Q. If I find myself in a free-falling elevator, is there any position that might increase my chance of survival? (Climbing on top of other people is not an acceptable answer.)
A. The best option would be to lie on your back on the floor as flat as possible, said Eliot H. Frank, a research engineer at the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Yes, that makes sense, but how does one get to the floor and lie flat, while in free-fall?
Neutrinos not faster than photons — the lab results have come back and they were juicing, so they’ve been stripped of their title. Sean Carroll has included a graph of the results, in Superluminal Neutrinos are so 2011, which shows that the new ICARUS results are statistically well-separated from the OPERA data.
A few other summaries-
Neutrinos not faster than light
This Time, ICARUS Really DOES Refute OPERA
This is the way it works in science all the time. A first experiment makes a claim that they see a striking and surprising effect. A second experiment tries to verify the effect and instead shows no sign of it. It’s commonplace.
Nearly every second, a user on Twitter tweets about what time it is. It could be groaning about waking up, to telling a friend when to meet, to an automated train scheduler alerting when the next one is coming. By searching Twitter for the current time we get a tiny glimpse of how active and far reaching the social network is.
Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else
Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes ran between 1985 and 1995. His comic strip managed to infuse wondering (and wandering) on a cosmic scale into an ageless world of lazy Sunday afternoons, snow goons, and harassed babysitters. I’m not saying that you should take moral and philosophical guidance from the inventor of Calvinball (a game that runs on chaos theory), but you could do much worse.
So here, in no particular order, is a selection of quotes that nail everything from the meaning of life to special underwear. Enjoy.
First Digital Message Sent Using Neutrinos
MINERvA is one of world’s most sensitive neutrino detectors and yet, out of 10^13 neutrinos in each pulse, it detects only about 0.8 of them on average.
Nevertheless, that’s enough to send a message. The FermiLab team used a simple on-off protocol to represent the 0s and 1s of digital code and transmitted the word “neutrino”.
Not particularly practical, though the story notes there are potential applications, such as submarine communication. You would use neutrinos to reach regions inaccessible with EM radiation — you need a situation where you are leveraging the one advantage you have: penetrability.
… or perhaps not.
Entanglement Is Not That Magic
That said, though, it’s fairly common to hear claims of the form “when two particles are entangled, anything you do to one of them changes the state of the other.” This is not strictly true, though, and it’s worth going through in detail, if only so I have something to point to the next time somebody starts using that line. This will necessarily involve some math, but I’ll try to keep it as simple as I can.
A Random Walk through Oddly Named Physics Things
In spite (or perhaps because) of the overwhelming boringness of much technical jargon, scientists are drawn to whimsical or poetic names more than you might suspect. Here are some of my favorites.
…
In a 1969 paper entitled “Mixmaster Universe,” physicist Charles Misner set out his idea for a solution to the paradox. Although it sounds like a 1980′s proto-hip-hop group, the theory actually gets its name from a kitchen appliance, the Sunbeam Mixmaster.The idea was that the early universe went through a phase of so-called chaotic evolution, which did for the cosmos what the Mixmaster does for cake batter, mixing its contents until they were smooth and even.
The thing just exploded very close to our zodiac! Or should I say imploded. And it spitted out big chunks of thousands year old ice to our heads… Crazy!
Vaguely reminiscent of Atlantis blowing up in The Spy Who Loved Me
Stop deifying “peer review” of journal publications
I would like to add my two cents now – focusing on the exalted status some give to peer reviewed journal articles. I have three main concerns with this attitude which can be summarized as follows
1. Peer review is not magic
2. Peer review is not binary
3. Peer review is not static.
In general discussion, a peer-reviewed article is often a better citation than a mainstream/pop-sci article, but one has to acknowledge that peer-review simply means that some professionals have looked at it and found no (obvious) errors in the work. Mistakes can be made, things can be overlooked. Even without that, peer-review doesn’t mean the results are true. The full process of scientific inquiry means others have to replicate the work somehow, if it’s experiment, or test the work, if it’s theory. As the article says, this is a continual process, and as I’ve said before, every experiment is a test of the principles that underlie it.
… are math insults. (SMBC)