researchers assess which actions intimidate and which attract real lizards. Pheromone-soaked cockroach counterfeits in Brussels, meanwhile, exert peer pressure on real roaches to move out of protective darkness. In California, a tiny video camera inside a fake female sage grouse records close-up details as it’s wooed – and more – by the breed’s unusually promiscuous males.

And here’s a short video of said sage grouse, deemed the fembot (oh, behave!). It’s a preview that’s G-rated (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) though check out the soundtrack. I fully expected Mrs. Krabappel to pop up and proclaim, “She’s faking it.”

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