The Twitter #weirdscifacts from June 20 – July 03 are below the fold!
I can’t resist doing a mini-bleg: vote for our kitty Sasha as cutest pet in the American Express Cutest Pet Photo Contest! The pic you’re looking for is:
Voting runs to 10/1/2010, and you can vote every day for Sasha! We’re way behind (I’m pretty sure folks are gaming the system), but the benefits of winning aren’t trivial — we could win a $2000 gift card.
The only catch is that they ask for an email on first voting. They aren’t verifying emails, however, so you can put pretty much anything in to thwart future correspondence. You will lose out on a chance for a $375 gift card if you don’t use your own email, though.
At this point, it’s partly about pride for me — Sasha is way cuter than some of those other animals, and deserves more votes!
(Okay, I’m done begging — back to science blogging!)
“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.
Check back next week for more miscellaneous suggestions!
Almost two weeks ago, I noted the arrival of two foster kitties in our home: Brewster and Breyer! Well, I’m happy to say that we dropped them off at their new hopefully “forever home” this evening!
This was all done with the help of (and helping) Terry who runs F.U.R.R. — Feline Urgent Rescue and Rehabilitation. We’ll almost certainly be fostering some more cats in the near future, and I’ll keep folks posted on events as they progress.
In the meantime, here are some final shots of Brewster and Breyer, so I can remember how sweet they are!
I’m currently working my way through E.T. Whittaker‘s monumental A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (1910), among other things. Whittaker’s book is a very comprehensive study of electricity and aether that stretches back from the seventeenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, and it really is excellent — I’ve already learned a lot, and am only 20 pages into it! (I loved a fascinating tidbit about the first experimental measurement of magnetic field lines, demonstrating the poles of the magnet — I’ll come back to this in a future post.)
However, as I’ve blogged about previously, there is one glaring weakness in Whittaker’s treatment. In his second volume of the ‘History, released in 1953, he almost completely discounted Einstein’s contribution to the theory of special relativity! While discussing the “relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz,” his primary statement regarding Einstein’s work is:
In the autumn of the same year, in the same volume of the Annalen der Physik as his paper on the Brownian motion, Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention.
Whittaker is much more generous towards Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and gives him the credit, but his dismissal of Einstein’s contribution to special relativity is puzzling. I’ve speculated that Whittaker was perhaps a bit miffed that his life’s work on the aether was made obsolete in 1905 by Einstein before it was even published; it may also be that Whittaker genuinely didn’t completely grasp the philosophical implications of Einstein’s contribution.
So what is the irony in this?
With all the concerted efforts into popularizing science that goes on these days, it is quite easy to forget that some of the best scientists throughout history put a lot of effort into making their knowledge accessible both to students of the arts and laypeople alike. Physicists in particular are often viewed as “keepers of secret knowledge” who study phenomena outside the ken of mortals and who are unwilling or unable to make this knowledge accessible to others.
A perfect counterexample to this perception is the great physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) , who over the course of many years presented the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution, targeted at nonspecialists and young people. Two of these lectures, “The Forces of Matter” and “The Chemical History of a Candle”, have been reprinted and are still available today; I will be blogging about them in detail in the near future (hopefully). Faraday in fact put much effort and thought into his public presentations; long before he was a recognized scientist and had any opportunity to speak to an audience, he observed other lecturers and took elaborate notes on the “do’s” and “don’t’s” of lecturing.
Another example of a distinguished scientist working very hard on presentation is Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955). Wood is best known today for his work in optics, particularly in the study of infrared and ultraviolet light. As we have seen previously on this blog, however, Wood was also active in popularizing science: he co-authored two science fiction novels, The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915) and The Moon Maker (1916). He also was quite skilled at setting up simple demonstrations of optical effects; I’ve previously discussed his 1902 illustration of a simple form of invisibility. Between the years 1897 and 1905, Wood in fact published a number of short articles suggesting simple lecture hall demonstrations of a variety of physical phenomena; in this post, we’ll take a short look at these demonstrations.
There’s only 11 days left before the deadline of the next edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival! It will be held at Entertaining Research, and the deadline for entries is September 15th. Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!
The Twitter #weirdscifacts from June 06 – June 19 are below the fold!
My friend and colleague, Dr. Charles Sykes of Tufts University, recently sent me a link to an interesting video his research group has put together! Dr. Sykes’ group has been studying the behavior of complex molecules on surfaces at low temperatures. They use scanning tunneling microscopy to image and interact with the molecules on the surface, with the ultimate goal of making nanoscale machines, i.e. machines consisting of a single molecule!
Their research video describes the techniques, science, and challenges in developing such molecular motors:
Let me know what you think of the video, or contact the Sykes group directly!
“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.
Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” suggestions!
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 