Say no more. gg explains dark states, electromagnetically-induced transparency and storing information coherently.
Freezing images in an atomic vapor! Probably no swimming costumes, though.
Faith and Ignorance
Interesting link over at physics and physicists (rather than the title being a misquote from “Bull Durham.”) Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?
Richard MacKenzie of the University of Montreal has written a rather thought-provoking and lengthy article as a rebuttal to a talk given by Lawrence Krauss. In it, he is disputing Krauss’s assertion that:
Faith is not the enemy.
Ignorance is the enemy.
The linked article is pretty good.
The bottom line is that direct observation shows that faith does not obstruct scientists from
doing science. That said, there are many who portray themselves as scientists who, due to
their faith, are doing a brand of science which is an indignity to the word. I have in mind
particularly those whose principal goal in science is to advance a faith-based agenda. One
must wonder whether these individuals, who probably have a reasonable amount of scientific
talent, might not be doing respectable science if their scientificity had not been stronger, or
their religiosity weaker.Does faith obstruct non-scientists from learning science? I would argue that it does, for
several reasons.
On that point I quite agree. Anyone who uses their ideology to dictate what answers are acceptable isn’t doing science. Ignorance isn’t the enemy, in the sense that it is an opposing entity; the goal of teaching science (and education in general) is the eradication of ignorance. Ignorance can be fixed as long as there is no active plan to preserve it. Faith, the unsubstantiated belief in something, does indeed preserve ignorance if it prevents you from considering evidence and scientific explanations.
Well worth a read.
All Thumbs
Roger Ebert reminisces about Gene Siskel, following the announcement that Ebert & Roeper were leaving the show.
The first time they appeared on the Johnny Carson show:
We were scared out of our minds. We’d been briefed on likely questions by one of the show’s writers, but moments before airtime he popped his head into the dressing room and said, “Johnny may ask you for some of your favorite movies this year.”
Gene and I stared at each other in horror. “What was one of your favorite movies this year?” he asked me. “Gone With the Wind,” I said. The Doc Severinsen orchestra had started playing the famous “Tonight Show” theme. Neither one of us could think of a single movie. Gene called our office in Chicago. “Tell me some movies we liked this year,” he said. This is a true story.
I liked their — unlike everybody else, who would just criticize, they’d bother to tell you if they liked the movie, even if it wasn’t great cinema.
Coffeeonium
By embedding all element samples in clear acrylic, they are beautifully presented and also protected from tarnishing. This format also helps to addresses health and safety issues, as all potentially toxic or corrosive substances are permanently encased in a thick layer of robust resin. Argon gas and mineral oil is further used to ampoule reactive samples and preserve their freshly cut appearance.
And even though it’s a noble gas and not reactive, the Ar sample is sealed in Argon, too.
via way of the woo
Cool Things, Small Packages
DelFly Micro Air Vehicle Weighs Just Three Grams
The ‘dragonfly’ has a tiny camera (about 0.5 grams) on board that transmits its signals to a ground station. With software developed by TU Delft itself, objects can then be recognised independently. The camera transmits TV quality images, and therefore allows the DelFly II to be operated from the computer. It can be manoeuvred using a joystick as if the operator was actually in the cockpit of the aircraft. The aim is to be able to do this with the DelFly Micro too.
Here’s the DelFly II
And the Micro, which can be hard to follow
Schrodinger's Cat's Exam Score
I was attempting to collapse a wave function Thursday — the A/C for the office has been taking much of the past week off, with promises of its imminent repair since Monday. The one working chiller has the capacity to cool the building only a few degrees below ambient, which was nowhere near adequate with the thermometer reading in the mid-90s (ºF). So rather than continue to self-baste at my desk, I wore shorts, hoping that this action would induce the chiller to be fixed, via a combination of superposition, Murphy’s law and passive resistance: a working chiller makes shorts both superfluous and marginally inappropriate, and all will subjected to my pasty-white legs until the system is fixed (and they are quite distracting, though I am informed that “running away screaming” does not count as swooning). Alas, the wave function did not collapse to the desired state, though it was a much more pleasant day yesterday, so my office was more-or-less tolerable.
But the thought of collapsing wave functions reminded me of a phenomenon I observed many times during the years I spent as an undergrad and grad student: the student who doesn’t show up to class when the exams are handed out. The professor will usually tell the class when the exams will be returned, and it’s often delayed one or two class sessions. In a small school, that’s because the professor is grading them him- or herself, and it takes time, and in a large university it’s often because they will be graded by the TAs, and most of them won’t do it until the night before (or wee hours of the morning of) the deadline. But there’s always that handful of students who don’t go to pick up the bad news, and it’s almost always bad news — from what I observed, the correlation is pretty strong between poor performance and not showing up to face the reality. For a long while I did not understand this, as it required going to the professor directly and asking for the exam, rather than being a momentary “Bueller” on the lips, though the propensity for the student to sit in the back of the class would add some time and attention to this evolution. Still, I don’t see that comparing to the one-on-one in the professor’s office.
But then I learned of coherent superpositions in quantum mechanics and it all began to make sense. One has not failed (or done poorly) on an exam until one has been handed the papers with all the red marks. Aha! By failing to retrieve the exam, all grades are still possible, and a poor one has not yet been earned. (Though that’s not quite right, either. Good grades are earned, poor grades are given. i.e. “I earned a ‘A,'” as opposed to ” the teacher gave me a ‘D'”).
(Update: Paraphrase: “Tom, it’s fixed. Put your damn pants back on”)
Engineering as Art
I don’t care what Ted Kennedy and his Nantucket neighbors think. I like a lot of the wind turbine designs.
OObject: beautiful wind turbines
via Kottke
Put Your Hand Up My Back and I'll Sing Along
Rockin’ with the Muppets on Sesame Street
Feist, counting to four
R.E.M. singing “Furry Happy Monsters”
via Madam Lamb
Spooky Science
Images of what some labs look like when nobody is around. I’m a little surprised at the SLAC control room picture; I would have thought they would be manned 24/7 when they were running, so perhaps this is “at night while not running.” Many optics/atomic physics labs look pretty much the same, since you often do your work with the lights out (it’s a relatively recent development that the systems I’m working on have been made “light tight” so that we don’t have to stumble around in the dark)
Cross-Training
If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone
A clearinghouse, of sorts, for unsolved problems, open to anyone who wants to try and solve them.
The idea that solutions can come from anywhere, and from people with seemingly unrelated work, is another key. Dr. Lakhani said his study of InnoCentive found that “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it,” often by applying specialized knowledge or instruments developed for another purpose.
For example, he said, the brain might be thought of as a biological system, but “certain brain problems may not be solvable by taking a biological approach. You may want to cast it as an electrical engineering approach. An electrical engineer will come in and say, ‘Oh, here’s the answer for you.’ They have not thought of themselves as being neuroscientists but now they can approach the problem from the point of view of electrical engineering.”
I’ve seen this, in my own limited experience, and even within different branches of physics. There are different mindsets and approaches to problems; getting experience in different fields often pays dividends.
Offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. “It has been around for centuries,” said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One early example was the work of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who, in response to a prize offered by the British Parliament, solved the problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing a clock that would keep good time even in heavy weather.
Good and bad example — Harrison solved the problem, but the government kept changing the rules on him and it took a decree from the king to get the balance of the prize paid out.