Skulls in the Stars

The tally of death and devastation in China in the aftermath of the earthquake continues to grow; now the official death toll is 22,000, with 14,000 still buried under rubble. In addition, repeated aftershocks are hitting the region.

Numerous eyewitness videos have been posted online since the event. This one in particular caught my eye, which shows a group of students outdoors experiencing the quake firsthand. It is a bit chilling to see their enthusiasm, knowing the devastation that was being wrought far away, but the students clearly felt that they were experiencing a small local quake, and had no idea that they were in fact 500 miles from the epicenter.

The part of the video that caught my eye was the sloshing of the water in the small pond. I believe this could be considered a small-scale version of a relatively little-known water wave phenomenon known as a seiche.

(more…)

Now that I’ve actually written my “classic science” blog post, I realized I didn’t plan any way to compile all the entries in the end! If you accept the “challenge” (I keep putting the word in quotes because I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be confrontational), and post an entry, send me an email! I’ve put together a permanent page to compile all the entries together in one easy to find spot.

(I think I didn’t plan ahead because I didn’t think anyone was actually reading my blog!)

One final note:  Just to have an end date associated with the challenge, let’s mark the end of May as the official end date; I’ll do a summary post at the end about everyone’s entries.

I’m between “blog thoughts” today, but I thought I’d point out a couple of cool clocks that I “stumbled upon” in recent weeks. Though I don’t think either of them will help Tom with his research, they’re both pretty cool. Below the fold…

(more…)

One of the things that I still find incredibly fun about being a scientist is the ability to “touch” history, in the form of the original publication of now famous scientific results. I’m reminded of my undergraduate days, when a classmate and I were discussing the topic of Čerenkov radiation, which had become relevant in our high-energy physics discussions. We didn’t completely understand the idea, so the next day my classmate came in with a photocopy of Čerenkov’s original (well, translated) 1934 paper. That was the first time it dawned on me that, as scientists, we could go right to the “source”, so to speak, and in essence learn about science from the famous people who performed it.

There’s a lot more to learn in going to the source than one might think. As Tom at Swans on Tea observed recently,

The “materials at hand” is one thing that continually amazes me. I read details of some century-old experiment and am reminded that their apparatus and supplies were hand-crafted, often in the same lab. You read about Rutherford doing alpha-scattering experiments in pure nitrogen. Did he order a tank of compressed nitrogen from the local welding-supplies shop, like I do? Of course not.

The nitrogen was obtained by the well-known method of adding ammonium chloride to sodium nitrite, and stored over water.

(My well-known method involves the internet and a credit card)

My “challenge”, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, “in your basement”-style science. There’s a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!

(I’ve already got my paper picked out, though I miscalculated a bit: I thought it was a straightforward experiment that couldn’t be more than a two-page paper, but it’s about 40 pages - and in German!)

P.S.  Hopefully it was clear from the original post, but my “challenge” extends to sciencebloggers of all branches, not just physics bloggers: I’d be really interested to read about some of the landmark papers in biology, chemistry, and math, too!

Again via StumbleUpon, I found this very nice interactive version of the periodic table.  The elements are color-coded according to their orbital configuration, and hovering the mouse over an element gives you all the significant chemical properties.  I find myself uncontrollably wandering the table, looking at various elements, which probably means it serves as an excellent teaching tool!

Via StumbleUpon, I came across this nice collection of chemistry videos at listverse.com: The Top 10 Amazing Chemical Reactions.  If you want to see chemicals acting in very ‘unnatural’ ways, take a gander.

My favorite is the sulfur hexafluoride, an invisible gas over 5 times heavier than air.  Because of this, it can be held in an open container and have lightweight objects floated on top of it.  On a more serious note, it reminded me of another gas which is heavier than air: carbon dioxide.  In 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a massive amount of carbon dioxide that had been suspended in solution at the lake’s bottom, evidently much like a can of soda bubbles over when pressure is released.  The carbon dioxide hugged the ground and ended up smothering and poisoning 1800 people in the lake’s vicinity.  (Cattle were not spared from the effects, either.)  Currently, a French-Cameroon team is working on ‘degassing‘ the lakes by venting the gas from the lake bottom.

The girlfriend sent me the link to the following I Can Haz Cheezeburger, which I post without further comment:

A few weeks ago I did a post on the camera obscura and noted that the earliest researcher to really understand its properties was the middle-eastern scientist Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040), who in spite of his impressive achievements is rarely discussed by the physics community (including myself in that group).  The post caught the attention of Bradley Steffens, who has recently written a short book on the scientist, and now that I’ve read it, I thought I’d recommend it!

(more…)

Just thought I’d point out a few interesting science posts around the web, for those who might not have stumbled upon them:

Blake Stacey at Science After Sunclipse is doing his best to shed readers with an excellent, but mathematical, post about the Dirac equation.  Dirac’s mixing of special relativity and quantum mechanics led to the prediction of antimatter, and also  naturally incorporated quantum-mechanical spin.

Tom at Swans on Tea points out that it is officially ‘Talk Like a Physicist Day‘.  So I ‘propagated’ to work today instead of ‘drove’, and instead of ‘eating lunch’ I’ll be ‘extracting energy from organic compounds.’

Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles describes some recent interesting optical four-wave mixing experiments and their implications.

Over at PLEKTIX, Ben Allen gives a non-technical discussion of ‘causality’ in special relativity and, in essence, who to blame when something goes wrong!

A few recent articles got me thinking about the prevalence of crackpot science and medical quackery in modern society, and I thought I’d just write a post with some general thoughts and observations on the subject.

The articles that got me thinking again: McCain jumps into autism controversy, rejects science and evidence, via The Carpetbagger Report, the ‘return’ of the Lizard Man in Lee County, South Carolina, and Bad Statistical Reasoning about Weather and Climate, via Good Math/Bad Math.

Let me summarize each of these reports briefly after the fold, and then speculate what they (and other unscientific arguments) have in common.

(more…)