Category: Science

Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs

Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and… Continue reading Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs

Sticky Tape: The Final Chapter

Simulated results for charged tapes, using the toy model to simulate the force between a charged tape and an uncharged but polarizable one.

I realize people are getting sick of reading me talk about this charged-tape business, which has run to one, two, three, four posts at this point. Truth be told, I’m losing enthusiasm for it myself. So this will be the final post, at least for now… As I mentioned on Twitter, as I type this… Continue reading Sticky Tape: The Final Chapter

Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism

Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem– he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a… Continue reading Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism

Repeat After Me: Particle Physics Is Not All of Physics

The very last section of the book-in-progress (at least the draft that’s with my editor right now…) is titled “Science Is Never Over,” and talks about how there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in… Continue reading Repeat After Me: Particle Physics Is Not All of Physics

The Tricky Thing About Simulated Dynamics

The minimum separation as a function of the release position in the toy model of the charged tape system.

In the previous post about simulating the attraction between sticky tapes using VPython, I ended with a teaser mentioning that there was a discrepancy between the simulation and the theoretical solution from directly solving the equations. The problem is kind of subtle, but clearly visible in this graph from that post: In this, we see… Continue reading The Tricky Thing About Simulated Dynamics

Physics Hangout in Need of Better Title

What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term: The video quality… Continue reading Physics Hangout in Need of Better Title

Simulated Tape and Universal Behavior

Comparison of the two different simulations, scaled to the "tipping point" showing the universal behavior.

Having spent a lot of time solving equations related to sticky tape models, including trying to work solutions in my head while driving to Grandma and Grandpa’s with the kids, and making some measurements of real tapes, there was only one thing left to do: try simulating this problem in VPython. Because I’m a physics… Continue reading Simulated Tape and Universal Behavior

Atomic Physics with Sticky Tape

Two pieces of sticky tape with the same sign of charge, hung from an incredibly sophisticated measuring apparatus.

In addition to making a toy model to show the tipping-point behavior of charged pieces of sticky tape, I spent some time on Tuesday trying to do something quantitative with this. Of course, Tuesday is the one day of the week that I don’t teach, and I didn’t want to go to campus to do… Continue reading Atomic Physics with Sticky Tape