Ahem.

You must have heard about 3.14…
In many circles she’s all the rage.
She’s the greek character that we all adore,
whose irrational nature takes center stage.

Defined by division, as opposed to sum,
(a fact that is known throughout the land).
But don’t count on her with your fingers and thumbs,
she flaunts more digits than you have on your hand.

Men fight to reveal her decimal places,
– around 2.5 trillion is the current amount.
A complex attitude is not what she embraces,
but, she’s a real number, and that’s what counts.

I hesitate to sound slightly cliche,
but she’s a hero unhonored and unsung.
And after all, it’s true what they say:
two Pi is greater than one.

yes…

 

Let’s start on a light note, with a video…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a video put together by one of my favorite scientific youtubers. Although I’m unsure of his name, he calles his youtube channel C0nc0rdance.

While to most people — especially those with a scientific background — this video may be painfully funny, I hope that at least some detect a rather frightening element illustrated in this video. Let me elaborate…

As a scientist (and especially as a physicist), when I look at this video, I understand most of the words that fall out of these people’s mouths — yes, even in the Star Trek scenes. And to me, the sentences sound no more sensical than: “Pork pie scissors affect the banana glands which embigens the healing power of homeopathy”. Having a knowledge of the meaning of these words allows me to easily differentiate between technobabble and a logical explanation. I’m sure those of you who have a certain knowledge of scientific terms also sympathize with that position.

But let’s imagine that I hadn’t done a degree in physics. Imagine I hadn’t kept up to date with current discoveries in science. How would I be able to tell what was science, and what was non-science (or nonsense)?

I doubt many of my readers find it difficult to pin the tail to the crackpot claims in that video… but perhaps there are some. To those of you I say, don’t be too hard on yourself. Sometimes, crackpot claims are much more subtle and harder to spot.

Let’s continue with a harder example…

Consider the following two abstracts. The first was accepted in the APS Physics Journal (1990), and the second was accepted in the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (2005).

The Chern-Simons Lagrangian has been studied previously in (2+1)-dimensional spacetime, where it is both gauge and Lorentz invariant. In 3+1 dimensions, this term couples the dual electromagnetic tensor to an external four-vector. If we take this four-vector to be fixed, the term is gauge invariant but not Lorentz invariant. In this paper, we examine both the theoretical consequences of such a modification and observational limits we can put on its magnitude. The Chern-Simons term would rotate the plane of polarization of radiation from distant galaxies, an effect which is not observed. From the observations we deduce that the magnitude of the vector is <1.7×10-42h0 GeV, where h0 is the Hubble constant in units of 100 km sec-1 Mpc-1.

And…

Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and publicprivate key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

What if I were to tell you that one of these articles is serious research and one was, in fact, randomly generated technobabble? Can you tell which is which?

The first abstract is from a physics article written by distinguished theoretical physicist and blogger, Sean Carroll. This is definitely serious scientific research. The second abstract is randomly generated. Seriously. It fooled some people well enough to get accepted into the WMSCI in 2005. You can read the full article here, and even make your own randomly generated technobabble article here.

At a certain point, the difference between technobabble and respectable science becomes difficult to tell apart. Some ridiculous claims, in the right context, can become temptingly believable. On the other side of the coin, even claims from distinguished scientists are sometimes encoded in scientific lingo so much that even scientists in the same field find them difficult to understand.

…it’s impossible to know everything, you say? (Well… not you, of course ) It’s futile to try to dissect all of the things people say out there. I’m going to let the scientists do their thing and I’ll do mine. It’s not like it’s going to affect my life.

I hear you. For a while, I was discouraged by that thought and there may be truth in it to a certain extent. But, a defeatist approach to scientific knowledge won’t help you. And, the reality of the situation is probably closer to this:

Even a small awareness of scientific facts and methods will present you with a huge advantage when it comes to siphoning out false claims and crackpots from the jumble information we juggle with on a daily basis.

If you think that a knowledge of science is separate from “real life”, I would invite you to consider this. Exhibit A: Conservapedia. A wealth of completely false claims. Many of these claims, although rooted in false scientific claims, permeate into the political arena. As people who live in a democratic society, it matters what we deduce to be fact or fiction.

But what’s to say that wikipedia is any more accurate? This is where science comes in. Not only is science a collection of knowledge, it’s also a process. A way to filter out fact from fiction.

Science is a life skill. Like cooking, or cooperating with others, or reading a map. It’s not just a profession, it’s not just for nerds, it’s not just a divider (but it can be). Science is a world view… a useful one that cuts through a lot of harmful and misleading bull. It doesn’t just affect scientists, it affects our society, politics, our health …

I think I’m going to make this a bit of a series. In future posts we’ll look into what science really is, confirmation bias, and other neat things.

I always love talking to new people about what they do. Not only because it makes for interesting conversation, but also because I like to hoard skills. I love the nitty-gritty. I love general concepts. And usually, different people with different backgrounds have some very interesting bits of knowledge.

This is why I found this link so interesting (scroll down quite a bit). It is a list of 164 responses to a specific question:

What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?

It’s essentially a collection of ideas, concepts, and “did you know?“s that a large assortment of “big thinkers” find interesting or useful.

For me: gold.

I haven’t finished browsing through all of the contributions, but two have caught my eye so far.

The first is Adam Alter’s tour through the subconscious influences seemingly mundane things have on our thoughts, feelings and opinions.

[…] while we’re focusing on the business of daily life, our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness. Meanwhile, this peripheral information subtly shapes our thoughts, feelings and actions, and crafts some of our most critical life outcomes. […]

[…] recent studies have shown that people find strangers more likable when they form their first impressions while holding a cup of warm coffee.

[…] people think more creatively when they’re exposed to the Apple Computers logo, or when they witness the illumination of an incandescent light bulb […]

The second is a similar self-deception described by Robert Sapolsky. One that is best dealt with by adopting a scientific mindset. This is the idea that people tend to bias their opinions towards anecdotal evidence (stories) rather than objective data (ex: statistics).

[…] Every good journalist knows its power — start an article with statistics about foreclosure rates or feature a family victimized by some bank? No brainer. […]

[…] But anecdotalism is potentially a domain of distortion as well. Absorb the lessons of science and cut saturated fats from your diet, or cite the uncle of the spouse of a friend who eats nothing but pork rinds and is still pumping iron at age 110? Depend on one of the foundations of the 20th century’s extension of life span and vaccinate your child, or obsess over a National Enquirer-esque horror story of one vaccination disaster and don’t immunize? […]

A good story is a powerful thing and is probably much more intuitive to people than scientific data. But a general understanding of science — what it is, how it’s done and why you can trust it — is also a powerful thing and it’s a great tool for gaining perspective. The problem is the latter takes time to acquire.

Exciting news for those of you who like quirky physics blogs. One of my good friends, a Ph.D. in physics and fellow swing dancer, has started a delicious new blog called Quantum Pie. Find it at: quantumpie.com.

He’s lined up a series of great posts focusing on the magic of quantum mechanics. He’s honing his video making skills and is producing some great videos like this one. We’ll be cross-posting eventually and we have tentative plans to do a video series together that uses dance to help explain physics (or at least to catch attention). The series will be called Two to Tangle (pun on quantum entanglement). The first of our swing dance video series starts with his Dance your Ph.D submission which he choreographed, but also starring yours truely.

Most of you probably don’t know that I’m a swing dancer, so here’s proof. Sit down, relax, have some pie and a coffee and enjoy some physicists try to explain a PhD with a dance called the Lindy Hop.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Speaking of spectacles, put on yours, and look through the lens of time with these two optics articles…

First up is Kirsten Walsh, who sheds some light on Newton’s first optical paper in her post: Newton’s ‘Crucial Experiment’ – Early Modern Experimental Philosophy from the blog Early Modern Experimental Philosophy.

Now, if there’s one blogger that knows how to tell a story, it’s Jennifer Ouellette. She has reimagined the story of Ibn al-Haytham, who some consider to be the father of modern optics. The Scholar and the Caliph is posted at physicsworld.com.

For some more light reading, we have two articles pertaining to the hotspot of light itself; the sun…

Christie Thony has spotted the spotty history of the discovery of sun spots. If you have a spot of curiosity, The Rennaissance Mathematicus is the spot for you, check out the article: Spotting the Spots.

Dr. SkyScull writes an illuminating article on the discovery of the connection between radioactivity and solar radiation: The first glimmer of a nuclear Sun: radium and solar energy (1903) posted at Skulls in the Stars.

If the last two articles have left you with a bit of heat stroke, plunge into the ice-cold subject of glacier research with David Bressan. Here David will tell you the chilling story of how Glacier research came to be. Guest Blog: The discovery of the ruins of ice: The birth of Glacier research is posted at Scientific American.

Cold not your style? You prefer something with a bit more energy? Behold, Stephen at Reciprocal Space has written an energetic post about the man behind the SI unit: Joule in an article titled: Joule’s Jewel.

Speaking of hot things… Alun tells us the secret to a good date… a carbon date, that is. Check it out: Archaeologists prove the secret to a successful date is knowing what is on the menu posted at AlunSalt: Ancient Science and the Science of Ancient Things.

Expect the unexpected at a blog carnival, ladies and gentlemen… and in science also…

Michal Meyer takes a step back, and gives us a window into the nature of scientific discovery and the detours it sometimes takes. Discovery is posted at Periodic Tabloid.

Fun for the entire family! Something for the children, perhaps? Alice takes a look at early records of scientific literature for children in A bit of Victoriana posted at through the looking glass.

William Eamon presents an iconic time in the development of science in The Iconography of Scientific Discovery in the Renaissance (Part I) posted at The Official Website of Author William Eamon.

A separate but equal introduction is deserved by Romeo Vitelli who recounts the academic life of Mamie Phipps who’s scientific research transformed her into a civil rights icon. The “Separate But Equal” War is posted at Providentia.

Stand back, ladies and gentlemen! The next topic is not for the faint of heart, for it has been known to send some into the depths of utter madness…

Alexi Baker talks about the darker side of longitude in Longitude and Lunacy posted at Board of Longitude.

Creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night…

Adrian Thysse’s article will leave you bug-eyed with an intoxicating tale about How to subdue an ant posted at The Bug Whisperer.

Brian Switek dives into the Origin of Species and speaks about the, so called, “missing links”. Breaking our link to the ‘March of Progress’ can be found on the scientific american blog.

What would a carnival be without a freak show? David Bressan digs down into past literature and unearths some interesting specimens in The greatest show on Earth posted at History of geology.

We laughed, we cried, we were left bug-eyed, and now it’s time to pack up and move on. No place is home for a carnival, but the Giant’s Shoulders still needs a place to stay next month. If you would like to host the next blog carnival, leave a comment on the Giant’s Shoulders site. Thank you guests, organizers and carnies.

It’s time for Morning Coffee Physics to get back to its regular scheduled blogging, starting with another cup of coffee.

the whole universe is in a glass of wine.

I think wine can easily be replaced by coffee, don’t you?

Morning Coffee Physics is my way of trying to share what I see some mornings when I look at the steaming hot cup of coffee in front of me. There are things about the world you can’t see with your eyes.

But we can measure them. We can infer them. And we can be sure of them.

These sometimes unseeable things are discovered by the process of science. And  scientific knowledge goes beyond mere technological application. This knowledge lets you see the invisible things about the world with your mind.

Sometimes after discovering these things you may ask yourself, “why didn’t anyone tell me this before?” I know I did. I sometimes became giddy from this new knowledge. I wanted to share it with the world. I want you to see what I see when I look at a cup of coffee.

The great physicist, Richard Feynman, put it very eloquently…

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will
probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to
be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely
enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the
twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the
reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is
a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the
secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange
array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the
ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is
found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can
discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the
cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into
the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some
convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts –
physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that
nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting
ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it
and forget it all!

- Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, v. 1, p. 3–10

Have fun, explore, you’ll hear from me again very soon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What do you all think about his suggestion that getting a universe from nothing is natural?

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web.

The topic of choice for this year is: Climate Change. Yes, that scary thing.

I puzzled a while trying to think of something physicsy to tell you about climate change. I could tell you that same story about how CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat causing an increase in average global temperatures. I could tell you that this is exactly the reason why the planet Venus (with a CO2 rich atmosphere), although it is further than the sun from Mercury, is hotter by a long shot. But I decided against repeating those same old stories, because I figure you’ve probably heard them many times and are probably getting numb. Instead I’m going to go outside my comfort zone and plunge into the depths of Limnology and tell you about some current issues involving climate change in the convective currents of holimictic lakes.

…what’s a holimictic lake, you ask?

Good question. I’m not much for fancy names; I prefer concepts. So, let’s start with the basics. Firstly, you must have heard that hot air rises. But why does it do that? Well, air that is hotter than the air surrounding it is also less dense than that air. This means that a volume of hot air weighs less than the same volume of colder air. The colder air will be pulled towards the earth more than hot air and so hotter air will be pushed out of the way (upwards) by colder air.

The same is true for water, but only to a certain degree; 4°C to be exact. Water, unlike air, is densest at 4°C, so in a tub of 5°C water, a 7°C blob of water will tend to rise to the top. On the other hand, in a tub of 1°C water, a 3°C blob of water will tend to sink because even though it’s warmer it is more dense.

Now, consider a lake in the four seasons. During the Summer the lake water is generally above 4°C, so the sun will warm the top layers of the lake and that water (being warmer and less dense) will stay on top and the cooler water will stay deeper down.

When Fall comes around the top part of the lake will be cooled. Eventually that top part of the lake will cool to the same temperature as the bottom part. Winds can cause some turbulence and the bottom parts and top parts of the lake will get mixed up.

When Winter comes along the top part of the lake will be colder than the bottom part which can happen when the lake is lower than 4°C. The top layer of the lake may freeze over and the lake will again get separated into layers of different temperature — this is called stratification.

The lake gets mixed up again when Spring comes around. The top of the lake will be heated again and when the lake water at the top reaches 4°C it will sink to the bottom and mix up the lake.
A lake that undergoes this kind of mixing is called a holimictic lake and if it does it twice a year (as described above) it’s called a dimictic lake.

…what does this have to do with climate change, you ask?

Well, nutrients from the lakebed seep into the lower parts of the lake while it’s stratified (Summer and Winter for a dimictic lake). When the lake mixes, these nutrients get mixed into the whole lake. If you are aquatic life which has adapted to depend on those nutrients, this mixing is a very good thing. Without it, many species of fish would not be able to survive in that lake.

Climate change threatens to put a damper on that mixing process for some lakes. As average global temperatures increase, unusually warm Winters become more likely. What would happen to a dimictic lake during one of these unusually warm Winters? Well, the lake won’t cool very much during the Fall, and might even stay above that 4°C mark. This would cause less mixing during the Fall. To make matters worse, because of the warm Winter, there will be less mixing during the Spring as well. To make matters worse still, those salts that are dissolved in the deep parts of the lake make those deep layers more dense. Less mixing during a certain Fall or Spring means more salts stay built up in the deep layers of the lake making it even more difficult to mix the upper and lower layers in future seasons. This is a runaway process and it can lead to a nutrient deficient lake, and very unhappy fish.

The take away message? Climate change isn’t just about things getting warmer and sweating more during the summer. Climate change is a direct threat to whole ecosystems. By tipping ecosystems out of balance it endangers many species of animals, including the animals causing the tipping (us). It’s high time that you start sweating over this situation. Please think about ways to cut your greenhouse gas emissions. If you need some suggestions, here are two good ones.

Apparently Mythbusters showed that running is a better option for staying dry, but only after they corrected for a false result they’d obtained in a previous show. So how could you figure this out without going through the hassle (or fun) of running through some rain yourself?

Well, what we could do is set up an idealized situation. Imagine there are 5000 drops of rain falling in every cubic meter above you. Let’s say they fall at 5 m/s straight downwards. To simplify things even further, let’s suppose we ignore the structure of our bodies and just consider a blocky person to have a set width, depth and height. Let’s make up a name for this person; Sponge Bob Square Pants (Bob for short). So, let’s say Bob is 0.25m thick, 0.5m wide, and 1m tall.

If Bob stands in the rain, all of the rain will hit his head. The number of drops hitting him per second is equal to the density of the rain times his width times his height thickness times the velocity of the rain in the downwards direction;

If he moves (walks or runs) this amount won’t change because the downward velocity of the rain won’t change with respect to him. But, on the other hand, if Bob walks or runs in the rain, the rain will have a horizontal velocity with respect to him, so the rain will start to hit him in the front. We can find the number of drops hitting his front by the same method.

I’ve just called Bob’s walking/running speed V. I’ll leave it like that and plug in his speed at the end. If Bob needs to run to his house which is 20m away, a total number of drops of rain will hit him in front and back for the trip which we can calculate. We just need to multiply the above results by the time it takes him to get there and then add them together. That’s just the distance to his house divided by his walking/running speed.

But here something funny happens. For the rain hitting his front:

Hey! It doesn’t depend on how fast he runs! So it really comes down to the rain hitting his head:

The faster he runs, the less time it takes him to get home. So to minimize the number of rain drops hitting his head, the faster he needs to run.

… but hey! I’m not the same shape as Sponge Bob, and rain doesn’t always fall straight down, you say?

Well, for those of you who want a more complex analysis, here’s a link to an online running-in-the-rain-wetness calculator. Check it out, it’s fun!

This week: Thought Experiments

When someone mentions the term “thought experiment”, the first person that probably comes to mind is Einstein and his daydream about trying to chase a beam of light — an image of which even non-physicists will be familiar. This is because thought experiments tend to be very memorable and accessible because they usually involve simple math or no math at all. Despite their mathematical simplicity, however, they still manage to shed light on puzzling aspects of nature.

Physics is an empirical science which means that you can do all the thinking and theorising you want, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t match the real world experimental results, it’s wrong. This fact might make the term “thought experiment” seem like a bit of an oxymoron. It’s true, a thought experiment won’t serve to prove anything in the same way a real experiment would, but it still has tremendous value. Thought experiments serve to collect one’s thoughts and attempt to make certain concepts in physics more intuitive. Occasionally they can shed new light on how the world works.

Here’s a really neat example. Remember Galileo? Remember the story of him dropping a cannon ball and a musket ball from the leaning tower to show that they fell at the same rate? Well, it’s unlikely that Galileo actually did this. It’s more likely that this was a well crafted thought experiment. Imagine starting with the assumption that heavier objects fall faster. What happens now if you attach a lighter object to a heavy object? The light object would want to fall slower than the heavy one, and would almost act like a parachute for the heavy one. But if you consider the compound object, it is heavier than both objects alone. So shouldn’t it fall faster? This thought experiment demonstrates that the assumption that heavier objects fall faster leads to a contradiction. An obvious resolution to the contradiction is to declare that all objects, regardless of their weight, fall at the same rate. If one did this experiment in real life would probably not see the objects fall at the same rate because of air friction. The power of the thought experiment is in its simplicity. It serves to demonstrate how nature should behave under certain assumptions and signals that something more is needed to be understood if nature doesn’t behave like this.

Newton’s cannon ball is another great example of an enlightening thought experiment. Really, just the simple picture of a few trajectories of a cannon ball being shot with greater and greater force demonstrates how things like the moon can orbit the earth. Good thought experiments like this tend to give the thinker an “aha!” moment; that moment of realization.

I’ve blogged about a few thought experiments here on Morning Coffee Physics. Some fun ones include Einstein’s elevator experiment, and the Rope and Wood riddle.

There’s one more thought experiment I really like. Imagine placing a chain (constant mass per unit length) on an obtuse triangular block. On one side, there is less chain, but a steeper slope. On the other side, there is more of the chain, but the slope is not too steep. Which way will the chain slide?

Sure, you could work out the forces and angles and all that jazz. But there is a very simple way to see the answer. Think about it for a few seconds.

…

Done? Okay.

Just connect another chain below and let it hang off of the ends of the previous chain, like so. Have you felt that “aha!” moment yet?

The hanging chain is symmetric so it should pull on each side of the top chain equally, which cancels its effect out. But if the top chain slid to one side or the other, for every link that fell off the block, another would replace it on the other side (coming from the hanging chain). Meaning the two (now linked) chains would spontaneously spin around the block! This is a ridiculous notion and a violation of the laws of conservation of energy. Therefore, the chain in the previous picture must remain at rest. No math necessary!

Anyone else have a favorite thought experiment?

___

A great reference: Brown, J. R., “Thought Experiments”.