Rhett does the “shoot the falling target (aka monkey)” demo, and solves the kinematics. This was the demo that got me truly hooked on the idea that I wanted to do physics, after my neighbor set this demo up in his basement, albeit with a blowgun and with a cruder triggering mechanism.
Validate Me, or Someone Else
[T]his year we’re hosting our first ever physics.org web awards to give the best physics sites out there some well-deserved recognition
…
Nominations open on Monday 6 September 2010, and you’ll have 6 weeks (until 10 October) to give your favourite physics sites the chance to scoop up an award.
I'm Not Willing to Believe You
Question: How long would your Ph.D. have taken if everything worked?
We can use mine as an example. I did my grad studies in Microbiology and Immunology, but basically I was doing biochemistry type work (cancer research with a lot of molecular stuff). It took me just over five years to finish this sucker which is pretty typical in North America. Of course, when I take a critical look at my thesis and calculate: “What if this thesis literally shows all of my work, because everything I did, worked? What if I had magic fingers throughout my research and never had a failed experiment!?”
Using this rubric, I calculate that my Ph.D. in biochemistry/molecular biology type work could’ve taken about, DUM-DUM-DUM…
6 months
Note that this figure also includes the 3 months needed to write the damn thesis itself! This means that technically my thesis is reflective of only 3 months of successful experiments: or as I like to think of it — four and a half years of failed experiments!
Bull.
OK, it’s possible that the pathway to a degree in Microbiology and Immunology is very different from that of physics, but other than the subject matter, I don’t think so. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one’s thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that’s not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation — you can’t just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don’t believe it.
To get my physics degree, I had a summer research grant, followed by two years of classes, along with part-time research, before more than three years of full-time research, then writing. I didn’t come into an established lab; I arrived at grad schools the same year my eventual thesis advisor did, so building up the lab took some time. I could have saved some time if things hadn’t broken — a hole in a new vacuum chamber, requiring it to be dismantled and sent back for repair, a broken feedthrough and ion gauge, problems with the atomic beam oven, lasers dying left and right. All of that added to the time it took, but I didn’t know anything about trapping atoms when I started in the lab, and you can’t fake that experience. Even if you start in an established lab, with more senior students to teach you the ropes, it’s going to take time to learn how all the equipment works and how to run everything. Best case for me, I think, would have been four years — two in the classroom and two in the lab. In reality, it was just a titch over six years from start to turning in the finished copy of my thesis.
Anyone out there with realistic estimates of how long your grad school career would have been, had everything gone right? Compare with the actual.
Uncertainty Squared
Uncertain Principles: What Uncertainty Means to Me– And You, and the Universe
One of the most (if not the most) commonly maltreated physics concepts in journalism is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
[T]he origin of uncertainty really does spring from the idea of particle-wave duality rather than any ideas related to the act of measurement. It comes from the fact that, fundamentally, the position of a quantum object, like an electron or a photon, is a particle-like characteristic, while its momentum is associated with the wave nature of the object. Mathematically, the momentum of a quantum object is given by Planck’s constant divided by its wavelength (or, equivalently, the wavelength associated with a quantum object is determined by Planck’s constant divided by its momentum).
Perhaps we can start up the group Physicists For The Proper Treatment of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or PFTPTHUP (which would sound like blowing a raspberry, or Bill the Cat hacking up a furball, either of which could be one’s reaction to seeing the HUP abused in the media)
Can You Level-Up to an "A"?
Learning Science in a video game
River City is a multi-user virtual environment, based in ActiveWorlds … Students make avatars, talk to citizens in the world (some are dumb AIs, but they can be puppetted by the teacher), and have a workspace in which they can perform water quality tests and other diagnostics, record the results, and create and test hypotheses. The software design includes the ability to record what steps students take, in what order, how often they repeat content lessons or experimental steps, and other aspects of their approach to solving the problem.
It’s not the first time a game has taught science skills, but this time it’s deliberate. I really like how you have the opportunity of creating a mysterious illness for the students to investigate, and this leaves open the possibility of it not being a real one. So instead of the the situation where someone could simply apply memorization to the problem and say, “Oh, the symptoms are X, Y and Z, but not A or B? It’s the plague. Fleas carried by the rats,” you have a number of perturbations which might not correspond to any real-life disease, and which means some actual problem-solving skills are in play. Which is tough(er) to do in physics.
Robots Perpendicular to a Plane
A week ago it was geckos. Now, I can almost hear Samuel L. Jackson saying, “There are Mothef—— robots on this Mothef—— plane!”
Beavers … iiiin … Spaaaaace
Time lapse footage taken by Oregon State University alum Don Pettit during his time on the International Space Station. This one shows Earth from day to night.
Cool. Especially the aurorae.
Silhouette
The Big Picture: In silhouette
A photography technique that frequently catches my eye is the use of silhouette – placing a subject directly between a primary light source and the camera. The effect can be painterly or haunting or evocative. It can break a subject down to basic ideas conveyed only by line and shape, where an individual might appear iconic. Collected here are a handful of recent photographs from around the world, where we can only see the outlines of the subject, our minds (and the captions) are left to fill in any details in the darkness.
WTF
What it really means.
h/t to ewmon
Mailing It In
I ordered something online, and expected it to be delivered at the end of this past week. I thought that it was going to ship via the postal service, but then got a tracking number from FedEx. Here’s why.
That’s right. (Pardon my use of the vernacular, but) FedEx got the package and then fucking mailed it. Apparently this is a new “service” called SmartPost, and if you Google on that term, you will find complaints all over the place. The skinny is that the SmartPost service waits until they have a critical mass of deliveries, and then they turn them over to the Post office, so “at the Postal Facility” might not be the truth. If it is, then they’ve been hanging on to my package for 4 days, not the 1 or 2 advertised. And based on the complaints I’ve read, if it actually gets delivered on Tuesday, I will be getting off easy. There are horror stories of deliveries taking weeks and packages just disappearing.