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Good luck at the LHC!
Nov 20, 2009
By Hamish Johnston
I know I’m not alone in wishing physicists at CERN good luck tonight as they try to get a beam all the way round the Large Hadron Collider — for the first time since the LHC failed spectacularly last year.
“The LHC is a much better understood machine than it was a year ago, and we can look forward with confidence to a smooth transition into physics,” said CERN director general Rolf-Dieter Heuer earlier today.
“By the time you come into work next week, I hope we’ll have beams circulating in the LHC,” he added.
Just what did Galileo believe?
Nov 20, 2009
Galileo returns to the Catholic Church
By James Dacey
Last week I found myself travelling through Rome, when I stumbled across a remider that science and religion are still battling it out in some quarters. A new exhibition at the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli sets out to provide the evidence for Galileo Galilei’s unerring faith in the Catholic Church.
“According to dominant atheist culture, Galileo pretended to be a believer but he was really a convinced atheist. Galileo was convinced that Divine Providence could not miss nor disregard anything to do with the government of human affairs,” read one of the info boards.
It was in Rome in 1633 that Galileo was forced to stand trial and found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, mainly for his support of the heliocentric view of the universe. By publicly renouncing his opinion, Galileo managed to avoid the death penalty but was forced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. Despite all of this, by official accounts, Galileo remained a committed Catholic right through to his death in 1642.
Whilst Catholics often refer to Galileo’s unerring faith, many atheists point out that it was very difficult to be anything but Catholic in 17th Century Italy. Their basic argument is that had Galileo not feared for his life, then he would more than likely have been an atheist.
Seeking to debunk this idea, the exhibition in the Basilica presents evidence of faith from a selection of Galileo’s personal writings. The displays draw from a recent book Galilei, Divine Uomo, written by Antonino Zichichi, Italian nuclear physicist and president of president of the World Federation of Scientists.
One of the displays referred to Galileo’s private reaction to Kepler’s study of the planetary orbits. “Galileo died convinced that Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbits of the Sun’s satellites was mistaken. This is the final testimony of his faith that Galileo left to us and to our descendents in the millennia to come”.
Perhaps the translation from Italian into English has added some aggression to writings, such as the greeting board which read, “The aim of this Exhibition is to make everybody understand that science means to decode the logic of He who created the world”.
In fairness, it is not just the outspoken religious camp that has tried to claim one of the great physicists as one of their own. Back in January, arch religion-basher Richard Dawkins was amongst the funders of a campaign to promote atheism through posters on London public transport. One of the posters included the quote of Einstein included is Einstein’s quote: “I do not believe in a personal God and have never denied this but have expressed it clearly”.
Inflation, strings and the anthropic principle
Nov 19, 2009
Alan Guth at the Institute of Physics
By Hamish Johnston
Have you ever wondered what went on in the universe when it was just 10-35 s old — and how this could be related to our special pocket in the multiverse?
If so, you might want to watch a video of the 2009 Newton lecture, which is now available on the Institute of Physics (IOP) website.
The lecture was given in London on 14 October by Alan Guth, who was in town to receive the IOP’s Isaac Newton Medal for his pioneering work on cosmic inflation — a theory that changed the way we think of the early universe.
Entitled “Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse?”, Guth’s talk lasts about one hour. He starts with an explanation of how inflation provides a “simple and natural” explanation for how the universe became what it is today.
He then moves on to dark energy and explains how its discovery has further improved our understanding of the evolution of the universe — but brings with it the “nightmare” of a vacuum energy that is much smaller than that predicted by quantum mechanics.
But inflation offers a way of avoiding this nightmare in a scenario that involves a multiverse of pocket universes, string theory and the anthropic principle…but you’ll have to watch the lecture to find out how!
Quantum poetics in NYC
Nov 19, 2009
Unravelling physics fusing science with art
By James Dacey
“A mash-up of laboratory theatre and laboratory science”. This is how a group of New York thespians are describing their attempt to take theoretical physics to the stage.
Quantum Poetics is seeking to transform recent advances in theoretical physics and neuroscience into performance art, and it’s the latest project of NYC’s Stolen Chair Theatre Company.
A cast of 12, including clowns, stuntmen and musicians will create a “gravity and genre-defying world, which marvels at the complexity and beauty of how the universe’s massive and minuscule forces allow humans to build meaning”.
When I caught up with Liza Green, the theatre company’s spokesperson, she said they hope the performance will “expose audiences to what is beautiful and exciting about mathematical exploration and scientific thought.”
Admitting that the directors still have a lot of homework to do, she says they are determined to avoid “fake science” or “pop math”, citing the film Pi as an example of a production that, whilst name-checking maths and science, doesn’t really engage with academic content.
Of course, this is not the first time that playwrights have looked to theoretical physics for creative inspiration. British writer Tom Stoppard incorporated ideas from thermodynamics and chaos theory in his highly acclaimed play Arcadia (1993), which looked at the life and times of Lord Byron.
In Copenhagen (1998), another British dramatist Michael Frayn built an entire play around the famous 1941 conversation between Neils Bohr and his former protégé Werner Heisenberg in the Nazi-occupied Danish capital.
Earlier this year, the Ransom Theatre Company in Northern Ireland produced the Gentlemen’s Tea Drinking Society — a black comedy centred four alcoholic graduates from Cambridge one of whom has secretly discovered the Higgs boson.
Quantum Poetics will open its pilot season on November 22, which will build towards a full stage production scheduled for the Autumn of 2010.
Nobel laureates call for open access
Nov 19, 2009
John Mather has called for open access
By Hamish Johnston
It’s a debate that’s been around as long as the Internet — should academic research papers be free to read by one and all (open access) or should university libraries pay for journal subscriptions?
41 Nobel laureates are backing open access, and have written to members of the US Congress to ask them to support a bill calling for the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). The group includes four physicists — Sheldon Glashow, John Mather, Douglas Osheroff and David Politzer.
I’m not a lawyer, but I believe the the act would require that the results of all federally funded research be freely available online.
But are we well down that road already?
Over the past few years you may have noticed that more and more papers published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science appear on the open access arXiv preprint server immediately after being published. I don’t know if this is done with the publisher’s blessing, but I’m guessing that it is tolerated in the hope of avoiding the sort of legislation that the US laureates are calling for.
So what about our journals here at IOP Publishing?
We have an open access journal called the New Journal of Physics, which fits the bill as far as the laureates are concerned. Physicists pay to publish their papers, and if the entire industry went this way, funding would have to be diverted from libraries to the researchers themselves.
Access to most of our other journals is restricted to subscribers — but most articles are open access for 30 days after publication. And I’m told that IOP Publishing is happy for authors to post the text of accepted papers on arXiv, but not the final version that appears in the journal.
So it looks to me like open access publishing is possible already — just make sure you pop your accepted manuscript onto arXiv and the Feds will be happy.
But is this sustainable — if the accepted versions of papers are freely available, why would a scientist pay to publish or a university library bother to subscribe?
In other words, who is going to pay for managing the peer-review process that many scientists believe is essential?
An idealist might argue that scientists themselves could manage peer review — but does a busy physicist really want to be chasing her colleagues for overdue referee reports or field telephone calls from an irate colleague whose paper has been rejected? Who is going to copy edit papers written by authors whose first language is not English? And who is going to ensure that the journal keeps up with the latest advances in information technology?
That brings us back to the New Journal of Physics author pays model…is this the way of the future?
Sorry for all the question marks…and what do you think?
The story of Europe’s space telescope
Nov 18, 2009
Inspecting the mirror of the Herschel telescope (Courtesy: ESA).
By Hamish Johnston
At 11.00 am GMT today BBC Radio 4 is running the first in a two part series about the Herschel space telescope, which was launched earlier this year.
If you are not in the UK, you should be able to listen online — or listen later to an archived version.
Here’s what the Beeb says about the series:
“Following the engineers and astronomers who are working on the biggest telescope ever sent to space, in one of the most important missions in the history of European spaceflight. Jonathon Amos joins Professor Matt Griffin of Cardiff University and his international team as they aim to peer through the areas in space that are invisible to other telescopes. This is the story of how the team is aiming to solve the mystery of galaxy and star formation, and how these processes eventually gave rise to life-bearing planets like Earth.
“In this episode, the team approach the biggest milestone in their 20-year project - the launch of their work on a rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana. Will it all go safely?
There’s no mention of the Planck microwave observatory, which was launched at the same time as Herschel — but hopefully Amos will touch on its mission to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation - a remnant of the Big Bang
Bend it like Beckham
Nov 17, 2009
Eric Goff testing ball trajectories
By Matin Durrani
Qualification for next summer’s football World Cup in South Africa reaches its climax tomorrow — highlights include France’s return play-off with Ireland and Egypt squaring off against arch-rivals Algeria on the same day.
But some teams, like England, have already secured their passage to the world’s greatest sports tournament and will no doubt be already be dreaming of lifting the famous trophy.
England’s players have a night off tomorrow but if star midfielder David Beckham is feeling a bit bored, he might want to read a new paper in the American Journal of Physics by John Eric Goff of Lynchburg College, Virginia, and Matt Carré of the University of Sheffield in the UK.
Goff and Carré carried out a series of experiments in which soccer balls were launched from a machine while two high-speed cameras recorded portions of their trajectory. The equipment allowed the researchers to vary the balls’ launch speed and spin — balls could be fired either with no spin, topspin, backspin, sidespin or any combination.
From the resulting data, the two physicists then calculated the “lift” drag coefficient on the ball and the “sideways” drag coefficient, CS. If the ball has pure topspin or pure backspin then CS is zero, but if the ball has any other spin, the value of CS is not zero.
All lovely stuff, of course, but where does Beckham come in? Well, Goff and Carré then examined Beckham’s famous 90th-minute free kick taken against Greece in October 2001 that secured England’s qualification for the 2002 World Cup in France. His carefully taken kick bent around the wall before landing plum in the back of the Greek net and secured England a dramatic last-minute equalizer in the 2—2 draw.
Using TV footage of the famous match, the two physicists calculated that the ball left Beckham’s foot at a speed of 36 m/s at which point its “Reynolds number” (air speed times ball diameter, divided by kinematic viscosity) was of 5.1 × 105. The ball had an average rotational velocity of 63 radians per second, rose above the height of the crossbar during the flight and moved about 3 m sideways, before slowing down to about 19 m/s as it dipped into the corner of the goal.
Goff and Carré then did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate a value for CS, which was found to be about 0.2 for the famous shot.
And the punchline? Sorry folks, there isn’t one. But maybe the paper will persuade Becks, who’s currently on loan from LA Galaxy at AC Milan, to swot up on a bit of simple physics before next summer’s tournament. Assuming he makes the team, that is.
The psychology of climate-change scepticism
Nov 16, 2009
By Margaret Harris
As the person who (with editor Matin Durrani) compiles letters and web comments for the “Feedback” section of Physics World, I’ve been paying close attention to the flood of comments on physicsworld.com’s various climate-change articles.
A majority of the comments have been negative, as many readers will have noticed, and the same has been true for feedback in the form of letters and emails. On the face of it, this is pretty typical, even for a good magazine: angry readers write letters, while happy readers, by and large, do not.
But I have to wonder what else might be going on that is specific to the issue of climate change. Most people who make negative comments have not read an enormous number of peer-reviewed publications on the subject; at best, they seem to have read an enormous number of websites set up by avowed climate-change sceptics. However, neither do they appear to be in the pay of the fossil-fuel industry, as some environmentalists have charged. So why is there such a huge amount of vitriol out there against the idea that the climate is changing, and humans are (at least partly) responsible?
The answer, it seems, may be partly down to human psychology — at least according to a report from the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University. Liz Kalaugher, editor of environmentalresearchweb.org (one of physicsworld.com’s sister websites within the Institute of Physics Publishing) has written a very good summary of the report here . Alternatively, you can download a guide to the CRED report here.
From baguettes to bosons
Nov 16, 2009
Now where did I put my sandwich? (credit: CERN)
By Michael Banks
The mystery surrounding the electrical fault last week at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has taken a new twist today.
Last week, a piece of baguette was found to be lying on an electrical connection in one of the eight above-ground cryoplants - used to cool the LHC to 1.9 K - that caused two of the eight sectors around the LHC’s 27 km ring to heat up to 10 K.
But in the latest issue of the CERN Bulletin, James Gillies, head of communication at CERN, claims that a bird carrying a baguette did not stall the world’s most powerful particle-physics experiment from starting up on schedule.
“Of course, no such thing happened,” says Gillies. But he did admit that engineers at CERN do not fully understand how the heating occurred in the two sectors. “To this day, we do not know what caused the power cut,” he says.
However, Gillies, who was not at CERN when the incident happened, says it is true that “feathers and bread” were actually found at the site of the mystery electrical fault.
Could it be that someone intent on sabotaging the LHC has cleverly laid a decoy of feathers and bread?
Whatever the reason, Gillies is keen for the media to now focus on the LHC and the science it will produce once low-energy collisions begin early next month.
“Soon, the headlines should be turning from birds to b-quarks, and from baguettes to bosons,” he says. Well there is hope.
Exoplanets and the ‘lithium problem’
Nov 13, 2009
Artist’s impression of a giant exoplanet. (Courtesy: Spitzer Space Telescope).
By Hamish Johnston
About a month ago we reported that astronomers might be able find Earth-like exoplanets by studying the chemical signatures of distant stars.
The idea is that the formation of rocky planets such as Earth and Mars leave their companion stars deficient in heavy elements such as aluminium, iron and nickel. The team came to this conclusion after finding that the Sun seems to have about a 15% deficit in these elements compared to similar stars.
Now another group of astronomers has looked at the lithium content of Sun-like stars, and discovered that stars with exoplanets have less lithium than those with no exoplanets. It is already well known that the Sun has 140 times less lithium on its surface than predicted by models of solar evolution.
I spoke to one of the group — Garik Israelian of the Institute of Astrophysicists in the Canary Islands — and he told me that there are two mechanisms by which planet formation could lead to low levels of lithium.
The first is related to “giant migration”, whereby the orbits of Jupiter-like planets change over time. The resulting transfer of angular momentum can leave the lithium-rich outer atmosphere of the star spinning faster relative to the core of the star. This leads to turbulence, which sends some of the lithium deeper into the star where it is hot enough for it to burn via nuclear fusion.
The second is related to the fact that much of the angular momentum in a solar system is tied up in the planets — which means that the core of a star with planets is probably rotating much slower than a similar star with no planets. However, the atmosphere of such a star still rotates rapidly, leading to turbulence and lithium burning.
Indeed, both of these effects could act in succession on the same star - really setting its lithium ablaze.
Israelian believes that exoplanets could be behind the ‘lithium problem’ — the puzzling observation that stars of the same temperature, age and metallicity have very different levels of lithium.
The discovery could also help to further accelerate the discovery of exoplanets — about 400 have been found so far — by narrowing down the field of stellar candidates.
The research is reported in Nature 462 189.
If you want to know more about exoplanets, check out this article by Alan Boss.