Laser light used to cool object to quantum ground state
For the first time, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with a team from the University of Vienna, have managed to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest possible energy state using laser light. The achievement paves the way for the development of exquisitely sensitive detectors as well as for quantum experiments that scientists have long dreamed of conducting.
Five Truths About Climate Change
I’m going to start by quoting the conclusion
It’s time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.
There are two possible lines of argument in the discussion: science and policy. The best science establishes that anthropogenic global warming is true, and from that you decide what, if anything, you do about it.
The first point is about political reality
The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.
Here’s a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.
i.e. the politicians of the world couldn’t get their act together and actually do anything. Somehow, that must falsify anthropogenic global warming. In the real world, though, nature doesn’t take its cue from politics. Some legislature could declare a gravity-free day, but you aren’t going to float off into space as a result. So really this is just a celebration of the fact that the denialists in the government have been successful. It doesn’t mean they were right.
2) Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.
That’s a non-sequitur. The need for energy has absolutely no effect on the correctness of the science. It’s also not true that we need a lot more energy — our energy use growth has been a meager 0.4% a year the last decade — and it also doesn’t mean that added capacity can’t be “green”.
3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore.
It never was. The author plays some games with statistics, but we’re still the biggest producer of CO2 per capita of the regions mentioned. So, whoop-de-doo that we’ve lowered our emissions 1.7%, when they are twice as much per person than in European countries or three times as much as in China. While the author is happy to pass the buck and complain that what others are doing isn’t working, we in the US can only be responsible for what happens in the US. We’re not in a position to try an influence anyone else if our own house isn’t in order.
Nearly all of the things we use on a daily basis—light bulbs, computers, automobiles—are vastly more efficient than they were just a few years ago. And over the coming years those devices will get even better at turning energy into useful lighting, computing and motive power.
This is despite the GOP trying to kill the measure that increases lighting efficiency, and that the improvements in things like computers, appliances and cars are driven by government regulation (energy star and cafe standards).
The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Seriously? Neutrinos were measured (probably incorrectly) to be FTL, and that means global warming is wrong? The weasel is strong in this one. This is a standard denialist tactic — science has been wrong in the past, therefore we can’t trust science. Which seems terribly hypocritical when presented by someone using the advances of science, probably on a daily basis. I’m just guessing, but I’d wager that the author doesn’t think his computer or car run because of magic.
Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation
Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.
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In the pre-net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.
This is the essences of Newton’s cradle: conservation of momentum and kinetic energy. What about the strings? Well, they just keep things lined up nice for the collisions. Also, after the ball is hit by another ball, it swings up and then back down making it the moving ball.
The world’s first x-ray laser is not only a true laser, but it’s an extremely good one, according to measurements reported 30 September in Physical Review Letters. Researchers studying the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) characterized the coherence of the laser–the degree to which the light waves are synchronized–and found that it produces the most coherent x-ray radiation ever measured.
Super Small: Top 20 Microscope Photos of the Year
We’re never disappointed with the photos from the Nikon Small World contest, and the top 20 judges picks contained in this gallery suggest that the photographers just keep getting better. These photos were selected from more than 2,000, but if you disagree with the judges, you can still pick your favorite in the popular vote contest throughout October.
Shamelessly stolen from ZapperZ, because it’s so neat. Is there anything left of the match?
Half of the physics prize goes to Saul Perlmutter (The Supernova Cosmology Project) and the other half to Paul Schmidt and Adam Riess (High-z Supernova Search Team). Cosmology wins the betting pool. The Nobel press release
By overthinking I mean spending a lot of time modeling the problem.
The Linear Theory of Battleship
I wrote a little code to generate random Battleship boards, and counted where each of the ships appeared. I did this billions of times to get good statistics, and what I ended up with is a little interesting. You can see the results for yourself over at my
results exploration page by changing the radio buttons for the ship you are interested in, but I have some screen caps below.…
This is an example of the failure of the linear model. All the linear model knows is that in the spots nearby misses there is a lower probability of the ship being there, but what it doesn’t know to do is look at the arrangement of misses and check to see whether there is any possible way the ship can fit. This is a nonlinear effect, involving information at more than one square at a time.
It is these kinds of effects that this theory will miss, but as you’ll notice, it still does pretty well.
I’m wondering if it does as well against human opponents, who would not place the targets randomly.
One classic illustration of how the old guys with the beards knew their understanding of physics was incomplete involves the specific heats of gases. How much does a gas warm up when a given amount of energy is poured into it? The physics of the 1890s was unable to resolve this problem. The solution, achieved in the next century, required quantum mechanics, but the problem was far from unknown in the years before 1900.