What is the site about and who’s behind it?

Empirical Zeal is a blog that covers mind-blowing science from a wide range of disciplines, but especially physics and evolutionary biology. Its zealously empirical author is Aatish Bhatia, a PhD student in the physics department of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. For a year or so in the late 2000s Bhatia wrote a conventional physics blog called High Energy Mayhem in which he described typical PhD-student activities such as going to conferences, attending seminars and attempting to get to grips with various mathematical tools. Since then, however, both Bhatia’s scientific interests and his blog have evolved considerably. His current research focuses on developing and applying new computational tools for genome analysis, and his new, general-public-friendly blog is an irresistible mix of everyday and esoteric science, backed up with some serious but accessible quantitative analysis.

Can you give me some examples?

Bhatia often uses blog posts or videos created by others as jumping-off points for his own work. For example, one post from July features a video in which the British science presenter and comic Steve Mould makes a long chain of beads “levitate” as it is poured out of a jar. The video is jaw-dropping, and Mould offers a good description of the physics behind it. However, Bhatia takes things several steps further, creating a mathematical model of the falling chain and using motion-tracking software to compare the model’s prediction to a slowed-down version of Mould’s video. Another recent post begins with a video of a “rolling swarm” of caterpillars, and goes on to explain that these swarms are essentially a squishier version of the moving walkways in airports: caterpillars in the top few layers can travel at speeds several times faster than an individual bug can crawl, thanks to the motion of the bottom layers. Calculating the speed of the Nth layer of caterpillars is, however, left as an exercise for the reader.

Anything else I should know?

In addition to physics and evolution, Bhatia also has a strong interest in education. Earlier this year, he helped make a video for TED-Ed (the educational wing of the online science/culture/ideas juggernaut) about the physics of fluids and the ways in which large and small swimming creatures have adapted to move through them. The video carries the arresting title “The physics of sperm vs. the physics of sperm whales”, and is worth watching for the animations alone. Another post takes an in-depth look at the “monkey and the hunter” problem found in many undergraduate physics textbooks, analysing not only the problem itself but also how its presentation has changed over the years.

Can you give me a sample quote?

From a post in June: “I just read an interesting new physics paper. It’s called ‘Statistical mechanics of the US Supreme Court’, and it attempts to understand how Supreme Court judges influence each other when voting, using techniques from the physics of magnetism… Imagine you had a magnet. If you zoom in to this magnet with the right kind of microscope, you’d see tiny little microscopic magnets – each of which can either align with or against each other. These micro-magnets (or spins, which is what physicists call them) can flip their directions, and they can influence each other – every micro-magnet tries to get the other ones to align with itself. Some micro-magnets are more influential than others, and they can convince many others to flip in their direction. Turns out, this magnet model maps nicely to the Supreme Court problem. Just as the micro-magnets influence each other’s orientation, and arrive at an emergent magnetization, the Supreme Court judges can influence each other’s votes, and from their deliberations emerges a final vote.”