Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week: A Pofessor’s Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the room. I haven’t been on the faculty… Continue reading Beware the Professor’s Negation Field
Category: Physics
True Lab Stories: Death of a Laser
So, what’s the deal with last night’s silly obituary? Basically, the main laser in my experiment died because I’m a jackass. More specifically, the laser in question is a diode laser, similar to the kind found in CD and DVD players. These are broadly tunable, available in a wide range of powers and wavelengths, and… Continue reading True Lab Stories: Death of a Laser
Requiescat in Pace
SDL 5401-G1, October 2001- February 6, 2007 SDL 5401-G1 (“Sid” to friends) died today of static shock, after five years of service in a grating-locked diode laser system. He had survived three lab floods, and more than a dozen power outages, but succombed to electric shock following a mishap with a Tesla coil. He is… Continue reading Requiescat in Pace
Physics Lab, By the Numbers
Time spent locating the parts for the Compton Effect experiment: 15 minutes. Time spent dragging lead bricks for radiation shielding into the lab: 10 minutes. Time spent bulding little lead houses for the hot 137Cs source and Photo-Multiplier Tube (PMT): 15 minutes. Time spent trying to find somebody who knew the administrator password for the… Continue reading Physics Lab, By the Numbers
Hopeful Abstracts and Extra Motivation
Late spring/ early summer is Conference Season in academic science, with lots of meetings scheduled during the academic break, so that everybody can attend without cutting into their teaching responsibilities (of course, our trimester calendar means we’re still in session for most of these, but whatever…). The peak time for conferences in my subfield is… Continue reading Hopeful Abstracts and Extra Motivation
Philosophia Naturalis
I’m really bad about remembering these things– I ought to start putting them on my calendar– but the physics blogging carnival Philosophia Naturalis is now up, collecting many excellent posts about physics. If you’ve been away from the computer for the last month, or would just like a quick recap, go check it out.
The Unbearable Sameness of Physics Talks
Gordon Watts has deja vu: [Leaving a colloquium], I got stopped by another member of our department, who is a good friend of particle physics, and she said basically the same thing: all particle physics talks look the same. Some of the comments: Two slides on the detector. Some pictures of quarks, and then some… Continue reading The Unbearable Sameness of Physics Talks
Bunnies Made of Cheese
The dog is standing at the window, wagging her tail excitedly. I look outside, and the back yard is empty. “What are you looking at?” I ask. “Bunnies made of cheese!,” she says. I look again, and the yard is still empty. “There are no bunnies out there,” I say, “and there are certainly not… Continue reading Bunnies Made of Cheese
Advanced Concepts: Decoherence
Matt Leifer doesn’t blog all that often, but what he posts is very good. It tends to be extremely high-level stuff about foundational problems in quantum theory, mind, so it’s not for the faint of heart, but if you get into that sort of thing, it’s fascinating. Wednesday’s post on dechoerence is no exception: [L]et… Continue reading Advanced Concepts: Decoherence
Physics News Round-Up
I’ve been collecting a bunch of little news squibs from the IoP and the APS over the last week or so, and I keep saying that I’m going to do a nice long post explaining each of the experiments. And my actual job keeps eating my life, what with candidate interviews, committee meetings, class prep,… Continue reading Physics News Round-Up