This week’s big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what’s the deal? What did they do… Continue reading Quantum Mechanics Is Square: “Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics”
Category: Experiment
Backyard Fluid Dynamics
Here’s a picture of the ornamental pond we have in our back yard, showing the fountain that we run to keep the water circulating so it’s not just a mosquito ranch: You can see the brick that we have sitting on top of the pump housing to keep it submerged (it tends to tip over… Continue reading Backyard Fluid Dynamics
What’s a Topological Insulator?
Yesterday’s post about how nobody cares about condensed matter physics produced a surprising number of comments of the form “I was really hoping you would post about topological insulators,” which surprised me a bit. Anyway, since people asked for it, I’ll give it a shot. The important caveats here are that 1) this isn’t my… Continue reading What’s a Topological Insulator?
Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?
In the comments following the silly accelerator poll, onymous wrote: [T]he point of the LHC isn’t to discover the Higgs. No one in their right minds would build a 14 TeV pp collider if their only goal was to discover the Higgs. While it’s true that the ultimate goal of the LHC is to discover… Continue reading Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?
Holy Grails of Science
With the rumors of a Higgs Boson detected at Fermilab now getting the sort of official denial that in politics would mean the rumors were about to be confirmed in spectacular fashion, it’s looking like we’ll have to wait a little while longer before the next “Holy Grail” of physics gets discovered. Strictly speaking, the… Continue reading Holy Grails of Science
Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can’t read because it doesn’t display properly in Firefox, but I’m sure is very interesting. Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought
The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it’s a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving… Continue reading Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought
Big News in Tiny Physics
A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics: There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations seem to proceed at different rates for neutrinos and antineutrinos. This is a really surprising… Continue reading Big News in Tiny Physics
Photons: Still Bosons
Last week, Dmitry Budker’s group at Berkeley published a paper in Physical Review Letters (also free on the arxiv) with the somewhat drab title “Spectroscopic Test of Bose-Einsten Statistics for Photons.” Honestly, I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed it, even though this is the sort of precision AMO test of physics that I love, had it not… Continue reading Photons: Still Bosons
Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?
Next in line of questions from readers, we have tbell with: Since science is a self-correcting process (maybe only at a statistical level, not necessarily an individual level), it would be cool if you would relate the last time you were seriously wrong about some aspect of science or research, and how you altered your… Continue reading Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?