Daily Archives: December 9, 2010

Once Again, Separating Me From My Money

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[Shakes fist at sky] Think Geeeeeek!

Back when the Monolith Action Figure was just an April Fool’s joke, I wrote

I wonder of this will turn into a real product, not just available on Europa, based on consumer demand. I’d buy one.

It’s now a real product. When you click on Buy Now it takes you to a real shopping cart, instead of a gotcha! page. I am following through on my vow (Ha! Who says I’ve got commitment issues?!)

They still bring the snark, though. There are some LEGO™ randomly selected toys, and they tell you

-Random packed means you have a 1 in 16 chance of getting any particular figure

-For liberal arts school graduates: Ordering 16 will not “guarantee” you get all 16 figures.

X Doesn't Mark the Spot

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io9: Poisson’s Spot: The Greatest Burn in Physics

There was nothing left to do but award the prize to Fresnel. Poisson had put forward a consequence of light as a wave that was so ridiculous, so unlikely, that it couldn’t be explained by anything else. Fresnel was smart enough to come up with the theory. Poisson was smart enough to have proved Fresnel right, and proved himself wrong. Even though Dominique Arago had actually done the test, the tiny dot of light at the center of the shadow of a spherical object has ever after been called Poisson’s Spot. There is no perpetual motion in physics, but there is perpetual taunting.

If you want a short story about the essence of science, here it is. You have a model, it makes a testable prediction which will either confirm or falsify it. You do the experiment, find out that the model was right, and then tweak a detractor’s nose in perpetuity.

Attack of the Math Monster

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Uncertain Principles: Two Cultures Within Science

[No equations in a paper] is almost completely inconceivable to me (at the risk of leaving myself open to the Vizzini joke). In my part of science, a paper without an equation is suspect, and I’m not exactly the world’s most mathematically inclined physicist. Physics is so intimately connected to math, and the business of doing physics is so inherently mathematical that its difficult to imagine a scientific paper about physics that doesn’t contain at least one equation. A press release or popular article, sure, but to a physicist, the equations aren’t some offal to be avoided en route to the science. The equations are the science. Objecting to the presence of an equation in a scientific paper is like objecting to the presence of meat in a steak sandwich.

I had the serendipity of reading another post just before reading Chad’s, related to the closing remarks concerning physicists sometime needing to learn some less “standard” math to do the physics they are interested in pursuing:

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

My more reasonable friends claim that this abstract isn’t really as amusing as I make it out to be. And to be sure, they’re right.

Murray Gell-Mann developed the “eight-fold way” to explain the spectrum of hadrons in the 1960s. It wasn’t until after he’d developed this formalism that he discussed his model with mathematicians, who then told him that he’d rediscovered group (representation) theory. This ushered ina new era in the history of particle physics where symmetry became our guiding light and group theory became a necessary tool for any particle theorist. Though, to be fair, in the 1960s group theory—unlike calculus—wasn’t something that physicists were expected to take during high school.

I’m also aware of a few instances of some of my colleagues struggling through some new way of analyzing clock performance, only to find out that the math is standard analysis of some other sort of problem. As they say, math is the language of physics.