Where is my mind?

Look at more optical illusions here. I was really confused by the color perception flash animations! I actually took a screen shot, got the RGB code of the patches they say have the same color, and they do! The flash ani is not so really convincing, but trust me ;-)

Try this trick and spin it
Your head will collapse but there's nothing in it
And you'll ask yourself:
"Where is my mind?"

Pixies, Where is my mind

Circle of Carts

Look at this :-) I'd bet it was taken in Santa Barbara.

Found on Robert Wechsler's site.

Happy Birthday Benjamin Franklin!

Gee, it seems whenever Stefan and I attempt to write a post together it ends up being a total disaster. Good morning Stefan! Thanks for the draft, I rewrote it, just so you know! Okay folks, here we go: today is Benjamin Franklin's 301st birthday, and so this blog honors the man who enlightened America, born on January 17th 1706 in Boston.

Did you know...

...that Benjamin Franklin was the first American to own a bathtub?

Well, if you knew that and thought is was funny, Stefan taught me it belongs into the recycle bin of urban legends. But lets try again:

Did you know...

... that Benjamin Franklin was so sure that fresh air was important for good health that he took a daily “air bath”?

Well, I didn't know until today. See, that's what being married is good for, you learn how to get along with your ideas about bathing.


Besides this, Benjamin is known for the invention of the lightning rod, the chimney and the public library.


While I was browsing the web for interesting stuff about Franklin, I found this website where you can have Fun with Franklin. Among other things, you'll learn that a necessary ingredient for a lemon battery is '1 adult helper'. But besides this, upon the mere mentioning of Franklin, I kind of feel the responsibility to remind you 'Never play with electrical cords, wires, switches, or plugs. - Fly kites and model airplanes in a wide open field or park never near overhead electrical wires.'

Yes, yes, you'd have thought after 300 years, people should know:


"(19 March 2006, Belize) Benjamin Franklin reputedly flew his kite in a lightning storm, going on to discover that lightning equals electricity. However, certain precautions must be taken to avoid sudden electrocution. Kennon, 26, replicated the conditions of Ben Franklin's experiment, but without Ben's sensible safety precautions. Dennon was flying a kite with a short string that he had extended with a length of thin copper wire. The copper made contact with a high-tension line, sending a bolt of electrical lightning towards the man. Just bad luck? Kennon's father told listeners his son was an electrician, and "should have known better." Kennon is survived by his parents, six sisters, and five brothers."

Nominee for the Darwin Award 2006

But besides providing an everlasting inspiration for the truly ingenious, Franklin was also actively involved in the first scientific clinical trial:

In the 1780s, the Viennese physician Anton Mesmer came to fame with his theory that "animal magnetism" may be an important determinant for the health of the body and the mind, and that magnetism could be used to cure all kinds of diseases. In a time when electricity was recognized as a driving force for the muscles in the body, this idea could not be easily dismissed as plain nonsense.

Mesmerism: The Operator Inducing a Hypnotic Trance, engraving after Dodd, 1794. Plate from Ebenezer Sibly's book, A Key to Physic, 1794. (Source)

There were many arduous fans of Mesmer and his healing methods. But there were skeptics, too - one of them was Louis XVI, the King of France, who wasn't as mesmerized as his wife, Marie-Antoinette. He wanted to know for sure what was there about these theories of this Austrian physician, and commissioned a report by high-level, international and interdisciplinary committee of experts to find out.

Headed by Franklin, and including the chemist Lavoisier, the botanist Jussieu, and the physician Guillotin, the panel carefully planned and conducted experiments to test Mesmer's hypothesis. In their public report, they concluded that there was no scientific evidence of animal magnetism. Successes of Mesmer's cures could be attributed either to other factors, or to a placebo effect. I bet they'd been interested to hear this frog's idea about animal magnetism.

One could go on and on about Franklin, if you are really interested, you might want to read his autobiography. But from all the interesting things about this great man's life, I want to share with you a quotation that I found about our search for the truth:

"Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities."

(In the preface of the 1784 Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin and other commissioners, charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practised at Paris)

For more fun with Franklin, check out this very professionally designed website, it's just a looker.

PS: Sorry Stefan for messing up your pedagogically valuable essay.

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TAGS: HISTORY OF SCIENCE, USELESS KNOWLEDGE, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, BATHTUB

Micro Black Day

This post refers to three articles I read today about Micro Black Holes at the LHC. The articles are in German I am afraid, but I'll briefly try to summarize them.

The first article is rather short and uninspired, and appeared in an online magazine called astronews.com

Schwarze Löcher im Labor? (Black Holes in The Laboratory?)

The second article, which is actually very nicely written, contains a lot of information and also cool pictures, and appeared at heise.de

Experimente mit Schwarzen Löchern (Experiments with Black Holes)

As Andi informed me, both apparently go back to a publication at the University of Frankfurt by Marcus Bleicher und Horst Stöcker:

Schwarze Löcher im Labor? Auf der Suche nach einer experimentellen Bestaetigung der String Theorie (Black holes in the Laboratory? The search for an experimental verification of string theory)

If you look at the above pdf-file, last page, bottom right in the box 'about the authors', you'll find the sentence '[...] work closely together with Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder and Dr. Stefan Hofmann (both at Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada) [...]'.

I am very relieved this piece of information did not make it into the both articles, because a considerable part of the content is complete nonsense. What we reliably know about micro black holes you find in my earlier post, or - for more information - look up this brief summary paper.

Firstly, I should point out that the possible production of mini black holes relies on a scenario with large compactified extra dimensions, without these, nothing will happen. So far, there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of these extra dimensions. (See also Lisa Randall's book Warped Passages). Nevertheless, the possibility that quantum gravitational effects could potentially be observable at the LHC next year is just fascinating, and has been explored during the last years. I too have worked on predictions for the LHC.

Especially the production of micro black holes is a topic that I've found very exciting, because it is one of the most general expectations that we have. When gravity gets too strong, one makes black holes. This is fairly independent of the exact details. The precise properties of the black hole's decay however will be model dependent, especially in the late (Planckian) stages. Some argue that there might not even be a final decay, but that a 'black hole relic' remains: a thermodynamically stable black hole of about Planck mass that does not evaporate. For the case of LHC, these relics would have mass of the order TeV (about 1000 times a proton mass), or a diameter of the order 1/1000 fm. (In case you don't know what a fm is, this is really tiny.) Nobody knows whether black hole relics exists. Most don't think so, me included.

The three articles above feature an 'idea' by Horst to use black hole relics to convert mass into energy. You find this mentioned in hep-ph/0607165, section 6. The idea is roughly that one pushes matter into the relics. Thereby their mass increases, which means they are able again to evaporate. They evaporate back down to their original mass, thereby releasing the matter that was pushed into them in form of energy. Thus, one has converted mass into energy.

The astronew article closes with

"Should the production of stable relics at CERN in the next years be successful, then the energy consumption of the whole earth could be provided with only ten tons of arbitrary material in these converters. The search for the micro black holes therefore is a profitable matter."

Well, unfortunately this idea is very far from being realistic. Since I know both Horst and Marcus, I really don't like to do this, but I just feel that I have to point out this is scientifically complete nonsense: The black hole relics are very small, and have an extremely tiny cross-section. This does not only mean it's impossible to store them (when they are uncharged), this also means you can't feed them. This exactly being the argument why the black holes don't grow and eat up the earth.

Even if you'd run the whole LHC for each atom of the matter that you want to 'push' into the relics of size 10^-18 m, you'd have very little chances of success. To put it boldly, if you want to convert your empty coke cans into energy, you'll have to push them into the relic of the size 1/1000 of a proton's diameter.

But let's leave aside the coke cans. What do you think how profitable it would be to run the LHC to convert even a single proton into gamma rays? And even if, then what? Use it to heat water by cooling the detector? And notice that you can't put these relics together to get a larger one (even if you could store them) because they would merge, evaporate and leave you with only one relic.

Look, I really am a friend of speculative ideas, but for scientists it is irresponsible to distribute gross misinformation like this. I've talked again and again to Horst, and I like to think that he is aware of this issue.

However, I can also tell you in how far this is profitable: getting research funding for theoretical physics is tough, in the USA as well as in Germany. Media attention helps. And recently, by a new decision, each patent hold increases grants...

One might want to blame the notoriously problematic financial support for this. One might also want to blame the journalists for not being skeptical enough, or - more importantly - the referees and editors who accepted papers that contained this nonsense.

But eventually the responsibility goes back to the scientist. I think it it ethically unacceptable to publicly spread this scientifically unjustified idea. I neither think this is cool, nor fun, and I want to strongly distance myself from this 'patent'.

If you avoid the part with the energy conversion, I can recommend the article at heise.de.

Winter? Which Winter?

While Bee has experienced at least some kind of winter in Waterloo, ON, the south-western part of Germany has had two or three nights of mild frost so far, and no snow at all. This weekend, I was at my parents' place for my mother's birthday. That's what I saw in the garden:



A Rose! In case you live in Southern California, you may say so what, and it's not even open - but the small village where my mother lives is not California. It has a relatively tough climate, and the last roses of autumn can usually be seen around mid-November.

So, winter is just late this year? Maybe, but then, look at this:



It's a bunch of crocus! That's a flower popular with gardeners because, as one of the first flowers to bloom in the spring, it signals the end of winter. Indeed, my father had planted hundreds of them in the lawn around the house, and it's a great view to see them in full bloom - which usually occurs in March! I had taken this photo at more or less the same spot on March 29, 2004:



So, it seems that for this year, we have just skipped the winter - that's at least what Nature says... And don't mention the climate change ;-)

The Galaxy Song

"Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light-years side-to-side
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick
But out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth"

The Galaxy Song, by Monty Python

Watch on YouTube (the audio quality is pretty good)

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TAGS: PHYSICS, HUMOR, GALAXY, MILKY WAY

New Blogger

Suprise! Eventually, we too are switched to the new no-longer beta blogger :-) This is a test-test-test....

A nice weekend to all of you

B.

Dancing Ball Lightnings in the Lab

Ball lightnings are mysterious things: Small, bright balls of fire suddenly appear during a thunderstorm, swirl around, make sometimes funny noises, and leave behind a smell of ozone. My grandmother has often told me how she once has witnessed one when she was a little girl.


The sudden appearance of a ball lightning can be quite frightening. (Hergé: The Seven Crystal Balls)

In the Tintin adventure The Seven Crystal Balls, a ball lightning destroys the mummy of an ancient Inca King which was brought to Europe by seven explorers, all of whom succumb to a mysterious spell and fall into a deep sleep interrupted only by cruel nightmares.

Since ball lightnings are not only spooky, but also very elusive, there has been a lot of speculation how to understand and explain them in a scientific way: People have suggested that it may be some ionised balls of plasma held together by their own magnetic fields, or even such exotic things as mini black holes leftover from the big bang...

A more "down to Earth" explanation was proposed in a 1999 Letter to Nature: John Abrahamson and James Dinniss conjectured that a ball lightning may be caused by the burning of small particles created when a normal lightning strikes on soil. The stroke of the lightning would vaporise and reduce silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As this vapour cools, they suggested, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound by electric charges on its surface and forming some kind of bubble. Like the magnesium in the flashlight of an old-fashioned photographer, the pure silicon immediately burns in the oxygen of the surrounding air. This then creates the bright light and the smell of the ball lightning phenomenon, which then would be not an electric discharge, but a chemical reaction.

The explanation proposed by Abrahamson and Dinniss has now been tested by by a group of chemists and physicists of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, as reported in the New Scientist. The paper Production of ball-lightning-like luminous balls by electrical discharges in silicon by Gerson Silva Paiva, Antonio Carlos Pavao, Elder Alpes de Vasconcelos, Jr. Mendes Odim, and Jr. Felisberto da Silver Eronides has been accepted for publication in PRL in January 2007. In their experiment, the Brazilian scientists vaporised parts of silicon wafers by the application of high currents of up to 140 Ampere. In the electrical arc of this discharge, similar to a lightning hitting soil, small glowing fragments of silicon could be created, and, sometimes, Ping-Pong ball sized blobs persisting for several seconds!


Small balls of burning silicon vapour dancing on the floor (Espacociencia, Olinda, Brazil, mpg file)

There is a small movie available which shows little balls of light, burning silicon vapour dancing on the floor of the laboratory (unfortunately, the movie does not seem to work with Mac...). These small little things probably wouldn't frighten good old Captain Haddock, but they are quite impressive, nevertheless.

Even if it's not completely clear yet if the riddle of the ball lightning is solved, as claims a headline in the German news magazine Spiegel - this Brazilian experiment may bring us closer to 'home made' ball lightnings as a fancy show effect for the next cocktail party!

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TAGS: PHYSICS, BALL LIGHTNING

Money Talks

The Federation of American Scientist reports in a summary about Technology Collection Trends in the U.S. Defense Industry that spies have been embedding tiny transmitters in Canadian coins:

'On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defense contractors’ employees traveling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons.' (p. 32)

See, that's what technological progress is good for.

More Info

• Washington Times:
  Foreign spy activity surges to fill technology gap


• Globe and Mail:
  If you're a spy, Canadian money talks


• Canada.com:
  Spies embedding tiny transmitters in Canadian coins, U.S. report says

Thanks to Kerstin for the interesting info.

New Digital Camera

This is to prove that I haven't (yet) turned into a polar bear

PS: The new digi cam is a Canon IXUX 60, also shots mini-movies with pretty good quality...

Polar Bear

It's snowing up here in Waterloo. I wish I was a polar bear! They aren't only cute but quite interesting guys.

Since they are hard to see in snow, researchers thought some while ago, it would be a good idea to search for them in the infrared. To their surprise, they didn't see much, see the picture to the left. There's eyes, nose, ears, but where is the rest?



Well, this paper

"Radiative Properties of Polar Bear Hair,"
By Preciado, Rubinsky, Otten, Nelson, Martin, and Greif,
BED-Vol. 53, 2002 Advances in Bioengineering, ASME 2002.


summarizes the results of an investigation which shows that polar bear hair has the same radiative properties as snow.
Amazing animals, eh? Though the military was originally very excited about the bears for creating infrared camouflage in cold climates, they quickly lost interest when they discovered that the polar bears could easily be seen in the ultraviolet.



Some more info at this website.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, POLAR BEARS

This and That

Just some random things:

• Clifford has a very interesting post on 3D imaging of dark matter distribution
  Update: See also Bad Astronomy and Cosmic Variance


• IEEE Spectrum has an article about the reactions to Lee Smolin's book 'The Trouble with Physics', titled Thread-Bare Theories (via qgs)


• I learned yesterday that my post about Micro Black Holes has been selected for the Science Blogging Anthology... since I did not submit my own entry, anybody has an idea who nominated me...? Huh? Anyway, a large THANK YOU to the anonymous fan :-)


• I am about to set up a discussion group here at PI about experimental tests on quantum gravity. From writing this blog it seems to me that the topic is of interest for many readers as well. I have therefore exported a brief summary on a separate blog, where I will (try to) report on the discussion. I hope you contribute lively --->Quantum Gravity in the Lab


• The January issue of Physics Today has a (free) article about Germany's 'excellence initiative' (Exzellenzinitiative of the BMBF) titled Germany singles out universities for excellence
  
• From the category 'Useless Knowledge': Did you know... that Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of the internet?

Priceless

When I fly I love to browse through the SkyMall catalogue. It lists all the true applications of scientific progress! Here is a sample of such inventions the world just can't live without:

Fish Finder Watch This sonar sensor attaches to your wrist and doubles as a watch. It operates in a 75' remote radius, transmitting views of fish to the LCD display. The sensor reads depth to 120' with a wide 90° sonar beam. Includes display backlighting. Remote sensor runs 500 continuous hours, and automatically shuts off after removal from water. With instruction manual, carrying case and remote sensor. Includes lithium watch battery. Sensor is ABS plastic.
Remote Control Golf Ball Detailed to resemble a real golf ball, it zigs and zags at a touch of the remote control, allowing you to fool golf partners as they watch putts drift wide of the cup at your command. The joystick on the discrete remote control lets you direct the ball within a 100' range. The ball can operate on three different, selectable frequencies, allowing you to race two at a time.
Excuse Box 'Hey, I gotta call you back later...' Everybody gets those annoying phone calls. The kind where you sigh heavily, roll your eyes, and make those annoying "blah-dee-blah" hand gestures like some demented muppet that won't shut up... Believe me, we get those calls, too. We feel your pain. Luckily, we have an awesome solution. The Excuse Box is no ordinary key tag. Its onboard memory holds 10 full minutes of environmental effects designed specifically to befuddle your annoying caller. Click on the links below, and imagine yourself gleefully escaping from an otherwise awkward and potentially trouble-filled phone call.
USB Missile Launcher The USB Missile Launcher is the ultimate deterrent against those annoying people who lurk around your desk because they've nothing better to do. The Launcher holds three foam missiles, and Missile Command is located on your desktop (which is a great deal more convenient than having it buried under Cheyanne Mountain in Colorado - but that's Norad for you). You simply use your mouse to control the launcher which rotates and tilts as you zero in on your victim, that, despite being deeply childish, is immensely satisfying. The Missile Launcher fires its three foam missiles sequentially as you hit the 'Fire' button, and though collateral damage is minimal, the fun factor is exceedingly high. We just love USB toys.
StealthSwitch Procrastinate At The Office With Confidence! [...] The Stealth Switch is the answer. Quickly install the software and plug the hidden foot switch in (it goes either between the keyboard and your computer, or just into an available USB port) and you are safe. It hides in the shadows and just a light tap of your toes will let it work its magic. Based on your preferences, it can hide the current window, hide all windows, or hide all windows except for specified windows. Not just minimize, mind you, but totally erase from your screen. The Stealth Switch can also mute the sound, hide the taskbar, hide the desktop icons, and password protect the restore function. When the coast is clear, another quick tap and you are ready to frag in peace.
Graphic Equalizer T-Shirt A t-shirt with a built in "graphic equalizer" panel that is sound sensitive. As the music beats, the shirt's equalizer lights up to the beat of the music. Great for concerts, raves, parties or just to impress your mates. [...] made from 100% cotton, beware of inferior shirts made with polyester. It has a fully functional EL (Electro Luminescence) panel with a battery pack and sound sensor that snuggles discretely into a pocket inside the shirt. The end result is an awesome sound sensitive music T-Shirt that commands attention.

Albert Einstein Action Figure

"Dressed for intense classroom action, this Albert Einstein Action Figure stands with a piece of chalk in his hand, poised to explain relativity or do battle with the forces of entropy. Fits in nicely with any office, cube or dorm decor and features realistic disheveled hair! [...] Sure he might not have been able to fly, breathe underwater or emit spider webs from his wrist - but he could melt your mind in a heartbeat with just a single attempt at explaining the Universe to you. Now that's power! Your Albert Einstein action figure measures 5-1/4" (13.3 cm) tall and is made out of hard vinyl. Illustrated blistercard included!" As seen on ThinkGeek.com

Wow, physicists action figures, this is an idea with potential! I am thinking Lisa Croft and the Nima Turtles, heroically fighting the instabilities of warped passages and infrared catastrophes!

ThinkGeek.com has the largest selection of things the world doesn't need I've ever seen. Like Great Scientists Finger Puppets ('They also feature a magnet sewn into their brains, so [...] you can literally put their heads together for an all night brainstorming session'), Caffeinated Soap ( 'each bar of Shower shock contains approximately 12 servings/showers per 4 ounce bar' ) , or Collapsible Chopsticks ('The white ash used to make the wooden tips comes from recycled baseball bats'). My favourite is a knife holder called 'The Ex' ( "Overall, we'd say The Ex Knife Set is very cutting edge!" )

You also shouldn't miss this important insight into Einstein's Dreams.

Physics Blogs

The January issue of Physics World has several interesting articles about how the 'Brave New Web' is influencing research in physics. Besides an article about 'The open-access debate' (authors pay instead of readers), Sean Carrol from CV tells us why he is 'Blogging for Physics' and Martin Griffiths writes about 'Talking physics in the social Web'.

In the latter article, some interesting points are raised that I briefly want to comment on.

What blogging can do

Sometime in the late 90ies I read an article about the - then new - phenomenon of the world wide web. The author wrote that one shouldn't be surprised that emails, chats, and personal homepages have incredibly boosted the interest in personal computers, and catapulted it out of the nerdy corner. The reason is simply that most people aren't interested in computers. They are interested in other people¹.

Blogs have contributed significantly to enhancing the interaction between users of the world wide web. Blogging is a very easy to use, and widely accessible tool to share thoughts, interests, and experiences. Similar to online forums, it is useful to connect people with common interests, to discuss questions, and exchange helpful references or advises. But in contrast to an online forum, the blog's content is filtered by the author, who is in power of the discussion, and who dictates the direction in which the story evolves. In this way, he or she collects people in his sphere of thoughts. In contrast to personal homepages, blogging allows for feedback and interactions with the visitors.

That people are interested in people is of course also true for physicists, most of which I know are human as well. Writing a blog is useful to establish contacts worldwide to people with similar interests. Developments of search engines, and features like tagging, feeds, and trackbacks make this work very efficiently. I'll give you an example. I've had a personal homepage since 1997. In these 10 years, I've had roughly 60,000 visitors. This blog isn't even one year old. Now look at the counter in the sidebar, and google Hossenfelder. Astonishing, isn't it?

Physicists writing about their every day life in a blog do communicate to a broad audience what this profession is about, and what it isn't. I feel that this has been severely neglected in the past, and I think that writing a blog gives the readers a good impression what it actually means to be a physicist². This can be very helpful for those who want to decide on what major to take, whether to make a postdoc, are interested how the situation in fundamental research is on universities or private institutions, or what really happens in a laboratory. Blogs also do a good work in making research results accessible to the non-expert by providing plain-text summaries of reserach papers. A big advantage of online articles over the printed media is here that the specialisation of the text can be kept flexible by adding links to further references.

Funding decisions basically reflect the relevance that our work is believed to have for the society we live in. Therefore, I find it very important to tell about the fascination and the excitement of our work, but also to report on the problems that our profession faces.

Besides this, blogs do of course distribute news, they do so very fast and efficiently. That is, if you're bored and sitting in your office chewing on a pencil, they are a nice distraction.

To summarize, blogging in physics is:

• Useful to find and connect people with common interests, also on the expert level
• Useful to share references and advises
• Useful to distribute news
• Useful to make reserach results accessible to the laymen^*
• Useful to communicate what physics is, and how it works
  

What blogging can't do

Blogs do distribute news, but they also act as a filter on these news. Why and how some stories get amplified and others don't is still a mystery for me, and also a reason for caution. One shouldn't misinterpret the attention that is paid to some topics and not to others. Very often, people don't comment on the actual story, but on somebodies comment on the story (not necessarily because it was a very bright one). The reason for this is again: people are interested in other people, in what others think, and what mistakes they make. Also, many who aren't experts on the topic just pass on things they've read elsewhere, and what seems like a lot of contributions are just echos of the same sentence again and again.

Obviously, blogs don't only profit, but also suffer from the online forum's diseases. Anonymity of comments tends to polarize discussions in a way that wouldn't happen in personal conversations. And since not everybody is very well in writing (or maybe just not very well in English), misunderstandings are unavoidable, esp. when it comes to humorously meant remarks.

"I can well imagine that blogs and wikis will become the framework for brainstorming and discussing ideas," says Gordon Watts of the University of Washington in Seattle. "It may even end up in some cases that ideas are fully formed on blogs and never make it into a preprint, let alone peer review." In fact, some have suggested that a framework based on blogs and wikis could be the basis of a new type of peer review." (from the mentioned Physics World article)

Even though I think that blogs can spark discussions about papers, lead to improvement, or actually develop ideas, I don't think they will become THE 'framework for brainstorming and discussing ideas'. For one, in most cases these discussions will end with a small circle of people going on in a comment section. This is about the same as having a collaboration with them per email, the only difference being that one has a neat timeline of the comments (instead of a messy inbox), and that the discussion is public. From a certain point of specialization on however (and from a certain amount of comments on), there will hardly be anybody reading through all of the discussion.

Pure 'virtual' collaborations can work, but are often frustrating. For me it is without doubts that collaborations work more efficiently when one spends at least some weeks in face to face discussions, with a blackboard nearby, and with a trip to the next Café every now an then. Though large parts of developing an idea can be worked out by email - or possible via a blog - I doubt this will ever become the first choice for researchers. After all, people are interested in people... ³

But there are also functions blogs can't and shouldn't fulfil. When it comes to reviewing papers, or developing ideas one has to keep in mind that a blog is usually maintained by one or a few persons, who are in charge of the posts as well as the comments. They are even more so when they run their own software. It is tremendously easy to modify posts after they are written, or to publish them with an arbitrarily chosen date. In a scientific debate this fluid change of information can be very confusing. E.g. consider somebody points towards a faulty statement, the post is corrected afterwards but without adding a note on this correction. Also, regarding the comments, there is the obvious problem of censoring contributions that the blogger just doesn't like. From the very construction, blogs just are not objective.

Regarding the peer review, I do think that online reviews can considerably improve the situation. Right now we have a tremendous amount of publications available, and it would be good to have a qualified rating on these. E.g. I have suggested before that the arxiv allows reviews and comments on the papers. This would also be useful to clear up the arxiv from papers like 'A comment on the paper ....' followed by 'A reply to a comment on ... ' and 'A comment to a reply to a comment on...', which seems to happen more often lately. For the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, doing this via trackbacks to discussions on blogs is not a good idea.

To summarize, blogs

• have a limited applicability for 'brainstorming and discussing ideas'
• are generally not objective enough to be a reliable source for scientific judgement
• suffer from the common online phenomena like 'what many people talk about, more people talk about' and anonymous comments
  

What this blog does

I am writing this blog because I've always liked to write about the topics that I am fascinated of on a general level, to communicate the excitement to a broader audience. It is very rewarding to get feedback on the topics, and encouraging that physics receives so much interest!

In the first line, I want to give you an impression what it is like to work in theoretical physics. Besides this every day life, there are topics that physicists care about but that aren't subject of their research papers, like the philosophical or religious implications, as also Sean has mentioned. And, as you might have noticed, I often use my blog to express my confusion about things I did not understand. (And, believe me, there are many things in this world I don't understand.) So, every time you let me know what you think, you help me understand a piece of this world.

I am not a news ticker, and I have no intention (and no time) to become one. Things I write about often aren't new but just newly summarized, and I hope this is useful - or at least entertaining - for the readers. After all, this blog is not so much about action, but about backreaction.

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Footnote 1: With the possible exceptions of the mentioned nerds, and those who are interested in why people are interested in other people.

Footnote 2: I've encountered quite a lot of sometimes funny, sometimes tiresome prejudices that stem from this lack of communication, as most people have a very distinct idea what physicists do. E.g. as long as I was working for universities, I've more than once heard the remark (comes with a wink) that I'm the eternal student who sleeps through the whole day and doesn't have to work because the government was dumb enough to give me a scholarship. The truth being that I didn't sleep through the day, but worked through the night, and there was a reason why I got the scholarship. Funny, eh?

Footnote 3: One should note that 'virtual' collaborations can considerably improve the situation for those who can't afford travels.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, BLOGS

PLoS ONE: a new "interactive" scientific journal

The January 2007 edition of Physics World, the magazine of the British Institute of Physics, has several very interesting articles about the impact of the "Web 2.0" on publishing in physics. Topics discussed include the open access publishing models for physics journals, and "Talking physics in the social Web", about Blogs and Wikis in physics. This latter article cites a very nice quote by Sabine about the impression of the string theory debate that may emerge if blogs are the only source of information one relies on...

While the physics community has made first steps to combine the open-access papers on the arXiv with the blogosphere through the trackback mechanism, the Public Library of Science has launched a new online journal, PLoS One, where the option of an annotation and discussion of papers is built in right from beginning.

The Public Library of Science, PLoS (it is not related to the Proceedings of Science, POS, the SISSA-based open-access proceedings publication which has evolved from the proceedings section of the the Journal of High Energy Physics) was founded originally to provide open-access scientific journals, mainly in medicine and the life sciences, where something similar to the arXiv was not available. These journals are free to read for everyone, and peer-review and publication is paid for by fees of the authors of papers, and by donations.

This scheme also applies to PLoS One: Authors pay for the publication, and access to the journal is free for everyone. The special feature of PLoS One is that the reviewing process predating publication seems not to include an estimate of the relevance of the paper. The idea is to leave the judgement about the scientific merits of a paper to the readers, who are invited to leave annotations and comment in the paper, and (in a future stage) to rate it!


Example of a Paper with annotations at PLoS ONE

PloS One includes so far more than 100 papers, from Biochemistry (1 paper) over Diabetes and Endocrinology (6 papers) and Infectious Diseases (29 papers) to Virology (6 papers). From the current table of contents it is clear that the main focus is on medicine and biology, although there is even a section called physics. It's bemusing to see such a wide topic to be squeezed in one small division of the journal - the two papers are about The Sound Generated by Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker Hydrothermal Vents and the Relationship between Thermodynamic Driving Force and One-Way Fluxes in Reversible Processes.

PLoS One promises to accelerate research, but to view and read the journal, a little patience will be a bonus, at least for the time being: The heavy use of CSS and advanced HTML (I guess) makes the rendering of the pages in the browser really slow.

However, I think this is an exciting experiment in scientific publishing, which will be very interesting to follow!

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, PUBLISHING, WEB 2.0

Interference

There is a lot of funny stuff I found in my old desk at my parents house! Among other things a 20 Mark bill... some 1000 Pesetas... a photo from me at Ipanema beach.... a truly ancient article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung (April 13th 2003) that a friend gave me, and which features Fotini Markopoulou talking about time not being continuous but quantized in Planckian units (I remember being relieved that there are people doing even weirder stuff than I, and thinking I didn't know they have cockroaches in Canada as well¹)... lots of trash... offprints of a paper I forgot I wrote... my old passport with the visa from Zimbabwe... a Miró postcard book, that is nice...

What else...? Aah, the CD from Queens of the Stone Age that I thought I lost in Tucson! And a laser pointer. This laser was extremely expensive at the time I bought it. Nowadays you get them as advertisement gifts. I exchanged the batteries and it still works.

If you have a laser pointer, try hitting a CD² with the laser... here's how it looks like:

(Click to enlarge)

Surprised?

Audio Compact Disk - An Introduction: "The CD disk is a 120 mm diameter disk of polycarbonate. The center contains a hole 15 mm in diameter. [...] The active data area starts at the 46 mm diameter location and ends at the 117 mm diameter location. The 46-50 mm range is the lead in area and the 116-117 range is the lead out area. Disks are written from the center to the outside [...]. A CD disk contains a long string of pits written helically on the disk. [...] Each pit is approximately 0.5 microns wide and 0.83 microns to 3.56 microns long. (Remember that the wavelength of green light is approximately 0.5 micron). Each track is separated from the next track by 1.6 microns.[...]"

To summarize this flash of information: the spacing between the tracks on the average CD is approximately the wavelength of visible light. That's why the CD separates the visible light into a whole spectrum and you see all the beautiful rainbows on it. The very clean and periodic spacing of tracks makes the surface of the CD act similarly as a multiple-slit, just that the light doesn't go through but is reflected back. You might have to fumble around some while before you find a good angle.

The multiple slit experiment is quite similar to the well-known double slit experiment, to which you find a brief introduction here, and an applet for a virtual experiment here. Roughly speaking, an incoming plane wave (the laser light) is split into two spherical waves centered around the slits. These interfere and cause a pattern of maxima and minima on the screen. For this to work, the distance between the slits and their width needs to have roughly the wavelength of the incoming light. The double-slit experiment was first performed by Thomas Young in the early 1800's and shows that light behaves like a wave.

The more slits there are in the experiment, the more the maxima are focused, and the less their peak intensity drops for the outside lying maxima. If you had an infinite series of slits, all the maxima would look equal. You can click yourself through various diffraction gratings on this website. The reasoning is the same if the light is reflected back: the reflection occurs in different angles, depending on how the incoming plane wave hits the tracks of the CD. The outgoing waves interfere and cause multiple maxima which you see in the photo above.

"I saw it during an optics course at Edinburgh University," wrote respondent Alison Campbell, an astronomer at St Andrews University. "The prof didn't tell us what was going to happen, and the impact was tremendous. I cannot remember the experimental details any more - I just remember the distribution of points that I suddenly saw were arranged in a diffraction pattern. Seeing the two-slit experiment is like watching a total solar eclipse for the first time: a primitive thrill passes through you and the little hairs on your arms stand up. You think this particle-wave thing is really true and the foundations of your knowledge shift and sway."

From: The most beautiful experiment

Further reading:

• Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments
• Young's Double Slit Experiment
• Wikepedia on the Double-Slit Experiment
• Thomas Young's Experiment
• Physics Web: The Double Slit Experiment

Ah, my husband is interfering with my blogging... his washing machine spin-dried itself towards death, so we have to go get a new one. Have a nice day!

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Footnote 1:

SZ: Was kommt der Menschheit zu Gute, wenn man die Zeit in Atome schneidet? (How does mankind profit from cutting time into atoms?)
FM: Hat es den Leuten geholfen, zu wissen, dass Materie aus Atomen besteht? (Did mankind profit from cutting matter into atoms?)
SZ: Es ist vor allem spannend. (First of all things it is exciting.)
FM: Und man hätte ohne die Erkenntnis keine Computer und 1000 andere High-Tech-Sachen erfunden. (And without that knowledge computers and 100o other high-tech-things hadn't been invented)
SZ: Keine Atombombe zum Beispiel. (And no atom bombs for example.)
FM: Auch die. (That as well.)
SZ: Haben Sie Angst vor dem Tod? (Are you afraid of death?)
FM: Nicht so sehr. Eher davor, etwas im Leben nicht versucht zu haben. Angst machen mir auch die dicken Autos hier in Nordamerika. Und Kakerlaken, die hasse ich wie die Pest. (Not so much. I am more afraid not having tried something in my life. And I am afraid of the fat cars here in North America. And cocroaches, I hate them like the plague.)

Footnote 2:

If you've all your tracks on the iPod, go ask your granny to help you out.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, DOUBLE-SLIT, LASER, THOMAS YOUNG

Optimists

I read in the newspaper that Germans are unusually optimistic about the New Year! A full 49% of them think the New Year will be a good one, that's 11% more than last year. The reason for this might be that 2006 - for the 4th time in a row - Germany was the export world champion. But now that the New Year has actually begun, they are already back to complaining, in this case about the raise of the sales tax from 16% to 19%.

Speaking about optimism, I saw today that The Edge Annual Question — 2007 is

WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
"The 160 responses to this year's Edge Question span topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth, cancer, climate and much much more. Contributing their optimistic visions are a who's who of interesting and important world-class thinkers."

It is definitely worth having a look! You'll find a lot of familiar names on the list.

E.g. Leon Ledermann is optimistic about science education: 'a war we must declare and win: The War on Ignorance.'

Paul Davies is convinced that 'Some time before the end of the century there will be a human colony on Mars.'

David Deutsch tells us that 'failure is opportunity.'

Alexander Vilenkin uses the opportunity to advertise the multiverse: 'In my view, it is science [...]'

Lee Smolin is optimistic that 'new experiments [...] are likely to transform our knowledge of fundamental physics'

Lisa Randall is also 'optimistic that we'll learn something truly new and exciting about the fundamental nature of matter'. I give her the optimist award for the best writing, and the sentence 'I'm anticipating that society will increasingly recognize and understand the value of knowledge. People will want to make their own critical judgments, know more facts, and stop deferring to questionable authorities or visual media for their education. '

John Horgan is optimistic not about The End of Science, but the End of War: 'In fact civilization, far from creating the problem of warfare, is apparently helping us to solve it.' (See also The End of Physics?)

Frank Wilczek thinks that there will be no End of Physics, because he is optimistic 'that physics will not achieve a Theory of Everything'.

Leonard Susskind states that some humans have successfully rewired their brains 'beyond the things that natural selection could have wired it for' and is optimistic 'that we may be able to go beyond our Darwinian roots in other ways.'

Carlo Rovelli is optimistic that 'scientific thinking is growing in depth' and writes 'The number of people that have realized how much nonsensical is there in religion continues to increase, and no doubt this will help decrease belligerency and intolerance.'

And the nicest piece I find that by Brian Greene who writes so well I just can't delete a single syllable:

"As I help raise my two year old son, I witness a basic truth familiar to parents through the ages and across the continents — we begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever-growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe.
While we evolved to survive, once we have the luxury of taking such survival for granted, the ability of our species to unravel mysteries grand and deep is awe inspiring. I'm optimistic that the world will increasingly value the power of such rational thought and will increasingly rely on its insights in making the most critical decisions."

And I? I am optimistic that we will accept the challenge of the world changing rapidly, and take it into account in political, sociological and scientific decisions to be made. I am optimistic that 'modern' civilizations recall that science is about the understanding of nature, and not in the first line about being internationally competitive. I am optimistic that I will write a couple of good papers this year, that I'll have fun with my blog, and that theoretical physics will see a lot of young optimists who'll learn how to sail despite some past storms in teacups.

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TAGS: PHYSICS, SCIENCE, OPTIMISM

Hunger Strike for Tenure

Here's how things look like Inside Higher Education these days:

Dec. 27: Professor’s Hunger Strike Ultimatum

"A professor who was denied tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has vowed to start a hunger strike on February 5 outside the provost’s office.

“I will either see the provost resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office,” James L. Sherley, who teaches biological engineering, wrote in a letter to colleagues [...]."

Found via The World's Fair's post MIT professor denied tenure will start a hunger strike. Don't miss the comments on that post :-)

Is he also going to hold his breath until he turns blue?
Posted by: speedwell December 28, 2006 03:26 PM


Why is he waiting until February 5th? Does he have an incredible stockpile of holiday leftovers he can't stand to miss out on?
Posted by: Ashley Bone December 28, 2006 03:47 PM

Okay, okay, I admit, was just looking for an occasion to use this Dummy Book Generator.

KATRIN

What are these people staring at?

Here is what they see out of their window:

What is this?! No, it's not the preparation for the New Year's firework. This is the main spectrometer of the KATRIN experiment as it is transported through the small German city Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen. If you have a high bandwidth, you can look at the full video here (~35 MB).

KATRIN stands for KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment, and is designed to detect the spectrum of the tritium beta decay with very high precision to directly measure the absolute mass of the electron neutrino. Keep in mind that neutrino-oscillations only measure mass-differences (for an elementary introduction, see here). In the beta decay, an electron is emitted together with the electron neutrino. The neutrino is hard to detect, therefore the measurement of the absolute mass with KATRIN is done by detecting the electron that is emitted, and measuring its energy, from which the neutrino mass can be extracted.

(Figure 6b, page 29)

The figure above shows the signature in the electron's spectrum for an electron neutrino with a mass of 1 eV in comparison to the spectrum in case the neutrino was massless. The distortion is statistically significant only in a region close to the endpoint of the spectrum of E₀ = 18.6keV. Since we already know that the electron neutrino's mass is very tiny, it requires such a huge spectrometer to resolve the spectrum of the electron's energy fine enough. The Design Report of the experiment says that they anticipate a sensitivity on the neutrino mass of 0.2 eV (90% C.L.) corresponding to a 5 sigma discovery potential for a mass of 0.35 eV.

The detector was manufactured by MAN DWE in Deggendorf, but then had to be brought to Karlsruhe, which is about 400 km away from Deggendorf. However, since the tank is too big for motorways, the spectrometer had to make a detour of almost 9000 km as shown on this map. You find much more information about the detector at this website.

See also: KATRIN moved

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TAGS: PHYSICS, NEUTRINOS, KATRIN