{"id":279,"date":"2006-06-01T11:07:09","date_gmt":"2006-06-01T11:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/01\/the-physicist-trap\/"},"modified":"2006-06-01T11:07:09","modified_gmt":"2006-06-01T11:07:09","slug":"the-physicist-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/01\/the-physicist-trap\/","title":{"rendered":"The Physicist Trap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Trodden has a post <a href=\"http:\/\/cosmicvariance.com\/2006\/05\/31\/fun-with-bose-einstein-applets\/\">endorsing the BEC videogames<\/a> at the University of Colordao&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colorado.edu\/physics\/2000\/index.pl\">Physics 2000<\/a> project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steelypips.org\/principles\/\">my blog on Steelypips<\/a>, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the &#8220;Geek Stuff&#8221; category of sidebar links. Still, I heartily agree with the recommendation to go try these out.<\/p>\n<p>They first put that site up back when I was in grad school, and somebody or another found the link and brought it up on the computer in the lab. If you read through the text, you&#8217;ll see that it&#8217;s pitched at somebody in high school or below, but it completely captivated a large group of PhD physicists that afternoon. Everybody had to take a turn at the evaporative cooling videogame, and test out different strategies (the &#8220;Maxwell Demon&#8221; approach of suddenly lowering the trap whenever a particularly hot atom is headed out wasn&#8217;t any more successful, but was an entertaining way of playing), and a couple of people even found ways to cheat.<\/p>\n<p>It just goes to show the truth of what my high school physics teacher said: the people who go into physics are people who never had enough toys when they were kids. No matter how many toys they had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao&#8217;s Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the &#8220;Geek Stuff&#8221;&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/01\/the-physicist-trap\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Physicist Trap<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}