Bear Stearns isn't the Only Bankrupt Thing These Days

Posted on by

OK, already, I’ll become the millionth blogger to note the delicious irony of PZ Myers being, well, expelled from a screening of the upcoming movie, “EXPELLED!” Ironic not only because of being expelled, but also because, if those that are advancing evolutionary science and tearing down creationism/ID are beetles (as something with which a student of Darwin might identify), they chose the lesser of two weevils — Richard Dawkins was allowed in.

You can’t make this shit up.

Writing about the politics and antiscience of creation—evolution is easy points. There are things going on all the time, and the cdesign proponentsists are just so intellectually and morally bankrupt that fodder for blogging is plentiful, and there really isn’t a shortage of smart people to shoot down all the crap that gets written. (Not that the ID folks have a monopoly on such behavior — it pains me when a science advocate makes arguments in the same vein, when there is such a wealth of evidence to present — but lies, whether repeated knowingly or parroted blindly, are just so widespread in the creationism/ID movement)

The thing is, the arguments are by and large the same as they have been for a long time. Way back in the USENET days, I was active on the talk.origins newsgroup (active enough that I was nicknamed “Chris” and hold a faculty position at the University of Ediacara) and I see things bandied around today in discussions, and it’s the same crap. The same hollow, fallacious arguments, the same lies that keep propagating despite having been debunked long ago. It just makes me tired all over. Facts don’t matter and won’t sway someone not interested in science.

But, if you’re interested, there is a large collection of links about the story.

Sowing and Reaping Science

Posted on by

ZapperZ discusses Public Impatience With Science, or the importance of doing basic research now so that people can do applied research later and bring new and useful technology to market in the future.

This ties in what I was talking about in my last entry, (and earlier than that) because while there are the funding organizations and agencies out there trying to drive applied research who also fund some basic research, it is usually in a narrow scope. Funding, overall, needs to expand in breadth and depth. What needs to be remembered is that advances and discoveries have a way of expanding and being adopted by other researchers, even crossing the traditional lines between disciplines, but it takes time to diffuse.

Even within the sciences themselves, many forget that some of the advancement in biochemistry, for example, were brought about because of something that was developed in physics years before. Synchrotron light sources came out of research in high energy physics, and it took many decades before the field of biochemistry, medicine, and pharmacy realized that such facilities can be valuable to their work.

And what is originally a heroic effort to observe some result will eventually become a standard lab practice or tool (BEC being a good example), allowing more advanced inquiry, but again, it takes time for this to happen.

Ponch Makes a BEC

Posted on by

AMO Physics meet chips.

I recently had the pleasure of attending a small workshop on the topic of doing atomic physics on chip-scale apparatus. The presentations and discussions were very interesting, but unfortunately do not lend themselves to a blog report for a couple of reasons. This kind of get-together discusses ongoing projects, some or all of which are not-ready-for-primetime, i.e. things haven’t been written up and published, so I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss details, and a lot of the really cool stuff was shown in the pictures, some of which also haven’t been published. So while I can’t go into certain details, I can give an overview, and provide some links to representative work that has been published or is otherwise available to the public.

There’s quite a bit of physics that is described as being “tabletop” physics — in part to distinguish it from the physics that requires large collaborations and trips to an accelerator lab, or access to a big telescope or a satellite, etc. However, “tabletop” in atomic physics usually refers to an optical table, which can be a behemoth — an 8′ x 4′ table can weigh 1000 lbs or more. Add to that the requisite optics, optomechanics, vacuum systems and the support electronics, and you still have quite a lot of equipment, and it’s not going to be very portable.

As I had mentioned before, research layouts tend to be bigger than they strictly need to be, in order to provide some flexibility, and you can transition to more compact layouts if you have just one application in mind. If you take the concept a little further, and start thinking of the possibility that you might want an AMO experiment (e.g. a MOT or BEC, or trapped ions) to be applied to some specific problem, and require portability, you have to shrink not only the laser system, but the trap, and everything mentioned above — the vacuum pumps, power supplies and control electronics. Fortunately, a lot of this is coupled: if the trapping volume is decreased you don’t need as much pumping capacity or laser power, so your power demand is also smaller. If you can survive the decrease in signal, you can still go pretty good measurements, though new challenges tend to crop up working close to surfaces rather than far away. Instead of using general-purpose power supplies and electronics, you use devices specifically built for the application. You mount components together, rather than spaced apart, and use fibers rather than mirrors to transport light.

Continue reading →

Blowout

Posted on by

My soft drinks are trying to kill me.

Not really an experiment, just an event from a little while back. Soda (or pop, depending on where you live) bottle of the 2L variety, that was sitting on top of the fridge, where it was a few degrees above room temp. I heard a muffled “boom” from the computer room, and found this, along with most of 2L of soda all over the fridge and floor. It’s generally agreed that these bottle can usually withstand upwards of 100 psi, with some empirical data from people using such bottles for water-rocket fun. So I’m pretty sure I either had me a defective bottle, or it was rigged in a botched assassination attempt.

pop.JPG

YORP, ahoy!

Posted on by

Notes from a recent colloquium:

YORP is the acronym from Yarkovsky, O’Keefe, Radzievskii and Paddack, several of the people that described the effects of radiation on the behavior of small celestial bodies. Kepler actually first broached the idea that light from the sun could affect orbits, and the idea has been fleshed out since then. Yarkovsky proposed that the thermal radiation emission could cause a torque on a non-uniform body, and this was later expanded to include radiation pressure effects — the incoming radiation has an effect as well. Radzievskii’s contribution was the idea that albedo changes or differences could contribute, but since absorption and thermal re-emission doesn’t look much different than scattering, from a momentum standpoint, it turns out to be a small effect.

Paddack gave part of the talk, and described the experimental steps taken to investigate this. He took asymmetric rocks and let the fall in a pool — the still water was a proxy for a uniform radiation pressure once the rock had reached terminal velocity — and observed their motion, measuring the increase in rotation rate and deducing an empirical formula for the effect. Later he was able to construct a small-scale satellite that was hung in a vacuum chamber by a thin filament attached to a magnetic bearing (essentially no friction) and observed the angular acceleration when a bright light was shone on the target.

The effect has been observed, with 2000 PH5 getting a lot of press (well, geek press) about a year ago. The effect is more prevalent in smaller bodies — moment of inertia grows faster than surface area as objects of uniform density get larger. Since asteroids are often not held together strongly, increasing the rotation rate can cause them to eject mass, changing their orbit. And it’s not just spin rate; you can get precession and nutation as well, and there is an interplay with the gravitational torques that give rise to some resonances. It is thought that this explains the existence of some binary asteroids.

Nongravitational effects like this are important to know for manmade satellites, such as GPS, whose orbits need to be precisely determined.