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: Science
Welcome to the Information Supercollider
The title is a .signature line that somebody– Emmet O’Brien, I think, but I’m not sure– used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90’s, when some people referred to the Internet as the “Information Superhighway.” I’ve always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I’ve moved into blogdom, where a lot of what… Continue reading Welcome to the Information Supercollider
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
On the “Hot Hand” in Basketball
A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don’t want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of “hot” shooting– a… Continue reading On the “Hot Hand” in Basketball
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