Last night I did an interview on The Twit Netcast Network, on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour, about a variety of science topics! Brian Malow, aka the Science Comedian, guest-hosted the episode and was the one to invite me on.
Here is the link to the episode, titled, “Let there be light“. We discussed a range of topics, including Young’s double slit experiment, optical cloaking, solar sails, and weird science facts. Brian posted some helpful links related to the discussion on the show here, and I thought I’d supplement them with some of my own.
For those interested in reading more about optical cloaking and invisibility, I recently wrote a post for Scientific American’s guest blog that covers the concepts involved. I also have discussed the history of invisibility physics in a series of posts right here.
In the interview, we discussed the momentum of light and the concept of an “optical wing”. I wrote a detailed post on the subject early this year.
I also did a detailed post some time ago about Young’s double slit experiment, discussed early in the interview. For that matter, I’ve been doing an ongoing series of “optics basics” posts to try and explain the fundamentals of optics in a non-technical manner.
One of the more contentious comments I made during the interview was a statement that flight involves more complicated and subtle effects than simply the Bernoulli force. There are a couple of places online that discuss this reasonably well and in more detail — see here and here, for instance. There is also a good discussion of “Bernoulli” vs. “Newton” at this NASA page.
Anyone interested in seeing the video of my skydive from a hot air balloon, check here.
All of my #weirdscifacts on Twitter are being archived on the blog; the link to the category is here.
Finally, let me say thank you again to Brian for the invitation to be interviewed (and for doing an excellent job hosting), and to all the folks on the Twit Netcast Network for making it happen! Also, thanks to everyone who listened or will listen in the future! If you have any comments or thoughts on the interview, I’d love to hear them.
Skulls in the Stars 
I heard your interview on TWIT tonight and had a question relating to the Expanding Universe that I’ve never heard being discussed:
As they have been able to determine that the universe is expanding, have they determined where the universe is expanding FROM?
Given that what they know is based on a tiny segment of the universe we are located in, working backwards from the farthest galaxy we have discovered, are they able to establish the point where everything started? It would be interesting to see some sort of time-line model of the universe giving the relationship of your galaxy, along with all the others, in relation to the point of the big bang.
Thanks for the comment! As I understand it, there’s still no way to determine the point of origin of the universe — since everything is moving away from everything else, in a sense everything “looks” like the center. This might be different if we knew the boundaries of the universe, but as it stands we’ve certainly not seen everything out there.
Of course this isn’t my field, so there may be a variety of more subtle circumstances that would make it easier/harder to make such a calculation.
This is correct; every point is just as good a center of the cosmic expansion as any other.
If the idea of space itself expanding sounds weird, well, whoever said life had to be simple? 😉