I’ve been haunted by Bertram Mitford’s novel The Sign of the Spider (1896) ever since I read it (and blogged about it), so I thought the time was past due to investigate some of his other works. The next one that caught my eye was Mitford’s second novel, The Weird of Deadly Hollow (1891), and I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it:
At long last, I get to blog about the paper that first piqued my interest about the research of Michael Faraday! If you haven’t been following my Faraday posts, let me give a quick recap: Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time, and the discoverer of some of the most important effects related to electricity and magnetism. I’ve blogged previously about his discovery of electromagnetic induction, his work in proving that all forms of electricity have the same common origin, and his demonstration of the relationship between light and magnetism (Faraday rotation). I haven’t even had time to discuss Faraday’s contributions in formulating the laws of electrolysis, understanding diamagnetism, and inventing the Faraday cage.
The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, ‘universal’ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faraday’s time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ørsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a tantalizing dream. Faraday went further than any of his contemporaries in realizing that dream, and experimentally cemented the link between electricity and magnetism and light. Faraday was by no means done, however, and in 1851 he published the results of his attempts to demonstrate that electricity and gravity are related!
Though his results were negative, they are a fascinating piece of experimental work and provide some lessons for modern day theorists and experimentalists alike.
The fiancée pointed out to me today that one of our new favorite shows, Life on Mars, will not be surviving to season 2. This is a real shame; though it was a remake of a classic UK show, we’d grown really fond of the series.
In fact, there have been a lot of good shows on television this season; for the first time in a long time, I’ve actually found much of my weeknights filled up with good television viewing. Quite a few of these shows, however, are wavering in the ratings and could share the fate of Life on Mars. I thought I’d do a post about, and a general appeal for, those shows I’ve fallen in love with in recent months/years:
I finally got around to adding a few additional blogs to my blogroll, and thought I’d acknowledge them:
White Coat Underground. I met PalMD at ScienceOnline09 and, in addition to him being one of those people I immediately liked and enjoy talking to, he writes a wonderful and compelling blog about “the intersection of science, medicine, and culture.”
The Inverse Square Blog. I also met Tom Levenson at ScienceOnline09, and have been enjoying his blog and its discussion of “science and the public square.” I’m looking forward to his upcoming book about a little-known chapter of Isaac Newton’s life, Newton and the Counterfeiter.
Bittersweet Sage’s Blog. My friend and colleague, who harasses me on my own blog under the name “Personal Demon”, has been writing his own blog as “an experiment in writing productively outside of my job.” As he acknowledges, the content is a bit random right now, but he always has some interesting things to say (and he scooped me in reviewing Dan Simmons’ new novel Drood).
Once again the folks at The Onion have demonstrated their satirical genius! They ‘report’ on an Arkham, MA school board member who is pushing to add the unspeakable, sanity-shattering dark arts to the curriculum:
“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods—not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”
The article is very entertaining, even for those with only a passing knowledge of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. (h/t Pharyngula)
The more I read of Michael Faraday’s work, the more I am in awe of the scientist’s insights and abilities. As evidence of the remarkable intuition he had regarding the forces of nature, consider the following passage:
I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many others of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. In modern times the proofs of their convertibility have been accumulated to a very considerable extent, and a commencement made of the determination of their equivalent forces.
Faraday wrote this as the introduction to the nineteenth series of his “Experimental Researches in Electricity,” published in the Philosophical Transactions (vol 136, pp. 1-20) in 1846! It is an eloquent and remarkably timeless statement which could very well have been written by any modern physicist working on the foundations of a grand unified theory of forces.
As he himself notes in the passage above, Faraday was not alone in envisioning a single theory encompassing all physical phenomena. Indeed, once Ørsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the relationship of electricity and magnetism, as well as other forces, was very much on the minds of physicists. Faraday, however, led the charge in actually demonstrating these relations. As I have noted in previous blog posts, Faraday demonstrated experimentally that magnets could induce electric currents (Faraday induction) around 1831, and also compiled evidence demonstrating that the diverse sources of electricity were different manifestations of the same electrical phenomena around 1833.
Because of these discoveries (and other hugely important ones that I haven’t had time yet to discuss), by 1845 Faraday was one of the most prestigious and famous scientists in England. He was by no means done with his research, however, and in that year he presented a paper describing his observations that a magnetic field can indirectly influence the behavior of a light wave. This was the first definitive evidence that light and electromagnetism are related, and helped pave the way for Maxwell’s brilliant theoretical demonstration of the existence of electromagnetic waves, and their identity with light.
The effect that Faraday observed is now known as Faraday rotation, and we take a look at the experiments, and their reception, in this post.
I’ve been planning another post on the scientific discoveries of Michael Faraday, but in the process of researching his work on so-called Faraday rotation, I came across a wonderful story which is too charming not to share!
By 1844, Faraday was at the height of his popularity, and reports of his discoveries would apparently be devoured by scientists and non-scientists alike. One would hesitate to compare his popularity to a modern rock star’s, but then there’s this charming anecdote from The Life and Letters of Faraday, vol 2 (1870).
Faraday received a letter from a lady ‘of the highest talent’ who proposed ‘to become his disciple and go through with him all his own experiments.’ The lady’s name is not mentioned by Dr. Bence Jones, who compiled the letters; it was likely still considered rather improper in that era for a lady to boldly apply for a research assistantship from one of the most prominent scientists of the day. Faraday, however, gave a charming and very cordial response (Oct 24, 1844):
I recently took another look at my post on depth of focus and depth of field, and noticed to my chagrin that the link to the original ‘miniworld’ pics, which show how a real scene can be made to look miniature by appropriate blurring, had been broken!
Fortunately, it’s no great mystery how such images are done. I easily found a very nice webpage that describes in detail how to manipulate your own photographs using Photoshop. The results of my crude tinkering are shown below (click on the pictures to see the full effect):
The first one is of houses on the coast near the Florida-Alabama border, the second is of the ice rink Jaap Edenbaan in Amsterdam, and the third is a view of Amsterdam from the Zuiderkerk. I put these pictures into an update on the depth of field post.
One thing is worth noting about this technique: real miniature photographs have a narrow depth of field, which means that only objects at a certain distance from the camera will be in focus. The Photoshop technique shown here fakes this by creating a vertical gradient blur on the image. To look reasonable, however, the image must be one for which the vertical axis of the picture maps more or less to the actual distance of the object from the camera. Big objects in the foreground, which stretch across the vertical axis of the picture, can ruin the effect. For instance, check out this attempt on a Providence cemetary:
The trees on the left and right (and the church steeple, to a lesser extent) disrupt the illusion, to my eye.
I’ve been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for years. If you’re not familiar, the show consisted of a human host and two wisecracking (puppet) robots ridiculing bad science fiction, fantasy, and horror films, and was generally a hoot! (I pay tribute to the show with my category, “…the Hell?“, which was a common refrain by Tom Servo.)
Like plenty of fans, I found myself almost uncontrollably ridiculing films and television shows, much to the chagrin of my friends and fiancée! After MST3K ended its run in 1999, the comedians on the show apparently felt very much the same way: several of them started a company called RiffTrax, in which they record audio commentaries for movies (‘riffs’) which can be played in sync with the DVD audio track. This brilliant premise means that the RiffTrax folks don’t need to fight for costly film rights and can riff on pretty much any film they like, including new and terrible releases such as The Happening!
Well, last fall they introduced a new innovation: iRiffs, in which the fans can write, record, and sell their own riffs through the RiffTrax store! I was intrigued, and started writing a script almost immediately. A recent deadline for an iRiff contest (which I didn’t really make) spurred me to finish my iRiff of the 1998 American version of Godzilla, which is now available online! I thought I’d share some observations about the iRiff construction process in this post.
This one’s been bugging me all day, and although others have tackled it admirably, I wanted to give my perspective, and an amateur would-be vulcanologist. In the Republican response to President Obama’s speech last night, in which he strongly defended the stimulus bill, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had the following to say:
While some of the projects in the [stimulus] bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a ‘magnetic levitation’ line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.
There’s a lot wrong with this statement; for instance, as pointed out by Steven Benen, the quip about a rail line from Las Vegas to Disneyland is pure Republican fantasy. What really angered me, though, is the mocking tone Jindal had for ‘volcano monitoring’.
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 