Fluorine: It tastes like burning

This is the first I've seen of Dr. Martyn Poliakoff's Periodic Table of Videos but it's a good one. Each video is about an element, and this one focuses on Fluorine, one of those non-heavy elements that you still don't see very much of because of its extreme reactivity. That reactivity is on display in this as they use it to burn through steel wool and charcoal -- just by squirting it at them, even in cold, liquid form.

Unlike most chemistry, this video comes with a moral: don't mess with fluorine.

[via BB]

Tipping the Scales

Powers of Ten from Heinz Legler on Vimeo.

A cool interactive take on the indelible 1968 Powers of Ten film (above) (or this a cheap, probably pretty expensive, Morgan Freeman-narrated knock-off). I've never actually heard anyone use the term "Yoctometer" but I support anyone wanting to.

It is an interesting fact that the divisions between different areas of science is based mainly on the scale they study. You could reasonably argue that everything important having to do with chemistry, for instance, takes place between roughly 10^-7m and 10^-9m. Counting molecular stuff, biology gets everything from the 10^-7m to 1 m scale or so. Physics, of course, is everywhere...

The Scale of the Universe:

Dark Matter Matters

As a card carrying astro-related blog owner I am contractually obligated to comment on yesterday's kinda-sorta-it-might-be-dark-matter-semi-quasi-announcement by the CDMS II group.

There had been rumors about this thing for over a week that CDMS had some kind of watershed announcement. That they had discovered dark matter (what other important announcements can DM detection projects make?), that they were publishing in Nature today, that a torrent of papers was about to hit the arxiv with analysis of this last night, that they had all learned the true meaning of Christmas and were going to be nothing but kind and generous from now on.

Yesterday, with the hype reaching a fever pitch, they held a seminar on their findings, broadcast online. Unified in the concerted effort to drive everyone crazy in anticipation they began the lecture with about 10 minutes of freshman-astronomy-level rationales for the existence of cold dark matter, before moving on to another 10 minutes of descriptions of things that were important to them but not to us, like the arrangement of the detectors and the way the data was collected. Then she threw in a joke about a spherical cow, and stalled for another 5 minutes. Finally, she got to a slide that said "Results" or something at the top, and the video completely froze. Of all the panicked, oh-my-god-just-tell-us-already, freakouts I can imagine something causing, this was way up there. When I regained consciousness and the video started working again she was on a slide that said "Conclusions," and before I could make out any of the bullet points, the camera quickly panned away and she started taking questions. It was awesome.

Anyhow, in the aftermath of that humbling experience, what actually transpired during those missing minutes has come to light. CDMS detected TWO events. But because of the way they pull events out the noise of other stuff hitting the detector that could appear as a false signal, they'd expect to find about 0.8 events in the time the experiment ran. There is a 23% chance that what they saw was just random noise. I read someone describe this as the least helpful possible result and I have to agree. It isn't enough to be a conclusive discovery, and it isn't enough to say that dark matter definitely ISN'T being seen in this kind of detector either. So unfortunately, not enough for solid results, and not much to come up with a decent parameter space constraint either. It could certainly turn out they did find it, but that will have to wait for later confirmation. Just a lot of build up, a suggestion that we might be on the verge of learning something really interesting, a clue, and then the realization that nothing has been settled and you'll have to keep waiting for answers. Kind of like an episode of Lost.

Links:
Best popular article about this I've seen: Scientific American
Cosmic Variance Liveblog of Yesterday's SLAC seminar.
Basically alright article with a non-sequitur about supersymmetry: NYTimes

Actual CDMS Paper

Shooting things in slow-motion

Slo-mo bullet porn. Videos like this are only quasi-illuminating, but they are certainly hypnotic. I love the way that the bullets appear to behave like a liquid-- presumably the energy of the impact does actually melt them. The world certainly looks very interesting at very high, and very low speeds.



For more slow-motion impacts, see this previous post.

Expectation Value = Nerd Humor

Via the other people in my department: these bookends, for the quatumly disposed. A handsome addition to any bookcase.

The folks who made these wrapped rigid paper around some bricks. That seems like kind of a tough method, but throwing one through a window would be a great way of intimidating a physicist.

Sure, Blame the Physicists

The New York Times has an article about Wall Street Physicists today.

Emanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985.

After all, for almost 20 years, as a graduate student at Columbia and a postdoctoral fellow at institutions like Oxford and the University of Colorado, he had been a spear carrier in the quest to unify the forces of nature and establish the elusive and Einsteinian “theory of everything,” hobnobbing with Nobel laureates and other distinguished thinkers. How could managing money compare?

But the letdown never happened. Instead he fell in love with a corner of finance that dealt with stock options.

“Options theory is kind of deep in some way. It was very elegant; it had the quality of physics,” Dr. Derman explained recently with a tinge of wistfulness.

I've always found it funny that the people who quit academia and go into finance are viewed from within physics sort of like sell-outs or quitters or as unsuccessful in some way. At least by the people I talk to, as sort of an undercurrent in the conversation. And yet, by any reasonable standard, the vast majority of society doesn't care about science at all, and cares a lot more about the ability to buy yachts.

Don't Be a Boron Moron

Let's hope Conan keeps up the bizarre, science-based tirades, like this one from Feb 5th, when he's in LA. (His previous interest in Penning traps is well documented)

CMB Beach Ball Liberated!

In August 2006 I made a solemn vow:

This is the cosmic microwave background presented in the best known way of conveying scientific information: printed on a beach ball. Talk about an inflationary universe!

...A few years ago WMAP secretly distributed them to cosmologists. Needless to say, the early universe printed on a inflatable ball is something that I have decided I must have. For some reason, despite not being for sale, the ball seems to have its own web site...I pledge now to the internet, ultimate keeper of pledges made to no one in particular, that I will acquire this ball. I am not sure how yet, but I swear to do whatever it takes--breaking into someone's office, posing as an elementary school, sending threatening letters to beach ball manufacturers. whatever.

I am now free to disclose that I have triumphed over the forces allied against me-- the beach ball website that mysteriously refuses to sell it, the people who said I would never amount to anything, the journals that keep rejecting my groundbreaking work on the anisotropy of CMB beach ball distribution, everyone. I have, indeed, obtained the ball:


I can't go into the specifics of where it came from, but let's just say that a certain physics department who could never appreciate it as much as I do had a habit of carelessly leaving it in a usually unlocked room full of other neglected items, which I thoughtfully did them the favor of not stealing. And that I have waited until now to announce to the world because the institution that department belongs to, due to some bureaucratic stuff, took until a year after I had finished to send me my master's degree. Having gotten it in the mail a couple of months ago, I am now free, statute-of-limitations-wise, to reveal the success of Operation CMB Ball Freedom. It is hanging from the ceiling of my apartment, daily inspiring me to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. Mission accomplished.

Now a beach ball of the Neutrino Background pattern, that would be something...

Please Just Stop

I have no desire to comment on the turn-on of the LHC and the "controversy" over whether we are all going to die. But to fulfil my community service as a guy who occasionally writes about science, I am honor-bound to do so. Plus I need to vent my frustration at basically anyone acting as though it is somehow an unsettled question. My buddy Dave put it best when mock-reporting that the LHC had, as feared, created a dragon. Depending on your tolerance for watching dead-horse beatings I have given you 3 options, reader.

Long Attention Span: If you are interested in a description of why anyone who seriously thinks there is some danger in turning on the collider, or that doing so somehow amounts to "recreating the big bang," is a complete moron read Backreaction's smack-down.

Medium Attention Span: This is one is just me yelling at you: Black holes would only be created in the case that an extrodinarily unlikely theory, that the universe has LARGE extra-dimensions turns out to be true. Something that is totally speculative and which we have NEVER seen any evidence for. On top of this, the particulars of this theory would have to be just right, which, as far as we can tell from other types of measurements, they are not. If all of this extremely disfavored junk turned out to be true, EVEN THEN they would evaporate in a femptosecond due to Hawking radiation. If they didn't, WHICH THEY WOULD SO THERE IS NO POINT IN EVEN WRITING THIS PART, they would be smaller than the nucleus of an atom and travelling at almost the speed of light, so they would never even interact with any normal particles to swallow them up, and would simply fly off into space never to return. And if any of this were possible, it would be happening all the time ALREADY because the cosmic rays bombarding the Earth are equivilent to the collisions that are going to take place, as far as this black hole nonsense is concerned. See how every part of that explaination is rendered moot by the preceding section? Ignoring that many layers of unequivical denounciation for this retarded black hole catastrophe concept means that you should lose the right to ever benefit from science in any way. And if anyone even thinks about uttering the phrase "but anything can happen" I will personally reach through your computer screen and punch you in the eye.

Low Attention Span: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the Earth Yet?

This might be mildly chauvinistic

From McSweeney's:

Physical Theories as Women

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.

1. Electrodynamics is your college girlfriend. Pretty complex, you probably won't date long enough to really understand her.

2. Special relativity is the girl you meet at the dorm party while you're dating electrodynamics. You make out. It's not really cheating because it's not like you call her back. But you have a sneaking suspicion she knows electrodynamics and told her everything.

3. Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her aura of mystery is actually just confusion.
...

6. Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.
...

Soil physics is the lady you meet at the bus station. She's 45 with dingy teeth, glue-on nails, and 3 kids. She yells at one of them not to turn over the trash can, but he does it anyway. As you pass by, she asks if you know how to get gum out of hair. You keep walking.

Science Tabloids

A harrowing vision of a very different world...where scientists are treated like celebrities.


Still, I would watch it if I were these people. Witten can be pretty sensitive about his shoes, they don't want to get a smack down in his next single PhysRev Letter: E. Witten, T. Shakur, "Hyperdimensional manifold collapse of motherfuckers who talk shit about my footwear" PRL 101 (2008)

Yes, not only is Tupak coming out with new albums every few months, he is also publishing. People are pretty much just remixing his old papers at this point, but that "Feat. T. Shakur" byline in your list of authors still helps you get played. I hear his next article is going to drop in ApJ this winter.

Barackyogenesis

Slate has a series of Obamisms that is about as good a lexiconographical study of our next president's neologisms as you will find anywhere on the internet. The widget here is quite a thing to behold. And this may be the best one yet -- combining cosmology, linguistic humor, and Change We Can Believe In™:

Barackyogenesis (buh-RAK-ee-oh-JEN-uh-sis) n. An attempt to explain why there were more Barackyons than anti-Barackyons in the Democratic Party, a condition necessary for the formation of heavier election matters.

Example: There must be some initial perturbation to explain the Barackyogenesis problem. Many political scientists have suggested that an imbalanced density of subatomic particles known as "charm quarks" in the candidates led to the dominance of Barackyons over anti-Barackyons.

Little boxes

For some reason, the genre of physics flash games resembling crayon sketches has exploded recently. Meaning that there are now at least two. I will keep you posted of others as I become aware of them.

This is a bit simpler than "CPD" you just stack little boxes on top of something precarious. It is also extremely difficult. I can't tell whether that means there is more strategy or less.

Poiser Hand Drawn Physics Puzzle Game

I Hate Everything Too

For your reading pleasure, while unreliable bloggers like me remain busy and unreliable, I recommend some new things I've come across recently, in addition to all that stuff already on the sidebar:

• Jacks of Science features some excellent writing. I hesitate to use the phrase 'science humor' because that sounds pretty non-humorous, but it's somewhere in that category. Posts like "Super Slow Motion is the New Slow Motion" with it's Coolness vs. Speed of Time graph and "Top 10 Greatest Video Game Scientists" are especially good.
• ReducedMass is a good place for semi-offbeat science news with an emphasis on physics/astronomy. It's straightforward, not hard to understand to a non-scientist, but not uninteresting to a non-non-scientist.
• I Hate Everything features a quint-weekly take-down of something, with the most vehement disdain. Nothing is too obscure or rarefied. Examples include "Why has siding become an acceptable building material?" and "Why don't people know what it is that light years measure?" For some reason, even when I don't agree with her, I still like reading it. Frankly I'm sort of jealous that she came up with this idea before me. As someone who hates a lot of stuff, and has a reputation for jokingly* looking down my nose at many things, something like this would have given me an endless supply of easy posts. Maybe if I shamelessly copy the format I can get written up.
  *not really jokingly
  

Physics of Crayons

This is way old, but still pretty awesome. A Finnish grad student spent 5 days making this funny little video game, and it ended up winning the Independent Game Festival this year, an important (I assume) video game contest consisting of many more slickly produced games. Essentially the idea is simply to solve puzzles in a 2D environment where you create shapes subject to-- wait for it-- the laws of physics. That is basically it, just some classical mechanics and the appearance of very rudimentary design. Slate's article on CPD is a good read, and it is especially cool to hear that such a simple and modestly designed game emerged as the talk of the Game Developer's conference (another important thing I assume), despite the many other high profile games showcased there.

Crayon Physics Delux (original non-slick version can be downloaded here for free)

Blowing things up in slow motion

...has always been an entertaining thing to observe. I recommend Stopping Time a book of Harold Edgerton photographs (he was the guy who invented super-high-speed photography and took those iconic shots of milk drops and bullets going through apples). This gallery of things shattering is not quite as good, but it's still interesting. And this melodramatic video of food executions is even better.

We now resume our regularly scheduled program, already in progress

So, sorry about that, Topography readers. Wasn't really in the mood for blogging for a few weeks. Or perhaps I was, but I was deluged with work and malaise.

But now, the work tide has (temporary) gone out, the Sox opening up Fenway has cleared away the malaise, and the sun is shining. Or it will be again, soon. So here is some of the junk that I bookmarked long long ago and never posted:

Subatomic Particle Plush Toys. I suppose a lot of people don't already anthropomorphize particles. This should be helpful to them. [Emergence]


Backreaction: Black Holes at the LHC - What can Happen? This is one of those retarded stories where news outlets get their hands on some sort of pseudo-factoid and run with it. If you are reading this, you probably know about the "LHC might create a black hole and swallow the Earth" thing. Some guys from Hawaii, who are NOT scientists (despite what I heard reported at least twice) sued to stop the LHC, pending some type of investigation into the likelihood of this catastrophe (which was actually conducted like 10 years ago). Backreaction does a good job of explaining why this is dumb. It boils down to this: black holes would only be created if there are large extra dimensions, which there almost certainly are not. And EVEN THEN it would be 1/1000th the size of a proton. And EVEN THEN it would only hit a few nuclei on its way through the Earth, and EVEN THEN it might not absorb them, but IF IT DID it wouldn't matter, since it would have a velocity well in excess of Earth's escape velocity. There is also a funny man-on-the-street video of people's views on the issue as well [via BA].

Eliza, Computer Therapist. I remember this as a DOS-based program on my family's 386. It is a psychologist with frustratingly naïve AI. Now, like all things of that era, available as online javascript, for free. Says the original (wildly erroneous) description:

Eliza will amaze you with its ability to ask probing therapeutic questions and then keep the conversation going. Based on the first computer therapist developed by AI expert Joseph Weisenbaum at MIT, this program will keep you, your friends or your family engaged in hours of conversation.

Well, at least it doesn't try to give you anti-depressants.

Physics Ball

The past few times I've filled out one of those bracket thingies, I've been pretty lucky through no fault of my own. Typically, I just go by the team records and guess, without any overriding methodology or interest. The method Chad Orzel employs to create the "Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever" is pretty admirable though: NCAA picks by physics graduate program ranking:

Winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins; if neither school has a graduate program, the higher seed wins.)

It is hard to see in the above picture, but basically it has Cornell over Wisconsin, with UNC and UCLA rounding out the final four. The last two aren't far fetched, but Cornell is wonderfully bonkers (update: they are already out! oh well, there is always next year Ivy League.) In fact the rest of the, um, 'elite eight' are actually not so weird either: Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Pittsburgh, Duke, but I mean, come on. [Full pdf in original post.]

It is worth noticing that the schools begin seeded as they are in the actual tournament, by basketball, not Physics. If there were organized by Physics to begin with (get on this NCAA!) you wouldn't have Stanford vs. Cornell in the first round. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But then again, neither does polluting academic institutions with recruited athletes.

[Uncertain Principles]

Prepare to be Blown Away

...by relativistic asteroids.


Someone has taken the already ultra-realistic classic arcade video game Asteroids and added the one element it was sorely lacking, relativity. Of course, Asteroids already featured 2D warped spacetime, but now, there are Lorentz contractions too! If they could only manage to factor in the quantum hall effect, it could outsell Halo.

[via Uncertain Principles]

Go Team Physics

OK, maybe just one more thing about politics, but only because it involves yesterday's election of a physicist to Congress.

Bill Foster, formerly a particle experimentalist at Fermilab, just won the seat formerly held by Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, in what was supposedly a solidly GOP region.

Mr. Foster defeated James D. Oberweis, a dairy company owner, in a contest for the 14th Congressional district, a long swath that runs from the far western suburbs of Chicago nearly to the state’s Iowa border. He will fill the remaining months of Mr. Hastert’s term.

Mr. Foster won with 53 percent of the vote, while Mr. Oberweis had 47 percent, The Associated Press reported.

“Back in the laboratory, this is what we’d say was a pretty successful experiment,” Mr. Foster, a soft-spoken man who makes regular references to his science background, told a crowd of supporters at a banquet hall in Aurora. “You sent a clear message to everyone in Washington. You demanded change, and you are demanding it now.”

Since this was only a replacement election he'll have to run again in November, but it still sends a "clear message to everyone in Washington:" physicists get things done.