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Embiggen, the fauxcabulary word created for an episode of The Simpsons, has found its way into string theory. Here’s the usage from a recently published paper on Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking:
Here’s the original quote from The Simpsons episode, Lisa the Iconoclast:
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
The uses are probably not related, but you never know.
The scale of the IceCube neutrino detector is amazing…a cubic kilometer telescope 1.5 miles deep into the ice caps of Antarctica. (via pruned, which has more thoughts on the architecture of particle physics)
Three trillion years from now, the universe will be observably static, the Milky Way alone, and scientists of the day likely won’t be able to “infer that the beginning involved a Big Bang”.
How to survive a black hole. If you’re in a rocket ship about to fall into a black hole, you might live a bit longer if you turn on your engines. “But in general a person falling past the horizon won’t have zero velocity to begin with. Then the situation is different — in fact it’s worse. So firing the rocket for a short time can push the astronaut back on to the best-case scenario: the trajectory followed by free fall from rest.”
A pair of articles on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN: A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions and Crash Course. The LHC will hopefully provide the 1.21 gigawatts 7 trillion electron volts needed to uncover the Higgs boson, aka, The God Particle. “What we want is to reduce the world to objects that have no structure, that are points, that are as simple as we can imagine. And then build it up from there again.”
While working on a particle accelerator, Anatoli Bugorski accidentally put his head into the proton stream. “The left half of Bugorski’s face swelled up beyond recognition, and over the next several days started peeling off, showing the path that the proton beam (moving near the speed of light) had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue underneath.” Some photos here. (via cyn-c)
Regarding the hypermiling business from last week, a question on Ask MetaFilter: Does a truck work extra to pull a drafting car?
A man outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain camping trip than they would have at a lower altitude.
Remembering a physics conference that took place in NYC 20 years ago about high-temperature superconductors. One session, the “Woodstock of Physics”, lasted until 3:15 in the morning; “it was like the Texas chili cook-off or the Iowa State Fair apple pie bake-off.” The conference was such a big deal at the time that physicists with conference badges were immediately ushered into a nightclub in Chelsea for free by the bouncers.
Regarding Susan Orlean’s piece on Robert Lang and origami from a couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker has posted a 5-minute audio slideshow of Orlean talking about the piece.
New Scientist recently compiled a list of strange substances (with accompanying video): ferrofluids, non-Newtonian liquids, superfluids, and materials that get thicker when stretched. (via bb)
Does free will exist? “The conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.”
“The Mpemba effect is the observation that, in some specific circumstances, hotter water freezes faster than colder water.” I remember hearing about this on an old episode of Newton’s Apple, but I think they never really got to the bottom of it on that show, which was highly disappointing to me at the time.
David Pogue and Boing Boing have been ensnared by the airplane-on-a-treadmill problem we debated here last February. The airplane still takes off. :)
Physicists at the University of Washington are hoping to use entangled photons to send information back in time. “Here’s where it gets weird.”
Man tries to jump the mile-wide St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. I don’t want to spoil the result for you, but the concepts of gravity, force, and aerodynamics are fairly well established and understood, so why did anyone involved ever think that this jump was even close to possible?
Stephen Hawking is making an Imax 3D film about “cosmology and the meaning of existence”. The film “will be like Groundhog Day meets Star Trek”.
Jim Holt reports on a pair of books that argue that string theory is hurting theoretical physics. The article contains a good overview of the history and current status of the theory. For those looking to discover which book is better, Holt recommends Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft on how to become a good theoretical physicist. He lists the subjects you need to learn (from languages to quantum field theory) and resources (both online and off) for learning them. A note on the ‘t in his name.
Satellites measuring the earth’s gravity from orbit detected a change in gravity from the massive earthquake that caused the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. “The gravity at the earth’s surface decreased by as much as about 0.0000015 percent, meaning that a 150-pound person would experience a weight loss of about one-25,000th of an ounce.”
This image of the participants of a 1927 conference on quantum mechanics sets the record for the most brainpower in one photograph. Schrodinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, Compton, Bohr, Einstein, Planck, Curie, de Broglie, and Lorenz, all in one place.
Update: A Great Day in Harlem depicts several of the world’s top jazz musicians. More here. (thx, jim & greg)
On the heels of two books critical of string theory, a look at the string theory backlash.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss sums up his thoughts from a small conference he organized on the topic of gravity. “There appears to be energy of empty space that isn’t zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century.”
Vincent van Gogh painted turbulence quite accurately. Mexican scientists “have found that the Dutch artist’s works have a pattern of light and dark that closely follows the deep mathematical structure of turbulent flow”.
Italian scientists have created glass made out of carbon dioxide. At high pressure, instead of forming a crystal (dry ice), the CO2 forms a clear, hard, vitreous material. More info. (Little known fact: I did research on glass in college, rubidium and cesium borosilicates mostly. Here’s a few citations on Google Scholar.)
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