Physics
"Why didn't these people follow their true vocation ending in a white-collar office, rather than breaking the balls to whom does Physics ?"
(Anonymous physics researcher from unnamed experiment, upon experiencing endless strings of meaningless objections and inane requests for wording changes to a paper about to get sent for publication by a bunch of less worthy colleagues).
... And there would be a lot to say about the subject, but I will save it for another post.
What Is A Tipping Point ?
The term 'tipping point' is in widespread use in English, but what does it mean?
Imagine a child's seesaw with an empty bucket on each end. The seesaw is initially at rest with one end touching the ground. If left alone, nothing would happen - there would be no motion. The whole mechanical contraption would be in a static configuration - in static, or stable equilibrium.
A sensitive dial scale is placed under the lower end of the seesaw. You now drip water or trickle sand into the upper bucket. For a long time, nothing much happens.…
Every two years particle physicists meet at a conference which is just a bit more important, more well-attended, and more prestigious than all the others that pester our agendas every other week. This conference is called ICHEP - the International Conference on High-Energy Physics - and it is usually the favourite and most favourable place where to present or to listen to groundbreaking results, important advancements, thorough review talks.
This year ICHEP 2010 will be in Paris. This is an attractive venue, and I expect a very large attendance. But this year there is a novelty that might…
Courtesy gizmodo:
The typo we had been all waiting for. And there is already who fantasizes about the need for a Large Hardon Condom, to play it safe...
Sorry for the reblogging, but this time I did not resist...
Two years ago I discussed the results of a very interesting search performed by the CDF experiment in its dataset of 2-TeV proton-antiproton collisions, provided by the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab.
The search focused on the hypothesis that a massive fourth-generation quark was produced in the collisions. What was assumed was that the quark was heavy -otherwise previous searches would have found it already-, and that it behaved similarly to the sixth quark, the top, which is by now a well-known animal of the particle zoo.
Top quarks have been sought by the CDF experiment since the late…
Marshall, thanks for your reply.
I'm not famous Jerry. He published his photo in the Keely group, so you can see the difference.http://keelynet.com/whoisdecker.htm
I believe John Ernst Worrell Keely was a complete and deliberate fraud.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely
I differ from the other Jerry on some important points.
** I draw all of my primary sources from original works of science by famous widely recognized pioneers. With a policy of reading everything and listening to every opinion, I read all of the fringe area writings and got nothing useful from…
Physicists at Ohio University and the University of Hamburg in Germany have captured the first images of atomic spin in action.
The research indicates that scientists can observe and perhaps manipulate spin, a finding that may impact future development of nanoscale magnetic storage, quantum computers and spintronic devices.
The images have been published in a new Nature Nanotechnology study.
For the study, researchers used a custom-built microscope with an iron-coated tip to manipulate cobalt atoms on a plate of manganese. Through scanning tunneling microscopy, the team…
My friend Peppe Liberti, a physicist and blogger from southern Italy, sent me today a amusing list of essential biographies of scientists. I wish to share them with you here, after I explain what this is about.
The rules of the game are quite simple: find an amusing way to summarize as succintly as possible (usually not exceeding two lines of text) the life and works of a well-known scientist.
Here is Peppe's bid: five really good ones.
Ludwig Boltzmann was one that sought an equilibrium. He died in an irreversible manner.
Georg Cantor tried to order the infinities. Ended in a closed set…
Well, who exactly is DORIS? “She” is actually the first Doppel-Ring-Speicher (which translates neatly into English as “Double-Ring Storage”) at DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron in Hamburg. It’s not the only one; the more recent PETRA (Positron-Elektron-Tandem-Ring-Anlage) and HERA (Hadron-Elektron-Ring-Anlage) are both storage rings. All these rings were originally built as particle accelerators, but in 1962 Ruprecht Haensel was asked to find out for his PhD thesis whether anything useful could be done with the “by-product” synchrotron radiation that…
Analogies are a powerful way to explain complicated scientific concepts. I use them as much as I can whenever I describe particle physics in this blog or when I give a outreach talk in a school. However, good ones are not always easy to find. One usually needs examples from everyday life, which are simple to describe and which do not possess distracting features.
Today I wish to try my luck with you, to see if you come up with an analogy which is better than the one I could find to explain a feature of weak interactions. I must say I am not dissatisfied with my own find, but it is always good…