Riddle me this, Batman. Physics Riddle — Of Rope and Wood at Morning Coffee Physics
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Playtime
[H]is data suggest that a lack of opportunities for unstructured, imaginative play can keep children from growing into happy, well-adjusted adults. “Free play,” as scientists call it, is critical for becoming socially adept, coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving. Research into animal behavior confirms play’s benefits and establishes its evolutionary importance: ultimately, play may provide animals (including humans) with skills that will help them survive and reproduce.
Most of my childhood play was unstructured. Decent-sized back yard, and a dad who resisted the urge to yell at us when we trampled it. (There were several patches where grass did not grow for about 12 years, from all the foot and bike traffic.)
I also live by the adage It’s never too late to have a happy childhood
(though I would never describe my childhood as being unhappy)
It's Pi Cubed Minutes after the Square Root of 121
I Don't Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation
Recasting the bad reputation the profession of research professor has.
How would you react to this statement: “Many aspiring swimmers are not pursuing olympic careers because doing so would require spending 30, 40, 50 hours in the pool, in addition to weight and flexibility workouts. This single-minded, work-ethics focus of otherwise talented athletes gives olympic competitors bad reputation – we need to work on funding alternatives, such as support for olympians who can afford to spend only half of that time in the pool”
The Mo is Slow
Thermal physics in slow motion
Almost makes me want to get one of those cameras. Almost.
Marco!
The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the famous Drake equation, which attempts put a figure on the number intelligent civilisations out there now, implies that if the number of intelligent civilisations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them.
That overlooks one small factor, says Reginald Smith from the Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester, New York state. He says that there is a limit to how far a signal from ET can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. And when you factor that in, everything changes.
Quality Time
Meet Entropy Jones. Four hours of a baby play, condensed into about two minutes of time-lapse video.
No Sucker Punches
Scars Reveal How Triceratops Fought
It’s the iconic dinosaur battle, seared into every kid’s imagination from picture books and cartoons: Tyrannosaurus rex lunges, mouth agape, and Triceratops parries with its horns and bony neck frill. This scene probably did unfold in North American forests 65 million years ago, but new research suggests Triceratops also used its headgear in fights against its own species.
Paleontologists have proposed this idea before. It makes sense, given that other animals with horns or antlers, such as deer, use them against their own kind in battles for dominance or mating rights. The new study, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE, documented wounds on Triceratops fossils, backing the idea up with hard data for the first time.
Going Into Overtime
Entangled Particles Face Sudden Death
[I]n a paper published today in the journal Science, two physicists show that entangled particles can suddenly and irrevocably lose their connection, a phenomenon called Entanglement Sudden Death, or ESD.
“The degree of information entangled can disappear faster than the information itself,” said Joseph Eberly, a physicist at the University of Rochester, who, along with Ting Yu, co-authored the paper. “It’s completely non-classical physics.”
I don’t do experiments with entangled particles and I haven’t read the paper yet, but I was a little surprised to read that the model up to this point had been that entanglement was lost slowly. I had always gotten the impression that entanglement was much more a binary condition, so you wouldn’t describe particles as being a little bit entangled, any more than you would say someone was a little pregnant. I suspect this has to be tied to the question of how fast a wave function collapses.
Science 30 January 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5914, pp. 598 – 601
DOI: 10.1126/science.1167343
Polar Bear in a Snowstorm Jigsaw Puzzle
Solve it, and the next one is bigger