Daily Archives: December 11, 2008

Great News for Science

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I just heard about Steve Chu being nominated for Energy Secretary, and see that I’m late to the party (Uncertain Principles, Cosmic Variance, and elsewhere in the blogohedron, I’m sure)

(As with Chad and Sean, I’ve met him; we sat next to each other at dinner one evening at the Frequency Standards and Metrology Symposium at St. Andrews in 2001.)

Having someone who, along with being a Nobel laureate, has the pedigree of running a national lab and someone with actual experience doing lab experiments is a fantastic thing. This is not someone who is being appointed under the sort of “he ran the FAA, so he can certainly run Energy” career-bureaucrat mentality. This is someone who isn’t going to be confused into thinking that hydrogen is an energy source, or that generators using hydrino reactions will solve our foreign oil dependence.

This May Not Bother Anybody Else

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… but it bothers a geek like me. Yeah, another leap second story. I suspect these will propagate, but like a game of “whisper” the errors will compound. Three…Two…One…One…Happy New Year!

They mention THE atomic clock (ha! there are many atomic clocks) and cesium clock/standard, but the picture is of a mercury ion clock. Not that anyone else would notice. Then there’s the mortal sin of the US Naval Observatory hyperlink going to the NIST cesium fountain wikipedia entry. (Don’t get me wrong — the folks at NIST do fantastic things and I have a lot of respect for them. And they’re fun at conferences. But get your links straight)

The blurb about miniature clocks goes to a link talking about optical clocks, which are nowhere near deployment as miniature devices. That’s purely conceptual at this point — full-sized optical lattice devices are cutting-edge at the moment, and require a fair amount of care and feeding. Miniaturization and making them robust enough to be portable, and work as true clocks as opposed to a frequency standard (a true clock runs continuously), is a long way off.

Fore!

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Researchers Observe Magnus Effect in Light for First Time

The Magnus effect can be observed in a wide range of systems. It describes, for example, the sideways force a spinning ball feels as it travels through the air, which explains why a baseball pitcher’s curveball curves, and why a badly hit golf ball slices. Light waves, which are made up of massless particles called photons, have their own version of spin. Light’s spin depends on whether its polarization, or direction of wave vibration, rotates in one direction or in the opposite direction as it travels. The Magnus effect for light (also called the spin Hall effect) causes the light to deflect due to the interaction between the light’s spin and shape of the light’s trajectory.