A History of the TV, and other things.

Like many people who are alive, I enjoy watching TV. Far from being the sole source of entertainment at the dinner table, the television has arguably become one of the most important information and communication devices ever invented. Even more revolutionary, recent technological developments in monitor systems have made it possible to see displays in larger-than-life HD, or 3D; touch screens allow you to interact with a virtual environment; some screens are thinner than your pocket book of particle physics.

Which is probably on your Kindle now, anyway.

LASERS!?

Let me start this post by stating the obvious: lasers are awesome. However, this is not entirely due to the pioneering work of Dr. Evil.

Though one has to recognize his work.

Other than their use in popular fiction, lasers have a startling amount of applications in the real world, too, from running your CD player, to creating microchips, to wreaking havoc and destruction, to malfunctioning during PowerPoint presentations.

Higgs Boson 2: Boson Harder

Here's the story.

And another one. From the horse's mouth, so to speak. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the physicists at CERN... still haven't found the Higgs boson. But they're damn close. 

Here's what the announcement was about. Being a project of gigantic proportions, the Large Hadron Collider has many, many teams of scientists working on each project. Finding the Higgs boson is only one of the many things being researched, though certainly one of the most important. 

Like antimatter studies. Antimatter is awesome. 

Blinded by the Light

Being a scholarly man, I have naturally abhorrent eyesight. My visual acuity is about 20/500, in both eyes. When compared to the perfect eyesight of 20/20… I’m not doing too hot. But I wondered, as I put in my contacts for astigmatism, what that number actually measured. What does it mean? How is my eye so horribly out-of-whack?

Smashing Pumpkins

Happy day-after-Halloween, everyone!

Halloween: The one day where giving candy to other people’s kids is
not only acceptable, but the preferred method of communication.

I guess I don't have to tell you that, as a physicist, I love shooting things into the air. For this reason, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays; it gives me a chance to watch pumpkin chucking. For any of you who are unfamiliar with the process, this is the breakdown:

1. Get a pumpkin.

2. Make a device that throws the pumpkin.

3. Throw the pumpkin using the device.

Hokie Stone

It turns out that the 78^th annual SESAPS meeting was all that I could have hoped for, and more. The most revealing part of the whole thing was just how many types of physicists there are. There were 35 different categories of talks, all with two to eight speakers each, going all day. That’s a lot of physics to cover.

Of course, some of the talks were more interesting (and more accessible) than others. For instance, did you ever wonder how a cat’s tongue laps up water? Neither did I, until I saw a presentation explaining the physics behind it. 

A Letter to Readers - Conferences

Fine Readers of PiPT, 


Sorry for the long delay in blog posts! It always stresses me out when I haven't written something in more than four days, and it's been a good 3 weeks since this site got any love, so you can imagine my state. But I think that it was worth it, because I was hard at work getting ready to attend...

Great Scott!

By now, you've either heard from me that CERN found faster-than-light particles, heard it from the news, or just not heard about it at all (in which case, don't you dare stop reading). This finding has turned the scientific community for a loop, and no one quite knows how to react. The popular news has been reporting it as the end-all-and-be-all of physics discoveries, but that's not true at all. To be sure, the significance of this find is mind-blowing, but I'm willing to bet that reporters took the ambitions and cautions of scientists (wild things, they are) at face value, instead of looking at the facts. 


You and I know better.* 

...or is it?

You know that article I just wrote? Hold on to your hats, kids. These neutrinos may have just broken the speed of light. This... is interesting.


http://news.yahoo.com/particles-recorded-moving-faster-light-cern-164441657.html
-----


EDIT: Here's an article about the experiment from a much more... scientifically sound source:


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/09/neutrinos-travel-faster-than-lig.html

It's All Relative. Really.

In the wonderful world of Physics, everything can be categorized with four adjectives: big, small, fast, slow.

Physics is pretty much like Sesame
Street, in that sense.

Seriously, though, these qualifiers are what physicists focus on when evaluating anything. In fact, there’s a branch of physics for each combination, and unbeknownst to you (or perhaps fully beknownst), we’ve already covered a lot of these concepts ourselves:

Slow and Big:	Classical Physics (The Tides, Gravity)
Slow and Small:	Quantum Mechanics (Quantum Dots)
Fast and Big:	General Relativity (Time Travel)
Fast and Small:	Quantum Field Theory (Higgs Boson)

The fascinating thing is that one man almost single-handedly made all of these possible: Albert Einstein. In 1905, Einstein published a set of papers establishing his ideas on Special Relativity, considered by far the most groundbreaking theory in modern physics. They revolutionized the way scientists thought of the Universe, and made further developments in both science and technology possible. This is all great news, and I’m sure you’re jumping out of your chair with joy, but… what did his papers actually say? What makes Special Relativity so special?

Nope. 

Where We're Going...

A lot of you have probably been thinking, “OK, world, this is the future. Where is my flying car?”

"I need something more... stylish."

Well, before you get your proverbial panties in a bunch, think about how that would work. Without involving jets (which are dangerous for a commercial vehicle) and propellers (which would make your car a plane) the only thing left to make your car fly would be the power of magnetism. Everyone’s pushed a magnet across a table before; in theory, a strong enough magnet would be able to push off a metal surface and, with, a motor in it, possibly drive itself around. However, that magnet you pushed does flips, skids, and is just entirely unstable if pushed from the bottom. How could one implement your fantastic new magnet technology in a stable car, one that wouldn’t flip over when you turned it on? The answer: superconducting levitation. Believe it or not, that is a real phrase, and the technology is being implemented as we speak.

The God Particle

The Higgs boson.
...I don't even know.

You may have heard of the “Higgs boson particle” in the news lately. It’s the thing that CERN is working so hard on this year, sending out news reports daily, it seems. In reality, the Higgs boson is one of the only theoretical fundamental particles that hasn’t been observed yet, and even more important, it’s the key to a grand unification of Physics theory.

But... what is it?

Music makes me...

I’m not sure how many people realize how much physics there actually is in music. In fact, the art of music is a branch of physics all on its own, called musical acoustics. The mathematics applied to this artistic field actually present beautiful and intriguing sounds that one would never think of directly, but at the same time has already intuitively known.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you play an instrument, you’re already familiar with the major scale: a series of whole notes that make a pleasing sound. In reality, every note in that scale is repeating sound wave, buffeting the medium around it at a certain frequency. This translates into a musical tone when it hits your eardrum. Yet did you ever consider that, by measuring these frequencies, all of these tones can be connected through the wonderful world of numbers?

YES! MATH!

The History of the Meter

In science, precise measurements are everything. In order to prove even the simplest theorems, you need systems of measurement that can be both accurate for your purposes, and translatable to other scientists to facilitate collaboration. This is what the SI units are for; they’re a universal system of measuring things. The meter, as stubborn as America might be to use it, is actually the perfect ruler for science (we’ll see why later). But I wondered today: what did the world do before the French intervened with their fancy “Système International d'unités”? How did we measure football fields? 

Yeah, I went there.

The Fundamentals, Part 4: The Weak (but still really strong) Force

Our final interaction, and it’s a tough one. The weak force is probably the most subtle of the fundamental interactions; it’s responsible for beta decay, or the breaking down of particles like the neutron and proton through radiation. This kind of decay is the main force that powers our Sun, as well as making heavier elements possible. However, there’s a lot more to the weak interaction than meets the eye...

The Fundamentals, Part 3: The Strong Force

Part three is our first venture into relatively obscure physics. I’d reckon that not many people could accurately describe what either weak or strong forces do. Luckily, you won’t be one of those people. 

Years ago, when quantum science was first being explored, physicists started discovering a couple of very, very small pieces of matter and energy that made up everything, particles like protons, electrons, and neutrons. They called these the ‘elementary particles’ because of their special status as the building blocks of the universe. All of this progress led to more accurate models of the atom, and it was finally deduced that all atoms contained a nucleus in the center with a certain number of protons and neutrons, as well as an electron cloud surrounding this core. 

And for this, there was much rejoicing.

But how did the protons and neutrons stay together?

The Fundamentals, Part 2: Electromagnetism, a.k.a. "The positive side has the bump, right?"

Ah, electromagnetism. This fundamental interaction of matter is so much more important than most would believe. Like gravity, the effects of electromagnetism have always been known by humankind, in one form or another. However, it wasn’t until way, way later that we found out what it truly was, or how integral it is to the existence of... well, everything. It took a man by the name of James Clerk Maxwell to get science on its way. He published his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873, pointing out several interconnected properties between the two phenomena, like: 

Point 1: Electric charges of different sign (positive, negative) attract, and like ones repel. The same goes with magnetic poles: north pulls south, and pushes away other norths. 

Point 2: Running an electric current through a wire creates a magnetic field. Likewise, moving a magnet through a loop of wire creates an electric current. 

What he had described was the newly understood phenomena called... electromagnetism. 

The Fundamentals, Part 1: Gravity

With all the talk happening on PiPT about fictitious motion, antimatter transformations, and overly-complicated analyses of the tides, it’s about time that we went back and explored the bare necessities of the Universe, those few things it absolutely needs to be what it is today. These absolutes are called the fundamental interactions of nature: 

• Gravity
• Electromagnetism
• Strong Force
• Weak Force

They're the four things that keep everything in one piece; without them, nothing, not even atoms, would exist. 

---------

1. Gravity

Good ol' gravity. It's the force that most of us are probably most familiar with, though it's the weakest of the four by far. Its effects have been known for about as long as humans have been on this Earth, yet it took a long time for someone to truly see it as its own entity. Aristotle was one of the first; he described gravity as the movement of objects to their 'natural place'. Earth went the lowest, water floated on that, air floated on that. Pretty straightforward. 

News: Quantum Dots

For anyone who's interested, here's an article expanding on my post about Quantum Dots, and how they can be used in solar cells:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-tiny-tech-big-results-quantum.html

I Can't Believe They're Not Forces!

If you’ve ever taken a Physics course, you may have learned about Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion. In case it’s been a while:

1. An object in motion stays in motion
2. The force of an object is equal to the mass multiplied by the acceleration (F=ma)
3. For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.

These are the rules upon which Classical Physics was founded. They are taught in grade school like they are the end-all and be-all of motion in our Universe, and one can certainly do amazing things with them. However, think about this interesting mind experiment: you slide a puck on a frictional rotating table.

That’s it. That’s the mind experiment. You can picture that, right? Because Newton’s Laws can’t.

...pause for dramatic effect...