Physics for Fun and Profit

In modest amounts, at least.

There’s an opening in the research and conspiracy consortium to which I belong. There’s an announcement at the GS-12 level, and one at the GS-13 level of duties and compensation.

This position is located in the Time Service Department, Clock Development Division, U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO), Washington, DC. The United States Naval Observatory is responsible for Department of Defense standards for time, and for the establishment of the Department of Defense precise time and time interval (PTTI) requirements for operations and research on time and time interval, and for the coordination of Department of Defense activities in these fields.

The official duties listed are what we all do, translated into HR-speak. We play with physics toys in the area of atomic physics, but, like the private sector, we expect results.

A B C meets 3,2,1

Help NASA Find the Alphabet… From Space

Adam Voiland of NASA’s Earth Observatory found the photo above that looks like a huge, cloudy “V.” He’s even speculated about which font it may be. I think this looks like a “Z,” but Voiland clearly spends more time looking at satellite imagery than I do, so we’ll defer to him for now.
But what about the rest of the alphabet? Voiland would like to assemble the entire alphabet from space, so if you’ve seen a letter, let us know and perhaps your contribution will be featured by NASA or Wired.

Inside the LHC

Interactive Panorama: Step Inside the Large Hadron Collider

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is one of two main detectors at the LHC. It weighs 12,500 tons, measures 69 ft. (21 m) in length and is a key research tool for 2,000 scientists hailing from 37 countries. It was built above ground and lowered into place—a sensible strategy for so massive a piece of hardware. Here it is seen in 2008, just before it was completed.

Strange Brew

Super-cold metals show ‘strange’ behavior

Georgia Tech researchers, writing in the journal Science, report surprising behavior exhibited by nanometer-scale clusters of the metal niobium when they are cooled to below minus 424 degrees Fahrenheit.

I would not be surprised if the “nanometer-scale clusters” aspect of the investigation has some significant impact on the behavior. A surface represents a loss of symmetry present in a bulk material; surface effects are of interest to many physicists. A nanometer-scale cluster is going to have a fair amount of surface relative to its volume. So it’s probably not just that it’s cold.

Two Thumbs Up for the Higgs Boson

There is something and not nothing

I really like this post. It’s well-written (not surprising, since it’s Roger Ebert) and gives the perspective of someone who is interested in science but understands that he will be limited in understanding the full depths of the science, for lack of a complete background. It think that’s significant. For many there is indifference, and for others (as we venture toward crackpot-land), there is an attitude that if I cannot understand it, it must be wrong. For the latter, there is interest in science — passion, even — but only if it’s already within their grasp. No acknowledgement of the giant body of experiment, on whose shoulders we stand.

As I understand computers, this discovery could not have been faked. Numbers went in, numbers came out, and the numbers indicated what the scientists predicted that would discover.

If they had not, that would have been a huge disappointment, coming at the end of such a magnificent and expensive experiment. The Collider is useful for many other experiments, but never mind: An explanation for mass in the universe would still have been lacking.

I think that while there’s a fair amount of truth to this, it’s also true that had the Higgs not been found, there would have been some euphoria that there is definitely new physics to go and discover.

There’s one other part caught my eye that Mr. Ebert hints at, concerning the scientific method.

Here is where we get to the heart of the question. The scientific method has no interest in belief. What you believe is of interest only from an autobiographical viewpoint. Scientists (1) regard a phenomenon they would like to explain, (2) suggest a hypothesis to explain it, and (3) devise an experiment to test their hypothesis.

There’s a subtlety here that cannot be overlooked, especially in the context of his comments on belief — doing good science is not just about gathering evidence that supports your hypothesis. A good hypothesis makes specific predictions about what is to be found, and what is not to be found. A good experiment will eliminate competing hypotheses as well as confirming the one in question, leaving only one valid explanation … if the data are as expected. If you don’t get that result, then you have falsified the hypothesis, and it needs to be modified or discarded.

If all evidence can be viewed as supporting your hypothesis, then you aren’t doing science at all.

In discussing the Higgs, Ebert quotes Lawrence Krauss

Krauss continues: “…if there exists an otherwise invisible background field permeating all of space, then the particles that convey some force like electromagnetism can interact with this field and effectively encounter resistance to their motion and slow down, like a swimmer moving through molasses. As a result, these particles can behave as if they are heavy, as if they have a mass.”

I have heard this explanation before, and it sounded like the aether had been resurrected — but I also know that the theory is going to be consistent with relativity, so there can’t be any way you can use the Higgs field as a frame of reference. So you are never at rest with respect to the Higgs field. If the effect is truly from motion through the field, you couldn’t be, because then you would have no mass, and would move at c. But that conundrum is as almost far as my understanding goes; I have a tenuous grasp of the symmetry arguments but don’t ask me to explain them.

Welcome to the Fusion Zone

Relativistic Baseball

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Lots of physics happens, and then …

Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.

A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch”, and would be eligible to advance to first base.

Managing Expectations

Subtleties of the Crappy Job Market for Scientists

However, difficulty finding a “long term academic position” is not the same thing as difficulty finding a job. Buried in those same articles is the fact that the unemployment rate for physicists (which likely mirrors that of astronomers) is between 1-2%. In contrast, the lab-based biologists and chemists (which are the focus of the articles) are not finding employment at all, or if they do, it’s frequently in a position that makes no use of their technical skills.

The problem in astronomy and physics is therefore not employment, but expectations.

[S]tudents should never be made to feel that they’re failures for not getting a particular flavor of academic position, and should instead always be encouraged to explore other avenues that could use their talents while bringing them greater day-to-day satisfaction.

Ah, someone who gets it. And by gets it, I really mean “agrees with me” and I’m applying a little confirmation bias, but I do find fault with the argument put forth by others that not finding a faculty position is proof (in and of itself) that we have an overabundance of PhDs. And I’m also much more familiar with the lay of the land in physics than with biology or chemistry.

As the post points out, some skills transfer well; technical competence and attention to detail are in wider demand than just the sciences, and I can’t imagine these are not part of biology or chemistry skill sets.