The third edition of The Giant’s Shoulders is up at Entertaining Research! It’s a smaller edition than the previous ones, but still has some very nice entries (mine included!). Thanks to Guru for putting it together!
The next edition will be held on October 15th at Second Order Approximation. Let’s get those entries in! I myself am working my way translating about 60 pages worth of old French research.
The music world has lost one of its greats: Rick Wright, keyboardist and founding member of Pink Floyd, died at 65 after a long battle with cancer.
His contributions to the band were often dismissed, especially, it seems, by fellow band member Roger Waters. My impression, though, is that Pink Floyd is one of those bands that worked its magic best when all its members were contributing to the creative process.
There’s probably one video that captures the mood amongst Pink Floyd fans right now, and seems a fitting tribute:
I continue with some reviews of the works of Richard Marsh, in celebration of the release of Valancourt’s edition of The Beetle. This time I discuss a book that is, as yet, only available through Google books, Richard Marsh’s A Metamorphosis (1903).
This story is a marked departure from other Marsh works I’ve read, in that it combines the elements of a thriller with what can only be called a rollicking adventure story. I discuss it and give some observations below the fold…
Since writing about the first official test of the LHC on September 10th, I’ve noticed I’m getting a significant amount of hits. This is a bit strange, since my post was pretty much the least informative post about the LHC, among many good ones. Then I noticed the nature of some of the searches that led people here:
earthquake sept 10 related to lhc
lhc earthquake
earthquake lhc
lhc caused earthquakes sept. 10
lhc +earthquake
Ah; my post had been primarily critical of CNN’s lede concerning the LHC, and I mocked it by modifying other ledes of that day, including the story about the Iranian earthquake. But why were people searching for the words “LHC” and “earthquake” together. A quick Google search found the following:
This is not a joke. This is not a ploy. This is real. 4 major earthquakes in a single day, and it just so happened to be the day the LHC was powered on. I’m not saying one caused the other because I have no definite proof, but I’m also not saying that it isn’t possible. If you dismissed the fear of what the LHC could possibly bring to the earth, I asked that you take another hard look and consider the possibility that you could be wrong. Consider the possibility that you don’t know everything and also consider the possibility that there are forces out there which are much greater than our understanding, some of which are not meant to be tampered with.
*Sigh* Other articles and comments can be found making similar claims (and one spoof).
Let me, as a physicist, be completely, unambiguously clear about this: the LHC had absolutely nothing to do with any earthquake anywhere on the Earth, and it never will.
If you need more reassurance, go below the fold.
It would be horrible of me to let September 13th pass by and not note the birthday of the most excellent actor Richard Kiel! Kiel turns 69 today.
Kiel, standing a daunting 7’2” tall, has made a career out of playing intimidating bruisers and sinister villains. Horror fans might know him for his two turns as monsters in the original Night Stalker series: once as a Native American shaman, once (unrecognizable) as a moss monster. Western fans might remember him as the hired goon Club in Pale Rider. Science fiction fans might recognize him as the towering (and hungry) alien Kanamit in the Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man. MST3K fans will of course immediately recognize him as the lovelorn caveman Eegah!
Most people, though, will think of Richard Kiel as the sinister, steel-teethed assassin Jaws in two james Bond films, Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me!
Kiel has also had a hand at writing and producing, penning the family movie The Giant of Thunder Mountain. In 2004, he penned his autobiography, Making It BIG in the Movies.
Happy Birthday to Richard Kiel, and thanks for giving us some villains and monsters (and heroes) worth remembering!
Shtemlo!
Note: This post is my contribution to the third edition of The Giant’s Shoulders, a carnival of blog posts on classic science papers.
One of the most famous statements concerning quantum mechanics, as it relates to the light particles known as photons, was made by the brilliant scientist Paul Dirac in his Quantum Mechanics book1:
“each photon then interferes only with itself. Interference between different photons never occurs.”
This statement is bold and unambiguous: in Dirac’s view, a photon only creates interference patterns by virtue of its own wave function, and wave functions of different photons do not interact.
The statement is bold, unambiguous, often quoted — and wrong! In 1963, Leonard Mandel and G. Magyar of Imperial College disproved this statement2 with a clever and simple experiment and a two-page paper in Nature. I was reminded of this work by a question on my recent post on coherence, and it seemed worth reexploring. Follow me below…
This is a reminder that there’s 4 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #3, to be held at Entertaining Research. Entries can be submitted, as always, through blogcarnival.com.
From various sources in the science blogotopia, we learn that the LHC has been started for the first time! For those unfamiliar, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is designed to be the world’s largest particle accelerator, which will probe the frontiers of known physics in search of a greater understanding of the fundamental forces of nature.
I don’t have a lot to say on the start up of the LHC itself, other than the fact that it’s very exciting (I did undergraduate and graduate work in high-energy physics, so I have a bias). I can’t resist, however, pointing out CNN’s initial lede on the subject:
Scientists applauded as one of the most ambitious experiments ever conceived began today. The Large Hadron Collider — designed to simulate conditions of the Big Bang — was switched on this morning. Skeptics claim the experiment could create a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth.
Emphasis mine. This is highly misleading, as the ‘skeptics’ in question to the best of my knowledge have no scientific experience and are contradicted by every reputable scientist on the planet. The structure of the story has changed since I first read it, but it still highlights the concerns of the ‘skeptics’. Just for fun, let’s look at what some other CNN ledes might look like if given similar skeptical counterbalance:
If anyone’s noticed a slowdown in my blog output recently, the reasons are twofold: 1. The beginning of the academic semester, and 2. I’m finally trying to make progress on my textbook. I will probably continue to post at a slower pace for a few weeks, but definitely won’t stop completely.
As a consolation, here’s a cute video I took the other day of two of our cats, Simon and Sabrina, getting acquainted with a new motorized water dish:
As promised, here’s the first discussion of some classic Richard Marsh, in celebration of the release of Valancourt’s edition of The Beetle. I start with a brief discussion of another Valancourt edition, Richard Marsh’s Philip Bennion’s Death (1897).
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. 
