MetaFilter posts tagged with physics and science

Selected Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Electric Dragon — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:05:07 -0800

To celebrate the start of its 350th year, the Royal Society has put online 60 of its most memorable scientific papers. The Royal Society's head of archives, Keith Moore, talks about some of them in an audio slideshow. The papers (warning - they're all PDFs) include: Isaac Newton's New Theory on Light And Colors. (1672) Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's observations of Little Animals in Rainwater. (1677) The Electrical Kite of Benjamin Franklin. (1752) Thomas Young's Wave theory of light. (1802) Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden's gold foil experiment which led to the nuclear model of the atom. (1909)

This may well be the last post on MetaFilter

shii — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:59:51 -0800

CERN has successfully circulated beams in the Large Hadron Collider. This news was announced via Twitter, where they will be accepting questions for an upcoming press conference; in the meantime, check out explanatory videos on their YouTube channel, some lively podcasts, or an overview of particle physics on their website. The home of the Web has done a pretty good job keeping up with technology. (previously)

Pepsi Big Blue

grouse — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:42:51 -0800

Scientists image single molecule with atomic force microscopy. See the original abstract in Science. CNET reproduces a representation of the experiment.

Glass beads cluster as they flow

homunculus — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:04:34 -0800

Liquid Sand: High-speed camera catches liquidlike behavior in a stream of granular material.

space and time do not commute

kliuless — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:54:27 -0800

TOE breaking Lorentz invariance - "by treating space and time differently as well as separately, the infinities in the quantum mechanics equations vanish, and gravity behaves as it should." BONUS WSF - Manufacturing universes in a fractal multiverse - Exploring a universe where nothing isn't empty

Sixty Symbols

DU — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:24:31 -0800

What Periodic Videos did for chemistry, Sixty Symbols is doing for physics and engineering. Some behind the scenes action and general scienciness. Some of the "symbols" are a little iffy and many are just jumping off points for a cool science demo/discussion, but that doesn't change the high quality of the material.

Genesis Revisited

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:00:41 -0800

Genesis Revisited scientifically summarises the scientific field of Creation Science (warning: science) [transcript]

SQUIRREL!

Artw — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:26:02 -0800

The real world location behind “Up’s” Paradise Falls. But could that house really fly?

Gleaming the Time Cube

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:16:47 -0800

Pascal Boyer explores the field of crackpottery in his article How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations. "For some time now, I have been an avid reader and collector of webpages created by crackpot physicists, those marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary work is sadly ignored by most established scientists. These are the great heroes, at least in their own eyes, of alternative science." The featured crackpots include: The Physics of Bruce Harvey PERTINENT INFORMATION Grand Unification [T]he really interesting crackpots are the ones trying to really, seriously do science, because their productions and their failures tells us important things about science itself. Most of my “informants” are committed to the standard scientific way of doing things. They accept that their theories should be coherent, clearly expressed, grounded in explicit mathematics, consistent with the evidence, compatible with other established (and empirically grounded) frameworks, etc. They accept that theories should be discussed, tested, and discarded if they are redundant or trivial.

I love my LHC

tellurian — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:13:29 -0800

Episode 4 - Problems "Okay, sometimes I almost want to give up everything." A fascinating insight into the Large Hadron Collider (loving the soundtracks too). YTL

Homework Helper

netbros — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:39:07 -0800

World of Science contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics. This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric Weisstein with assistance from the internet community. MeFi visited Weisstein's Mathworld a couple years ago.

Bringing the end of the world to your iPod

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:05:31 -0800

CERN Podcast - Lighthearted chats at the CERN laboratory with "a bit of particle physics thrown in". Featuring visits from British satirists and comedians, including Chris Morris and Kevin Eldon.

Somebody alert Jeff Goldblum

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:11:09 -0800

Scientists from the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland have managed to teleport information from one isolated atom to another over a distance of one meter, without it ever crossing space. Here's how they did it. You can also read the full abstract here, for those with a subscription. Previous experiments with teleportation have been made: Physicists teleport photons over 600 meters. Scientists teleport photons over 89 miles. Scientists teleport information from one atom to another with the help of a third one, albeit over a much smaller distance. The latest experiment is the first succesful teleportation of a qubit - a unit of quantum information - between two widely separated, charged atoms without crossing space.

Oh God, not again.

tkolar — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:56:46 -0800

There used to be this problem you see, until one of our own kindly settled it. His services are desperately needed once again.

Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations

homunculus — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:23:08 -0800

Confirmed: Scientists Understand Where Mass Comes From. An exhaustive calculation of proton and neutron masses vindicates the Standard Model. Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations.

Making the Title of Miss Universe a Little Less Impressive

Bookhouse — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:34:02 -0800

Is the Multiverse Real? Discover takes a look at theories that our universe is one of many. This blogger adds some interesting commentary. via

Would you like to buy an fuzzy multi-instanton knot?

escabeche — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:56:25 -0800

"...the best place to hide bulls**t is in a refereed journal that’s not open-access!" The math-physics blog n-category cafe digs into the curious case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is editor-in-chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, published by the well-respected scientific publisher Elsevier and sold to academic libraries for US$4,520 a year. The problem? El Naschie has published 322 of his own papers in the journal -- papers that John Baez (of "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics" and "The Crackpot Index") describes as "vague, dreamlike imagery," "undisciplined numerology larded with impressive buzzwords," and "total baloney." Is El Naschie a reverse Sokal? Or a Markov process for producing random publishable papers? One thing's for sure -- he knows how to cure cancer.

"You named your collaboration QAP? Really?"

fatllama — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:29:37 -0800

The DiVincenzo Code [youtube trailer, geekery]. Faced with a strict demand from a funding agency to allocate research funds towards the dissemination of research ideas to the public, an experimental physics group at the University of Oxford produced a feature-length (55 min) action thriller about murder, ancient prophecy, tea breaks, and quantum computation. [Trailer linked above. Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6] Named after the most basic requirements for a functional quantum computer, the DiVincenzo criteria [pdf], the student-directed effort is a superposition of The Da Vinci Code, The Matrix, and a live-action PhD Comics. Perhaps best viewed with either popcorn or your lab-mate's stash ofThorlabs Lab Snacks.

How Much

homunculus — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:55:56 -0800

Quantum of culture. Terminology from quantum theory shows up frequently in art, films, poetry and sculpture. Robert P. Crease gauges the impact of quantum mechanics on popular culture. [Via]

Star Stories and the Nobel Prize

ozomatli — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:27:27 -0800

Star Stories explains the life and death of stars using a multimedia approach that incorporates images, animation, video and text. From the official website of the Nobel Foundation. Don't miss out on the other cool games . One of the games has been posted before, but Star Stories is hot off of the presses.

Quark-Gluon Plasma

netbros — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:33:33 -0800

The ALICE Collaboration is building a dedicated heavy-ion detector to exploit the unique physics potential of nucleus-nucleus interactions at LHC energies. The aim is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where the formation of a new phase of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, is expected. This website aims both at introducing non-initiates to the field of physics covered by ALICE and at providing regular information on the evolution of the experiment, with detailed reports of its results and analysis.

T-Minus...

chuckdarwin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:51:21 -0800

In a scant few hours, scientists will make the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider. Terrified of nothing, a few deeply misguided morons have sent death threats to the CERN team, probably because of Faith-Based Science. *sigh* Anyway, what follows is the Just Some Of The Cool Shit About The LHC:

When the accelerator is fired up, two parallel beams of particles will be blasted around the underground ring in opposite directions. At four locations on the circuit, superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other in a giant chamber rigged with equipment to record the collisions and their aftermath.

Around 300 computer centres in 50 countries will handle data from the vast atom smasher for the next decade, marking what will be the biggest computing exercise in history. Handing the deluge of data will mark a test for the next generation of computing, called The Grid or "the cloud", and the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989 on the site of the huge machine. The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. The biggest concentration is the 80,000 PCs in a "farm" at the Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, near Geneva. When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually. "If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission. Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

BBC Radio 4 will devote a day of programming to the LHC, including covering first injection of beams live on the Today programme. See the BBC website for programming, background etc. You can try your hand at running the LHC and interpreting collisions on the simulator at www.particledetectives.net Good luck to all involved. Previously

Amazing Physics Videos

Turtles all the way down — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:06:17 -0800

Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos (via Wired Science) Some old, some new, but all awesome.

Mayan Muons and Unmapped Rooms

homunculus — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:34:04 -0800

Ghost Particles & Pyramids: How physicists and archaeologists “see” inside ancient monuments.

I Didn't Know That

netbros — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:11:17 -0800

Science Hack is a unique search engine for science videos focusing on Physics, Chemistry, and Space. For example, things to do with sulfur hexafluoride. Still growing, the editors are presently indexing other scientific fields of study including Geology, Psychology, Robotics and Computers. Ever wonder why things go bang?