Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new… Continue reading The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes
Category: Theory
A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time
The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would’ve banged out very quickly. I’m not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly… Continue reading A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Schrödinger
Newton’s birthday (in the Julian calendar) is Sunday, so we’re in the final days of the advent calendar. Which means it’s time for the equations that are least like anything Newton did, such as today’s: This is the Schrödinger equation from non-relativistic quantum mechanics. If you want to determine the quantum state of an object… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Schrödinger
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Hydrogen
Today’s equation in our march to Newton’s birthday is actually a tiny bit out of order, historically speaking: This is the Rydberg formula for the wavelengths of the spectral lines in hydrogen (and hydrogen-like ions), with R a constant having the appropriate units, and the two n‘s being two dimensionless integers. This equation was developed… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Hydrogen
Experiment vs. Theory: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Over at Backreaction, Bee is running an advent calendar of her own, with amusing anecdotes about famous physicists. Apparently, it’s a good year for advent calendars. A couple of days ago, her story was a famous one about Heisenberg nearly failing to get his Ph.D. because he disdained experiment: Wien wanted to fail Heisenberg, but… Continue reading Experiment vs. Theory: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Simple Answers to Stupid Rhetorical Devices
Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain’t Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize: A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer–let’s call him… Continue reading Simple Answers to Stupid Rhetorical Devices
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Gauss and Maxwell
As the advent calendar moves into the E&M portion of the season, there are a number of possible ways to approach this. I could go with fairly specific formulae for various aspects, but that would take a while and might close out some other areas of physics. In the end, all of classical E&M comes… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Gauss and Maxwell
The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their… Continue reading The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
Strongly Correlated Physics in a Superposition State
It’s been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I’ve got some time between flipping pancakes, so here’s an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the wonders of string theory applied to condensed matter physics. This uses the “AdS/CFT” relationship, by… Continue reading Strongly Correlated Physics in a Superposition State
Experimentalists Aren’t Idiots: The Neutrino Saga Continues
In a lot of ways, the OPERA fast-neutrino business has been less a story about science than a story about the perils of the new media landscape. We went through another stage of this a day or two ago, with all sorts of people Twittering, resharing, and repeating in other ways a story that the… Continue reading Experimentalists Aren’t Idiots: The Neutrino Saga Continues