Back when I was an undergrad, we did a lab in the junior-level quantum class that involved making a dye laser. We had a small pulsed nitrogen laser in the lab, and were given a glass cell of dye and some optics and asked to make it lase in the visible range of the spectrum.… Continue reading The Evil Professor Magic Trick
Category: Physics
The Real Point of Zero Point
While Kenneth Ford’s 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a “state of motion?” When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes: An object brought… Continue reading The Real Point of Zero Point
Why So Many Theorists?
When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday’s Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow– the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography,… Continue reading Why So Many Theorists?
Quantum Man by Lawrence Krauss
While I’ve got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, part of Norton’s Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I’m a fan of the series– past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves’s… Continue reading Quantum Man by Lawrence Krauss
101 Quantum Questions by Kenneth W. Ford
The folks at Harvard University Press were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Ken Ford’s new book, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can’t See a few months ago. I’ve been too busy working on my own book to read any other physics books, though, so… Continue reading 101 Quantum Questions by Kenneth W. Ford
What Counts as “Quantum Physics?”
In comments to yesterday’s post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of “quantum mechanics” as a term encompassing QED: IMO, one should say “quantum theory” here instead of “quantum mechanics”. After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics,… Continue reading What Counts as “Quantum Physics?”
Alternatives to Lab Reports?
An academic email list that I’m on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This “feels ” wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the… Continue reading Alternatives to Lab Reports?
The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science
NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be “twisted” by the Earth’s rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically… Continue reading The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science
Science Marches On
It’s been a hectic day here, so I haven’t had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I’ve written up here in the past: 1) In the “self-evident title” category, there’s Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year’s… Continue reading Science Marches On
The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)
Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist: [O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him. As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat,… Continue reading The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)