Cocktail Party Physics

friday fodder, july 29, 2011

It's been a few weeks since we had a roundup of Friday Fodder here at the cocktail party, and it's high time we got back on schedule. So here's a sampling of cool physics-y links to liven up your cocktail party conversation this weekend.  

Simulating the End of Time. Physicists at the University of Maryland -- the same group that brought you analogues of black holes back in 2006 -- have now used plasmons ("a two-dimensional form of light that moves along the interface between a metal and an insulator") to create analogues of what might happen to spacetime at the end of time itself. According to George Musser of Scientific American, they ended up with some unusual nonlinear effects corresponding to "the creation of particles—basically, Hawking radiation. In short, matter would go haywire at end of time. It would not go gentle into that good night." Or, as Brandom Keim put it over at Wired Science's coverage of the same story, "This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a higher harmonic generation." And in other time-related news, physicists re-confirm that time travel is probably impossible.  

Oh, the Glare. Chad over at Uncertain Principles wondered how effective polarized sunglasses really are at blocking polarized light. So like any good physicist, he did the experiment.  

Naked Science: The Singularity. No, not the kind of singularity futurists are always going on about. Over at io9, physicist Dave Goldberg tells you all about the science of a black hole's singularity -- and whether such a singularity could exist without the "clothing" of an event horizon. If so, then we might one day be able to observe the singularity without, you know, all the dying and stuff. Because once you fall into a black hole, Goldberg warns, "you get killed very quickly — it takes about a tenth of a second between mild discomfort and being ripped to shreds by tidal forces."

Through a Scanner, Lightly. The BBC made an eye-catching video of a multimedia musical performance by the Aurora Orchestra in London's Wilton's Musical Hall. The piece was composed by Mira Calix and Anna Meredith, who got their inspiration from the sounds of an MRI machine. Definitely worth a listen.  

Zombie Science of the Week: Over at Scientific American's Science Sushi blog, Nerdy Christie tells you all about soy sauce (or salt in general) and why it seems to reanimate the dead.  

Hubble Space Telescope and the Scarlet Letters. Richard Panek at The Last Word on Nothing delves into an intriguing bit of recent space history, looking back to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1986.

The idea was to include a small memento for the mission. Perhaps a pipe belonging to Edwin Hubble himself? Or something better: "What about the photographic plate with which Hubble had made the discovery that essentially began modern cosmology: that our vast menagerie of stars is not alone but is, as we now know, merely one among billions of galaxies clouding the universe as far as even HST would be able to see?"

In Defense of the James Webb Space Telescope. Physicist Lawrence Krauss writes an impassioned essay over at Richard Dawkins' place on why the successor to Hubble is important not just for science, but also for inspiring the public -- and, one hopes, a new generation of scientists.

The cancellation of the JWST would likely herald the beginning of the end of US leadership in Space Science, just as the cancellation of the SSC moved the center of gravity in particle physics to Europe. The JWST was designed to take off where the Hubble Space telescope—which has revolutionized astronomy—has ended, by taking us to the very beginnings of visible structure in the Universe. It was meant to be the centerpiece of astronomy for the next two decades, and without it, the tantalizing hints that Hubble has been able to glean about our beginnings will remain just that for perhaps a generation. ... But the potential loss of the JWST is far greater than just science. It is hard to think of a single NASA project, exceeding even the Mars Rovers, that has captured the imagination of the public, and in particular children, than the images of the cosmos provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. Whenever I lecture and show a Hubble photo I can be guaranteed to provoke excitement and awe. One can only imagine what inspirations the next generation will miss without another comparable eye in the sky.

The Science of Scotch. Over at Popular Science, reporter Paul Adams samples a bit of aged scotch at the Tales of the Cocktail convention in (where else?) New Orleans. But first, the chosen scotch is fractionated by scientist Dave Arnold: "He has set up his laboratory evaporator and physically separated out the flavor components in a glass of Glenlivet so they can be sipped individually.... The evaporator uses a process of vacuum distillation at room temperature to separate liquids based on their relative volatility."  

Hot Enough To Fry an Egg? As the Northeast simmered in record-breaking heat, Alexis Madrigal and his colleagues at the Atlantic wondered if it was really possible to fry an egg on the pavement -- or, even better, on the rooftop of the infamous Watergate Hotel. So they did the experiment. Also? Here's a brief history of the science of air-conditioning.

When Circuits Go Squish. Who knew that PlayDoh could be used to build simple circuits? Lots of folks, apparently. The Exploratorium offers this terrific post and photographs of the museum's first session of summer trainings with its High School Explainers. "We led three workshops on squishy circuits on different days hoping that as many Explainers as possible could try out this activity. The workshops started with the challenge of using the playdoh and batteries to turn on an LED and then progressed to free exploration with all the materials."

The Ladies of the Mercury 13. Via Science 2.0 we learned that in the early days of the space race, NASA investigated the possibility of training women rather than men as astronauts for those early Mercury missions. (In other space trivia, apparently the spacesuits worn by the Apollo astronauts were handmade by seamstresses at Playtex.) Meet the 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing procedures as their male counterparts. In the end they didn't go to space, but they definitely brought some advantages.

Their proposition was based purely on physiology and practicality. They recognized that women's lighter weights would reduce the amount of propulsion fuel being used by the rocket's load and that women would require less auxiliary oxygen than men. They knew that women had fewer heart attacks than men and their reproductive system was thought to be less susceptible to radiation than a male's. Finally, preliminary data suggested that women could outperform men in enduring cramped spaces and prolonged isolation.

One-Minute Physics: Dark Matter. Is it possible to summarize the basic physics of dark matter in one minute? Watch the video and decide for yourself!

 

is it cold in here?

[Originally posted at our new home at Scientific American.]

Last week, Linda Henneberg, a young science communication intern at CERN in Switzerland -- best known these days as the home of the Large Hadron Collider -- wrote a blog post about her experiences at the laboratory as both a woman and a non-PhD physicist. Haltingly, timidly, even a bit apologetically, she confessed, "I’ve never felt more constantly objectified, hit on, and creeped on than while at CERN.

She was careful to say that she has not encountered blatant sexism of the most egregious sort, although she has endured unwelcome awkward flirting: a wink and a hand on the knee, lame attempts at playing "footsie" with her under the table during meetings, and of course, tacky double entendres. Even then, she cut the guys a lot of slack; it's just social awkwardness, she rationalized, not a malicious attempt to make her feel uncomfortable -- and yet, she does feel uncomfortable. (There may also be cultural factors at play, given the international diversity at CERN.)

What she found equally bothersome is that because she's a woman in education, not physics research, she simply isn't taken seriously by her male colleagues at CERN, who apparently treat her with amiable condescension. Henneberg holds an undergraduate degree is in physics and a graduate degree in science communication, yet "[P]eople here, men especially, treat me like some sort of novelty item. Like because I am not a physicist, I have nothing substantive to contribute to CERN, but it’s cute that I try."

There's a phrase for what Linda Henneberg is experiencing: it's called a "chilly climate," and it describes not just overt sexism or sexual harassment -- which most people agree are unacceptable, at least in theory -- but the myriad unconscious diminishing behaviors that seem to proliferate in any male-dominated environment, whether it be a classroom, a boardroom, an Internet chat room, World of Warcraft, or an international physics laboratory.

The Australian band Tripod immortalized this phenomenon with their satirical tune, "Hot Girl in the Comic Shop" (video at end of post), poking fun at the social awkwardness and ridiculous over-reaction of nerdy comic book guys at the sudden appearance of a girl in their male-dominated realm.

What constitutes "chilling" behavior? A teacher calls on the boys in class more than the girls. A CEO ignores what a woman says in a meeting but listens intently when a man makes the exact same point. A conference emcee mentions a female speaker's appearance rather than (or in addition to) her accomplishments, but feels no need to comment on the appearance of male speakers. A guy at an atheist/skeptics meeting hits on a young woman in an elevator at 4 AM, ignoring the fact that she just spent the evening talking about how she hates being objectified at such gatherings.

All these sorts of things seem tiny and insignificant by themselves, but they add up, and this produces a cumulative "chilling" effect that makes women feel unwelcome, like they don't belong. That's a "chilly climate." The effect is subtle; sometimes we're not even consciously aware of it. We just have that nagging feeling of being "less than," unable to put our finger on why we feel that way.

Here's some good news for Henneberg: in the physics community, the "chilly climate" is a widely recognized concern (yes, even at CERN), with many programs in place to improve working environments for women in physics. The American Physical Society has a site visits program and maintains a "Best Practices" document for academic departments, for example, and in 2007 released a gender equity report (PDF) summarizing the progress made to date and offering recommendations for future improvements. That's not to say they've solved the problem: the number of women physicists is still less than 20%, one of the worst ratios in the sciences, along with engineering and mathematics. But it's progress, nonetheless.

With all the other trouble in the world, why should we care about this? It's because those climate issues chase many women out of the hard sciences -- and indeed, out of any male-dominated community. In March, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, conducted an NSF-funded study on the retention (or lack thereof) of women in engineering. Nearly half of the women surveyed who left engineering said they did so because of negative working conditions, lack of advancement or low salary, and one in three left because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture. Only one in four left to spend more time with family -- the usual excuse that gets trotted out when folks try to explain away the low numbers of women in such fields.

The message is clear: if you want to attract women to your community, the first step is to make sure they feel welcome.  

Chill, Baby, Chill

The term "chilly climate" was coined back in 1982 by feminist icon Bernice Sandler, now a senior scholar at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington, DC; an updated 2005 paper addressing the chilly climate in the classroom can be found here (PDF). For those who might not have heard of Sandler, she's known as the "godmother of Title IX," having played a pivotal role in the passage of that law prohibiting gender discrimination in education, and she filed the first charges of gender discrimination in the 1970s against more than 250 institutions -- at a time when such anti-discrimination laws simply didn't exist.

I had the honor of moderating a panel discussion back in June for the National Coalition of Girls' Schools that included Sandler. Honestly? I was expecting a stern, forceful Caped Crusader sort of person, and instead encountered a charming gray-haired soft-spoken woman who shares my penchant for rich jewel toned clothing (check out that awesome jacket in the photot -- WANT!), and who insisted I call her "Bunny." Yet, in her own quiet way, she is every bit as formidable as the Caped Crusader persona in my head -- an iron hand in a velvet glove.

Sandler told me she first encountered the chilly climate for women as a feminist activist in the 1970s, sitting in a policy meeting in which she noticed that the few token women in the room were constantly being interrupted by the men. She decided to perform her own little social experiment, carefully keeping count of the number of times both men and women in the meeting were interrupted. The results: women were interrupted (invariably by men) at least three times more often than the men.

Sandler shared her results with her male colleagues, who were predictably defensive, claiming she must have miscounted or been biased in some way because of course they would never do such a thing. But the next day, when the meeting resumed, the men were far more careful not to interrupt when the women were speaking. Their awareness of the problem altered the way they treated the women in the meeting, even though they denied the problem existed. And Sandler realized, "Oh -- this is changeable behavior." She's been working to change those behaviors ever since.

I thought of Sandler as I was preparing for The Amaz!ing Meeting (TAM9) in Las Vegas last week, where I was slated to give a light-hearted talk on how changing concepts of the universe have been reflected in popular culture. For the uninitiated, TAM is an annual conference organized by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), and has grown from humble beginnings into the biggest gathering of atheists and skeptics in the country. Science and skepticism are natural allies, so as a science writer, I am tangentially involved with that community, and I've met some great people within it. And yet -- I almost didn't go this year. Why? One word: "Elevatorgate."  

The Elevator Pitch

For the two people in the science blogosphere who missed it, here's what happened. Rebecca Watson, founder of the Skepchick website and co-host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, put up a "vlog" describing her recent trip to attend a meeting of atheists in Dublin, Ireland, where she was speaking on (of all things) gender issues in the skeptical community. (Full disclosure: I know Watson slightly, and like her, although we're not BFFs; I mean, we're not braiding each other's hair every Saturday night.)

Towards the end of the video, she casually related her discomfort at being approached in an elevator at 4 AM by an intoxicated Irish guy, who asked her back to his room "for coffee." Watson wasn't hysterical, or raving, or even angry. (You can see for yourself here. It starts at the 4:30 mark.) She simply said, "Look, guys -- don't do that. It makes me very uncomfortable," and briefly outlined the reasons why.

You'd think she'd castrated the poor guy on tape and held up his severed member as a trophy, the way some people over-reacted. I won't bother rehashing the various arguments, or my own thoughts on the matter, which have already been well expressed by John Rennie, Lindsey Beyerstein, Isis Scientist, the pseudonymous "Ryawesome" (who wins the prize for Most Colorfully Profane blog post title: "Frankly, atheists, skeptics, you're embarrassing as fuck"), and Watson herself. (Watson is also featured in this week's Point of Inquiry podcast.) Suffice to say, emotions were running high, and I waded through the ensuing comment threads with a growing sense of dismay, then anger, then outright revulsion at many of the opinions being expressed.

Watson was vilified for over-reacting, for being a diva, a "media-whore," an attention-monger, a bitch, a man-hating feminazi, and a troublemaker who was deflecting attention away from far more important issues. She was accused of being anti-sex (as if), calling all men rapists (she did not), and was threatened with sexual assault at the upcoming TAM "to give you something to complain about." (Being threatened with rape is not a new experience for Watson, alas.)

Those who spoke up and came to her defense received similar treatment -- including a couple of women who had survived sexual assaults. I was tempted to make a bingo card based on Derailing for Dummies and start checking off each hopelessly cliched argument designed to protect those with privilege from having to acknowledge the problem.

It pretty much mirrored every Internet comment thread (follow that link for a terrific comic by Gabby Schulz) that ensues whenever a woman, however diplomatically, dares to raise the issue of sexist behavior, with one crucial difference: Watson was being attacked by members of her own community, who prided themselves on their rationality and critical thinking -- in short, by the very people who should have had her back.

Here is the message being sent to the women skeptics and atheists say they want to join their ranks: "If an atheist/skeptic man behaves boorishly toward you, or refuses to respect your boundaries, whether social or sexual, and you have the gall to state firmly that this is not okay, you will be publicly pilloried, ridiculed for being hysterical, called a man-hating feminazi (or worse), and have your concerns belittled and dismissed."

Why should I, or any woman, want to be part of that community?

Let me be clear: I like men, and enjoy their company. I write about physics for a living, and earned a black belt in jujitsu by training in a mostly all-male dojo in Brooklyn back when I still lived in New York City. Plus I spent the last two years working to bridge the gap between science and Hollywood (still very much a patriarchy, especially when it comes to film). I am very comfortable in male-dominated environments, and accustomed to being the only woman in the room. And yet I have had far more negative experiences with men in the skeptic/atheist community than anywhere else.

Case in point: When I spoke two years ago at TAM7, I was flooded afterwards with friend requests on Facebook from the skeptical community. It was initially kind of gratifying, and I pretty much accepted them all, provided they weren't using obvious pseudonyms. Most of my interactions on Facebook have been positive, but there have been a dozen or so instances over the last two years where a man has become obnoxious, offensive, overbearing, overly flirtatious, or just plain creepy about personal boundaries, forcing me to defriend him. With one exception, they were all from the skeptic/atheist community. I now rarely accept Facebook friend requests from skeptic/atheist men. No, it isn't "fair." But even though 98% of them are probably very nice guys, I just don't have the time to comb through each profile, trying to ferret out clues as to who is most likely to tweak out on me unexpectedly.

So believe me when I tell you that the skeptic/atheist community has a serious problem when it comes to creating a welcoming environment for women. The APS lists causes of concern in an academic department that are indicative of a chilly climate. Guess what tops the list? "Denial that such issues do matter to people." And further down the list: "Derogatory comments about female faculty to reduce their ability to bring about change. Branding faculty as 'difficult' or 'troublemaker.'"

Manifesto for Change

It doesn't have to be this way; as Sandler discovered, this is changeable behavior. That's why I'm offering a Manifesto for Change, and I challenge those in the skeptic/atheist community to implement its principles.

(1) Ladies: even though you might not feel 100% welcome, grit your teeth and show up anyway, because there is power in numbers. Studies have shown that these chilling effects start to dissipate as communities approach 50/50 gender ratios. I showed up anyway, and I'm glad I did, because I could see firsthand how much has changed since I last attended TAM. TAM9 had markedly more women in the audience (around 40%), and half the speakers were women. I was the only woman speaker at TAM7 two years ago. That is tremendous progress in a very short time, and the willingness of Watson and her fellow "skepchicks" to show up, speak out, and endure the inevitable slings and arrows cast their way played a key role in making it happen.

(2) There are also women out there who do not believe this is an issue because they haven't personally experienced it, or have experienced things they feel are far worse. Please do not diminish the experiences and emotions of your sisters in skepticism. Remain open to the possibility that you, too, might be unconsciously influenced by cultural baggage.

A few years ago, Bernice Sandler realized that she had a bad habit of checking her watch during talks or panel discussions -- but she only checked her watch when women were speaking. That's how deeply ingrained these cultural attitudes can be: even a woman like Sandler, who has spent her career fighting for gender equality, can fall victim to the subtle assumption that men's voices are more valuable than those of women. She recognized her behavior, and actively worked to change it: "Now I only check my watch when I'm speaking." Little things matter.

(3) Foster top-down change. Leadership, especially male leadership, needs to set the tone for what is and is not acceptable in a community. The 2007 APS report quotes Virginia Tech's Patricia Hyer on this: "The voices of male heads ... can carry great weight in moving forward an institutional change agenda, especially if they use their access to institutional leaders and personal prestige to make the case for gender equity." (Richard Dawkins, are you listening?)

JREF president DJ Grothe did just that when, a few days before TAM9, he openly addressed the rift caused by "Elevatorgate" and made it clear that unwanted sexual advances or other harassing behavior were unacceptable, and grounds for being ejected from the conference. Grothe also deserves credit for making diversity a priority in his selection of speakers and topic. That's the mark of a true leader, and the JREF is lucky to have him. Kudos, also, to Big Name skeptics like Phil Plait, PZ Myers, Josh Rosenau, Greg Laden and others who spoke up eloquently in support of Watson.

(4) Foster bottom-up change. Men at the grassroots level need to reinforce the leadership position and make it clear to their peers that such behavior is unacceptable. As former APS president Judy Franz said in the 2007 APS report, "If you make all your women ... feel more valued by your speech and actions ... and if you publicly chastise those that make demeaning or snide comments, you will find the rewards are great."

Guys, why wouldn't you do this for people you claim to value and respect? These women are smart, sassy, strong, and yes, sexy. They're amazing. And they're your sisters in arms. It's time to step up and start acting like brothers. The next time you see a guy acting like a jerk around a woman at a skeptic/atheist gathering, call him out: "Dude. Not cool. She's not the hot girl in the comic shop, you know." Feel free to quote The Social Network: "You're going to go through life thinking girls don't like you cuz you're a nerd, when really it's because you're an asshole."

If a woman calls you out on your behavior, instead of getting angry and defensive, just say, "Wow, I never thought of it like that. I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable. It wasn't intentional." Cop to the behavior, and we can all move on. Or just be like that anonymous guy at Watson's TAM9 quiz show event; as Watson took the stage, he shouted, "WE RESPECT WOMEN'S VOICES SO HARD!"

Follow the manifesto, and you will continue to see your community change for the better as more and more women (and other under-represented groups as well, because these principles can be broadly applied) feel welcome in your midst. And who knows? Maybe at next year's TAM, Rebecca Watson will finally get the public apology she so richly deserves.

 

physicists embrace the splatter master

[Originally posted at our new home at Scientific American.]

What is it about painter Jackson Pollock that physicists find so entrancing? His notorious drip paintings have earned the artist as many naysayers as admirers over the years, but within today's art community his genius is largely undisputed. A genuine Pollock canvas is worth millions. And now a couple of physicists have published an intriguing article in the June issue of Physics Today on Pollock's seemingly intuitive grasp of the mathematical connection between viscosity and flow rate of a fluid (in Pollock's case, paint).

Pollock's technique was pretty unique for his era: he used a stick or a trowel to drip paint on the canvas, or fling it to form his signature splatter, or make elaborate coils with the liquid paint. The seemingly haphazard way he went about this caused more than one person to comment that surely even a trained chimpanzee could produce a canvas that looked like a Pollock -- certainly a chimp like Congo, who produced a series of paintings in the mid 1950s and was often held up as a way to ridicule Pollock's work. (Congo's oeuvre came up for auction in 2005, and the chimp seems to have also accrued value in death: the lot sold for £12,000. The same article reports that Salvador Dali is said to have quipped, "The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal.")

According to Andrzej Herczynski, a physicist at Boston College, and Harvard mathematician Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, along with Boston College art historian Claude Cernuschi, the hand of Jackson Pollock was also the hand of a brilliantly intuitive physicist of sorts.

"His particular painting technique essentially lets physics be a player in the creative process," Herczynski told Wired. "To the degree that he lets physics take a role in painting process, he is inviting physics to be a coauthor of his pieces." (Full disclosure: Herczynski is a friend of some years' standing; we used to joke that if you combined all the letters in our respective names -- his is heavy on consonants, mine on vowels -- you'd almost get the complete alphabet. <*waves*> Hi Andrzej!)

So, what's the specific physics we're talking about here? It's a phenomenon in fluid dynamics known as "coiling instability," first described in physics papers in the late 1950s. Anyone who has ever played with the syrup on their morning pancakes -- and who among us has not? -- knows what this is. It's a mathematical way of describing the way in which a thick, viscous liquid folds onto itself like a coiling rope.

Herczynski and Mahadevan measured the thickness of lines and the radius of the coils in one of Pollock's paintings where this effect occurs, and used those measurements to estimate the flow rate of the paint Pollock used as he moved his hand across the canvas. Recent fluid dynamics studies demonstrate that the kinds of patterns fluids form as they fall depends on two factors: how thick they are (viscosity), and the speed at which they are moving. For instance, a thick fluid will form a straight line when it's moving rapidly (say, paint across a canvas), but when it's poured slowly, it will form various loops and squiggles and figure eights. You see just that in Pollock's "Untitled 1948-49" (for all his genius, Pollock kind of sucked at catchy titles).

It's well known that Pollock deliberately played with the texture and viscosity of his paints, mixing them with solvents to make them thicker or thinner, depending on the effect he was looking to achieve. He was able to control the degree to which this coiling effect showed up in the final painting by moving his arm at different speeds, combined with using paints of different viscosities. In fact, while many art historians previously believed Pollock created the coiling effect by "wiggling his hand in a sinusoidal way," Herczynski et al maintain he did with simple gravity.

"When Pollock was doing that, when he mixed his paints and diluted them and chose paints of similar density and different viscosity and so on, in a way he was doing experiments in fluid dynamics," Herczynski told Wired-- and he did so before physicists themselves had established fluid dynamics as a separate field. Pollock wasn't consciously conducting physics experiments, of course, but perhaps the best evidence in favor of this analysis can be found in a 1950 video of Pollock at work (see end of post), in which the splatter master asserts in the voice-over, "I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident."  

Fractious About Fractals

This isn't the first time Pollock has piqued the interest of physicists. Several years ago, I wrote a feature article for Discover (and then a blog post) on the work of physicist Richard Taylor, who used the same analysis techniques he applied in his laboratory to study several paintings by the splatter master (affectionately known to Jen-Luc Piquant as "Jack the Dripper"). He found very clear fractal patterns in the seemingly random drip patterns Pollock splayed across his giant canvases.

Thanks to the enormous popularity of Jurassic Park, many people now realize that "chaos" -- a word that typically denotes utter randomness -- has a different meaning in the context of math and science. It applies to systems that only appear to be random on the surface; underneath is a hidden order.

The stock market is a chaotic system, for example: a slight blip can be amplified many times over until the system "goes critical" and the market crashes. It's known as the "butterfly effect" (not to be confused with the 2004 Ashton Kutcher film by the same name, although the movie certainly plays with the implications of the concept): a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and the air disturbance amplifies over time and distance, eventually causing a tornado in Texas (along with loads of other equally unpredictable changes everywhere else, of varying severity).

Fractal patterns are the mathematical offspring of chaos theory, the remnant of chaotic motion -- wreckage strewn in the wake of a hurricane, for example. Something might appear to be haphazard on the surface, but look closer and one might realize that there is, in fact, a single geometric pattern repeated thousands of times over at different size scales, just like those nested Russian dolls. That telltale pattern is known as "self-similarity."

I've always liked the concept of chaos. So I was chuffed to learn that fractal patterns pop up not just in art, but in music and literature as well. I love it when two widely divergent disciplines -- science and art, in this instance -- somehow manage to find common ground. Taylor's work particularly fascinated me because he explored not just whether such patterns occurred in Pollock's paintings, but why they might be there in the first place. When he analyzed archival film footage of Pollock in the act of creating those canvases -- shot in 1950 by Hans Namuth -- Taylor found that Pollock actually moved around the canvases in chaotic motions. So there was nothing random about Pollock's work at all, at least to Taylor's way of thinking.

Nearly five years after that, Taylor (who had since moved to the University of Oregon) was back in the news, having been asked to analyze several small paintings that were recently discovered, and appear to be original Pollocks. His findings, published in the British journal Nature, indicated that they might not be authentic. They didn't exhibit those telltale fractal patterns that Taylor had found to typify Pollock's greatest work. In fact, there were "significant differences" in the drip patterns -- so significant that Taylor concluded the new paintings were either due to one artist whose style was extremely varied, or to several different artists.

Naturally, the owner of the paintings, one Alex Matter, was less than thrilled with this news. Pollock's work typically fetches millions of dollars at auctions, so Matter's cache of canvases, collectively, would be equivalent to winning the lottery -- if they were genuine.

Some contended that the paintings were more likely to be a pale imitation of Pollock's signature technique on the part of Matter's mother, Mercedes, an artist in her own right, as well as an art teacher, and also an "F.O.J." ("friend of Jack").

These naysayers pointed to Taylor's analysis as hard, empirical evidence that the foundling canvases couldn't be genuine. Matter's supporters insisted that fractal analysis is far from a proven commodity when applied to the field of art authentication, which by its nature is fairly subjective, and usually comes down to a consensus judgment call.

"Irrespective of whatever determination is ultimately made on the authenticity of the... Matter paintings, fractal analysis should not be considered a foolproof technique for authenticating works by Pollock," Case Western Reserve University art historian Ellen Landau told Nature in 2006. After all, how could a mere computer program possibly be capable of analyzing all the complexities of the human creative process?

There's something to that criticism. The presence of fractal patterns in some of Pollock's painting is interesting, to be sure, especially since this shows up in the canvases considered to be his greatest work. But artists change and refine their techniques over time; and even Pollock had his off days, producing lesser works. What are the odds that every single Pollock canvas is fractal, if the secret to the splatter master's aesthetic appeal is that telltale self-similarity? Using that argument, the Matter paintings could still be genuine, since the absence of the expected scaling behavior in the paintings may be attributable to the fact that they were executed by Pollock at a different period from that of the paintings that Taylor had analyzed earlier.  

Of Fractals and Photoshop

At least a couple of physicists agreed with Landau's assessment. Shortly after the 2006 Nature article appeared, Case University physicists Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur published the results of their own analysis, claiming that Taylor's work was "seriously flawed" and "lacked the range of scales needed to be considered fractal." See, that whole self-similarity aspect of fractals isn't always visible to the eye; there is a computational technique known as box-counting to detect fractal patterns down to size scales beyond the limits of the human eye. Using that method, Pollock's paintings do not meet the criteria for "fractal," Jones-Smith and Mathur argue -- because the smallest marks of paint found in a Pollock canvas are "only a thousand times smaller than the entire canvas."

To prove her point, Jones-Smith created her own version of a fractal painting -- based on the criteria Taylor has made public so far -- in about five minutes using Photoshop, called "Untitled 5" (see photo at right). As you can see, it looks nothing like a Jackson Pollock, nor would anyone ever mistake it for such. Hell, even Congo could have done better. Still, Jones-Smith and Mathur maintain it meets Taylor's public fractal "criteria," and Mathur jokingly told Science News, "Either Taylor is wrong or Kate's drawings are worth $40 million. We'd be happy either way."

Oh, snap! It's a clever comeback, but also a bit disingenuous: there is a lot more to the value of a Pollock painting than its fractal (or non-fractal) nature, and Jones-Smith and Mathur most certainly know it. This illustrates the downside when physicists try to tackle art and apply rigorous quantitative analysis to assess aesthetic value. Our responses to art are highly subjective and vary with the individual.

That inherent subjectivity is why Taylor himself didn't claim his technique was "foolproof" for authentication. Indeed, he has been careful to insist that his analysis shouldn't be the final word on the subject, just one tool among many, telling the New York Times that his findings "should be integrated with all the known facts -- including provenance, visual inspection, and materials analysis." In other words, any objective, scientific data should be considered in light of the traditional, more subjective criteria typically employed by art historians.

Arguing that there can't be fractal patterns in a Pollock painting because the paint blobs aren't small enough strikes the average non-scientist as pointless nitpicking -- and even some bona fide scientists. The late Benoit ("father of fractals") Mandelbrot himself defended Taylor's work, telling Science News back in 2006, "I do believe Pollocks are fractal." And Taylor pointed out that his use of "fractal" is perfectly consistent with how it has been defined by the research community, adding that by "dismissing Pollock's fractals because of their limited magnification rage, [they] would also dismiss half the published investigations of physical fractals."

There is one criticism offered by Jones-Smith and Mathur that strikes me as a valid point: as of 2006, at least, Taylor had only analyzed 17 of Pollock's more than 180 drip paintings, a sample too statistically insignificant to draw substantial conclusions. I'm waiting for the first person to step forward and level the same criticism at Herczynski and Mahadevan, who focused their analysis mostly on a single painting.

Oh, you know it's coming; folks are passionate about Pollock, and physicists are no exception. I'm sure the scientists will respond with admirably convincing counter-arguments. Indeed, they seem to have anticipated something of that nature, since Herczynski observed that it's possible the coils may be present in other paintings but are obscured because Pollock favored canvases with course surfaces. The authors also acknowledge this was an effect Pollock used rather sparingly in his work because he didn't like "relinquishing too much control" in his paintings. See above re: how artists' techniques change and evolve over time.

That kind of spirited back and forth is exactly how science works. Thus far, Herczynski and his collaborators seem to have the support of a few folks in the art community, which is encouraging, and even have the support of Mathur, one of the physicists who led the charge against Taylor's work.

As for me, I'll continue to savor these kinds of art/science collaborations; they only enhance both my appreciation of the masters, and of the wonder of science. It's nice to see the growing body of evidence that Pollock really did know what he was doing, even if was due to intuitive artistic instinct. Besides, as Landau told Science in response to this latest paper, "What Pollock produced without a specific scientific knowledge base seems a quintessential illustration of the fact that art and science are not such emphatically different side-of-the-brain activities as so many believe." Speak it, sister.

 

a series of tubes

[Cross-posted from our new home at Scientific American.]

Imagine, if you will, a secret community dwelling beneath the streets of New York City, its inhabitants never allowed to travel to the surface or to interact in any way with the dreaded "Topsiders." That's the premise of an award-winning 1999 YA novel by Neal Shusterman called Downsiders, exploring what happens when a 14-year-old Downsider named Talon defies the prohibition and ends up falling in love with a Topsider named Lindsay. Together, they uncover the mysterious origins of the Downsiders: a forgotten inventor named Alfred Ely Beach who created the array of tunnels over a century ago.

This is an instance where science fiction bumps up briefly against science fact, because Shusterman's inspiration for his subterranean world is based on an actual person. Alfred Ely Beach is best known for his invention of New York City's first concept for a subway: the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which would move people rapidly from one place to another in "cars" propelled along long tubes by compressed air. Beach was also the publisher of Scientific American starting in 1845, when he purchased it (at the ripe old age of 20) with a fellow investor, so it seems a fitting topic for my inaugural post on that magazine's fledgling blog network. (According to Wikipedia, inventor Rufus Porter actually founded the magazine, but sold it to Beach after a mere 10 months.)

Tunnels and pneumatic transportation systems are a staple of classic science fiction, starting with Jules Verne's Paris in the 20th Century, published in 1863, in which the author envisions tube trains stretching across the ocean. In 1882, Albert Robida described not only tube trains, but pneumatic postal delivery systems in his novel, The Twentieth Century. Those authors were quite prescient: versions of such systems were actually built, and some still exist today.

When I was a kid, I remember my mom using the banking drive-through teller to deposit checks, withdraw cash, etc., through a pneumatic system employing metal canisters. Some of those systems still exist, despite the proliferation of ATMs. Hospitals, factories, and large stores use internal pneumatic transport systems to rapidly move physical objects (drugs, documents, cash, even spare parts) from one location to another. And it all emerged from a vacuum -- specifically, vacuum physics.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

(Note: This section adapted from a 2007 post.) The first recorded experiments on the existence of vacuum were apparently conducted by an Arab philosopher named Al-Farabi in the 9th century AD, using handheld plungers in water. That's when he realized that the volume of air would expand to fill any available space. Later scientists figured out how to create better and better artificial vacuums, thanks to the principle he delineated. It's pretty simple: by expanding the volume of a given container, pressure is reduced and a partial vacuum is created. It's temporary and is soon filled by air pushing inside by atmospheric pressure, but if the container is repeatedly sealed, the air pumped out, expanded again, and closed off, it's possible to create a sealed vacuum chamber.

Vacuum is measured in units of pressure. Technically, the standard unit of pressure is the Pascal, but scientists can't possibly let things be so simple, so they came up with a new unit for vacuum pressure, the Torr, named after 17th century Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli, best known for inventing the barometer. He was trying to figure out how to raise water levels in a suction pump to more than 32 feet in height -- the limit pumpmakers had been able to reach using simple suction pumping.

It seemed that perhaps Nature truly did abhor a vacuum, but Galileo Galilei cheekily suggested that perhaps the abhorrence only extended to 32 feet. Galileo knew a little something about the weight of air versus other substances, and thought it might be possible to overcome the obstacle using something heavier than water.

Inspired by Galileo's insight, in 1643, Torricelli hit on the notion of using mercury, which is 14 times heavier than water, in a simple experiment: he filled a three-foot-long tube with mercury and sealed it on one end, then set it vertically into a basin of mercury with the open end submerged. The column of mercury fell about 28 inches, leaving an empty space above its level -- an early version of a sustained manmade vacuum. Torricelli further realized that (a) the mercury would rise to the same level regardless of how tilted the tube became because the pressure of the mercury would balance the weight of the air, and (2) the height of the column of mercury rose and fell according to changing atmospheric pressure. Voila! The first barometer.

Seven years later, a German scientist named Otto von Guericke built a contraption known as the Magdeburg hemispheres -- the world's first artificial vacuum. He took two large copper hemispheres with rims that fit tightly together, sealed the rims with grease, and pumped out all the air. To do so, he had to invent a vacuum pump; his version used a piston and cylinder with flap valves, powered by people turning a crank arm that was connected to the pump. Once all the air was removed from within the hemispheres, they were still held together by the air pressure of the surrounding atmosphere because the artificial vacuum inside provided no opposing pressure to balance things out.

It was a pretty powerful hold, too: von Guericke harnessed a team of eight horses to one hemisphere of the big coppery globe, and another eight horses to the other hemisphere, and then set the horses to pulling the two hemispheres apart by moving in opposite directions -- to no avail.

News of the experiment quickly spread throughout Europe, eventually reaching the ears of Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, in England. Few scientists were able to replicate von Guericke's feat because it was an expensive apparatus. But Boyle had the 17th century equivalent of a trust fund, being the son of the Earl of Cork, so he cheerfully set about building his own "pneumatic engine," cost be damned. To do so, he enlisted the aid of Robert Hooke of Micrographia fame, then Boyle's humble assistant. Hooke had a gift for instrumentation, which is a good thing, because Boyle's design was a clunky, difficult to operate device, and sometimes Hooke was the only one who could get the thing to work properly.

Boyle conducted many different experiments to determine the properties of air, specifically how "rarefied air" affected things like combustion, magnetism, sound, barometers, and various substances. He carefully detailed his observations for posterity in a very thick book ponderously titled, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (Made, for the Most Part, in a New Pneumatical Engine).

He clearly lacked the gift of catchy titles. Jen-Luc Piquant would have called it something more dramatic, like Asphyxiated! Staring Into the Void of the New Pneumatical Engine.  

Suck and Blow

It was only a matter of time before scientists and engineers figured out how to exploit vacuum technology in their inventions, most notably pneumatic tube transport systems to deliver messages or small parcels to various linked hubs. A Scottish engineer named William Murdoch first conceived of the notion in the early 19th century.

As the 19th century drew to close, most major cities used some kind of pneumatic tube transport system. One of the earliest linked the London Stock Exchange to the city's main telegraph station, built in 1853, followed by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company linking the Euston railway station to the city's main post office. Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Chicago, and New York City all built similar networks, many of which remained operation until the 1950s. The one in Paris was operational until 1984, and apparently the UK House of Commons still has a pneumatic tube system in place for its telephone and computer exchange. And you can find older office buildings in New York with the remains of internal pneumatic mail systems still in place.

Prague's pneumatic post is probably the last surviving such system in the world, housed in an annex to the city's Central Post Office. Completed in 1899, it's a complicated network of pneumatic pipes snaking out through the city's underground for roughly 34 miles. Initially it was used to forward telegrams from telegraph offices to postal offices, but the network was later extended to include government and other office buildings. This came in handy during the notorious Prague Uprising, when the city's pneumatic postal system helped bring supplies to a besieged Czech radio headquarters.

At its peak, in the 1970s, the system made over one million deliveries a year, although that number had fallen to a dismal 6000 or so deliveries per year -- hardly a profitable venture, but it's such an unusual piece of Czech history. Alas, massive flooding in Europe in August 2002 damaged the system and shut it down; it has yet to come back online. Part of the problem is that because the mechanical system has never been modernized, it's tough to find the component parts needed to repair it. (The Berlin factory that used to supply those parts closed down a good 60 years ago.)

Modern pneumatic transport systems can vary in their complexity, but fundamentally, the concept is quite simple. You have a "sending station" -- say, a cashier's checkout post -- linked to a receiving station -- perhaps a locked box in the store manager's office -- via a tube. There is an air compressor pump attached to the tube on the receiving end which has two basic modes of operation: "suck" and "blow."

If you want to send cash from the register from the sending to the receiving station, you'd simply load the it into the metal canister, place it in the tube, and close the door, effectively sealing off the tube. The air compressor would be set to "suck" mode, acting just like your average vacuum cleaner, sucking the air along the tube to create a partial vacuum in front of the canister. The canister can then be emptied, and returned to the sending station via the "blow" mode -- the air compressor literally pushes the canister through the tube by blowing air behind it.

We might have more efficient means nowadays of delivering messages (email, twitter, text messaging, etc.) but some folks still think pneumatic tube systems could be useful for, say, delivering food via pipeline. That's the concept behind Foodtubes, a UK-based project that proposes the creation of high-speed pneumatic pipelines connecting every major city in the UK. Food items would be placed in canisters and sent zipping along the nearly 2000 miles of pneumatic tubes. It would be a major capital investment, to be sure, but would definitely cut down on the number of delivery trucks currently clogging up London's roadways. I'd bet the consortium members are fans of Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward, which predicted a vast interlinked system of delivering goods via pneumatic tubes by the year 2000.

This sort of thing is not unprecedented: until this year, there was a McDonald's in Edina, Minnesota, that prided itself on being "The World's Only Pneumatic Air Drive-Thru." Customers would place their orders in the drive-thru -- located in the middle of a parking lot -- and their Big Macs, fries, and Chicken McNuggets would be delivered via pneumatic tubes. (One assumes sodas and shakes were delivered this way, too, but the risk of spillage seems rather high.) 

Sub-Rosa Subway

In 1812, a man named George Medhurst speculated that perhaps it might be possible to blow carriages laden with passengers through a tunnel, but he never got around to building anything. He lacked a pump with enough power to generate the requisite air pressure. In the mid-1850s, there were several rudimentary "atmospheric railways" -- in Ireland, London, and Paris -- and while the London Pneumatic Despatch system was intended to transport parcels, it was large enough to handle people. In fact, the Duke of Buckingham and several members of the company's board of directors were transported through the pneumatic system on October 10, 1865, to mark the opening of a new station. And a prototype pneumatic railway was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1864, with plans to build a version connecting Waterloo and Charing Cross by running under the Thames.

Those early efforts in London inspired Beach back in the US. He first published an 1849 article in Scientific American suggesting building an underground subway along Broadway in Manhattan, employing horse-drawn cars to carry passengers. Then he discovered pneumatics: "A tube, a car, a revolving fan! Little more is required!" he exclaimed in 1870. The idea was to put people in carriages underground and propel them through the rubes using air pressure generated by gigantic fans.

He first built a prototype above-ground model, which debuted at the 1867 American Institute Fair. It was little more than large wooden tube (roughly six feet in diameter and 100 feet long) capable of holding a small vehicle with a ten-person capacity. That car was then pushed through the tube by air pressure created by a giant fan. But he couldn't get permission from the city to construct an underground system. (Accounts differ as to whether "Boss" Tweed or wealthy inhabitants of the neighborhood blocked his efforts.)

Was Beach at all daunted? He was not. He sneakily built the underground pneumatic subway anyway, pretending he was really building a pneumatic mail delivery system, and he did right under the noses of City Hall: beneath a rented store front across the street.

In February 1870, Beach unveiled his masterpiece, and it was an immediate novelty attraction for the public, especially given the luxury of the station: it boasted a grand piano, chandeliers, and a fully operational fountain stocked with goldfish. He charged 25 cents for a block long ride, and fought for the next three years to get a construction permit to extend the line uptown all the way to Central Park. Alas, while he ultimately succeeded on that score, a stock market crash (the "Panic of 1873") crushed his dream for good.

Beach's failure didn't keep others from speculating on the potential value of so-called "vactrains" (vacuum tube trains). The US government considered the possibility in the 1960s of running a vactrain (combining pneumatic tubes with maglev technology) between Philadelphia and New York City, but the project was deemed prohibitively expensive, and was scrapped.

An engineer with Lockheed named L.K. Edwards proposed a Bay Area Gravity-Vacuum Transit system for California in 1967, designed to run in tandem with San Francisco's BART system, then under construction. It, too, was never built. Nor was the system of underground Very High Speed Transportation conceived by Robert M. Salter of RAND in the 1970s to run along what we now call the Northeast Corridor.

Beach might not have lived to see his pneumatic subway system built -- he caught pneumonia and died on January 1, 1896 -- but his vision is still influencing engineers looking for transportation solutions in the 21st century, most notably researchers in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. The claim is that traveling through networks of these vacuum tubes enables supersonic speeds without the drawback of sonic booms that plague supersonic jets, making the trip from London to New York in less than an hour. (Those of us who are increasingly disgruntled with the airline industry, and long for teleportation, might welcome such an alternative.)

And Beach's dream has been immortalized in a song by a Canadian progressive rock band called Klaatu: "Sub-Rosa Subway" (lyrics are here). Nearly three minutes into the tune, you can hear a bit of Morse Code in the background, which one bandmember has since helpfully translated for their fans: "From Alfred, heed thy sharpened ear -- A message we do bring -- Starship appears upon our sphere -- Through London's sky comes spring."  

embracing change

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. Regular readers know that Cocktail Party Physics celebrated its five-year anniversary back in February. Since then, it's morphed into a group blog, and back to a solo blog, and gotten a much needed design facelift, but it's always been consistently at the same site. That's about to change. Earlier today, Scientific American officially launched its spiffy new blog network, and the (newly rebooted) Cocktail Party Physics is among the 40 or so blogs selected for inclusion. That means from now on, our main site will be over at Scientific American rather than here.

Say what? Some of you might be thinking, and with good reason: until now, we've had an almost pathological need to remain independent. I've turned down past invitations to join similar bloggy conglomerates (most notably SEED's Science Blogs, back when I was just starting out). But the science blogosphere is changing rapidly, with more and more bloggy networks springing up, and the cocktail party has to adapt to those changes. Besides, the "blogfather" himself, Bora Zivkovic, is the mastermind behind Sci-Am's new network, and how could I say no to Bora?

Other than the hosting site, nothing much will change. Jen-Luc will still preside over the festivities, I'll be covering the usual fun whimsical topics, and there will still be the Friday Fodder feature. The Sci-Am design is pretty darned spiffy, and might even encourage me to write shorter posts. (The Time Lord scoffed in derision when I brought up this possibility, so perhaps not.)

What's gonna happen to the original site? Well, I will continue to mirror new posts here, with a 24-hour delay (mostly for archival purposes, and to keep this site active in case the whole network experiment doesn't work out), but comments will be disabled. And really, wouldn't you rather read the posts over there on the fancy new site when they're spanking fresh and new? Right now, there's just a welcome post, but that will change as we get up and running. I'm really looking forward to this new adventure, and hope you all will come along for the ride.

In the meantime, what with all my travels, we haven't really had a cool links roundup in awhile. So here's my picks from the last two weeks of the niftiest stuff we found around the Interwebs.

The Physics of Fireworks. This is a favorite topic on the Fourth of July weekend, and Ethan over at Starts With a Bang weighs in this year with a richly pictorial overview of the science behind those sparklers.

Grilling for Geeks. The folks at Scienceline have some tips about the science of grilling that perfect burger for the holiday.

M-80s or Gunshots? For those (like us) who live in urban areas, EastersiderLA has some handy tips to tell if that pop-pop-pop or loud bang you just heard was from fireworks, or an outbreak of gunfire.

Hitler Sucks at Math. Herr Hitler tries to learn about open and closed sets, and ends up unleashing his fury at those stupid topologists who keep making up confusing terms like "clopen sets." (Do we really need to warn you about the NSFW language? Everyone knows Hitler has a potty mouth!)

Lightning in Super-Slo-Mo. Via Laughing Squid, we thrilled to the site of Rob Flickenger setting up an array of ten cameras to capture the lightning emitted from his Tesla coil. The result: a video effect that resembles that awesome super-slo-mo bullet sequence in The Matrix.

Arizona Wildfires Threaten Los Alamos. Wildfires in Arizona began encroaching on Los Alamos National Laboratory last week, prompting worries about radioactive material getting airborne. Fortunately, Daniel of Cosmic Variance was on the scene to give a clear-eyed assessment of the real state of affairs -- check out part one and part two. Physics Buzz also covered the story.

The Physics of Tibetan Singing Bowls. Via io9, we learn that "The physics of the bowls are the same as a tuning fork, or a wineglass that is stroked around its rim. The friction of an object moving against it causes the overall object vibrates at a certain frequency. This vibration gives off the tone that we hear when a wine glass is played, or a tuning fork is struck." Not only do the bowls sing, they can also fizz and spit. Resonances. It's all about the resonances, people. And speaking of resonances...

Aural Geometry. The folks at Coilhouse tipped me off to the amazing video below exploring the geometry of sound. "A group of over 30 animators and sound artists teamed up to create short pieces between 12 and 20 seconds with the aim to 'explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways.' The result is a series of warped, surreal sound visualizations."

 

RESONANCE from Resonance on Vimeo.

Mythbusting About Baseball With Physics. Working with colleagues from the University of Illinois and Kettering University, Washington State University physicist Lloyd Smith investigated cheating in baseball, resulting in a new paper in American Journal of Physics: "Corked Bats, Juiced Balls, and Humidors: The Physics of Cheating in Baseball."

Can the Coriolis Effect Influence a Baseball? Over at the Virtuosi, Corky takes an in-depth look at the Coriolis force -- "one of the artificial forces we have to put in if we are going to pretend the Earth is not rotating" -- and how it might impact a baseball's trajectory on a home-run hit.

Life in the Atomic City. Over at Believer Magazine, there is a lovely memoir by Millicent G. Dillon about her experiences in the late 1940s as an employee of the nascent Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's a fascinating inside look at a very different world. Here is her recollection of hearing about the infamous 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

I thought of electrons spinning around a nucleus, held in place—could one speak of “place” in such a small universe?—by the forces binding the atom together, an enormous ergy locked within. But now that energy had been unlocked in a sudden, violent release that brought about the annihilation of a city….

And, later, a second city—to show that the annihilation could be repeated? Even later I would learn—we would all learn—of the many thousands dead in an instant, of survivors walking in a daze, their skin stripped, hanging, some walking with their eyeballs in their hands, of the many dying thereafter, slowly, of radiation.

Listen Up: Particle Physics Windchime. Symmetry Breaking recently featured Stanford particle physicist (and trained musician) Matt Bellis and his development of the Physics Windchime: "a computer application that could take particle physics data such as particle type, momentum, distance from a fixed point, and so on, and turn it into sound."

Last, but certainly far from least, I give you The Ultimate Late-Night Geek-Out, featuring sci-fi/fantasy author Neil Gaiman's star turn on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Just try to keep up with the hardcore geekitude.

on the road again

We are madly traveling about the world at the moment, en route to Doha, Qatar, for the World Conference of Science Journalists. So there is very little time to blog, and rather than make myself nuts, I'm likely to just take a hiatus for the next week or so. But in the meantime, in honor of the recent observation of neutrino oscillations at Japane's T2K experiment, here's a bit of particle physics history for your reading pleasure: the discovery of the tau neutrino!

“Neutrinos, they are very small/ They have no charge and have no mass/ And do not interact at all,” John Updike wrote in his 1960 poem, “Cosmic Gall.” Neutrinos were a fairly recent discovery then, and within two years physicists would discover that they were only just beginning to understand this mysterious “ghost particle.” For instance, there was more than one kind of neutrino, and it would take physicists another 40 years to find them all.

Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of neutrinos in 1930 while investigating the conundrum of radioactive beta decay, in which some of the original energy appeared to be missing after an electron was emitted from an atomic nucleus. He hypothesized that in order to abide by the laws of energy conservation, another, as-yet-undetected neutral particle might also be emitted, accounting for the missing energy.

Pauli was reluctant to publish a paper on this unusual hypothesis, but he penned a letter to a group of prominent nuclear physicists gathering for a conference in Tubingen, Germany in December asking for input regarding means of detecting such a particle experimentally.  “I have done something very bad today by proposing a particle that cannot be detected; it is something no theorist should ever do,” he wrote, describing his idea as “a desperate remedy.”

Among the physicists who took Pauli’s idea seriously was Enrico Fermi, who developed the theory of beta decay further in 1934, coining the name “neutrino” (“little neutral one”) in the process. It became clear that if such a particle existed, it must be both very light – less than 1% the mass of a proton -- and interact very weakly with matter, making it very difficult to detect. But in 1956, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan succeeded in doing just that, sending a telegram to Pauli informing him of their discovery. “Thanks for message,” Pauli telegrammed back. “Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”

Pauli died two and a half years later, and thus missed the discovery in 1962 of a second type of neutrino, dubbed the muon neutrino, corresponding to the surprising discovery of the charged muon lepton. (The latter caused I.I. Rabi to famously exclaim, “Who ordered that?”) In 1975, a third charged lepton, tau, was discovered, and subsequent experiments hinted strongly that there should also be a third kind of neutrino. While scientists at CERN uncovered further proof in 1989 of the tau neutrino’s existence, it would take another 25 years before the technology was available to detect this elusive particle directly.

In the 1990s, Fermilab designed the DONUT (Direct Observation of the NU Tau) experiment to search specifically for tau neutrino interactions. The scientists used the Tevatron to produce an intense neutrino beam, predicting it would contain at least some tau neutrinos. After deploying an elaborate system of magnets and iron and concrete to eliminate as many background particles as possible, the beam was fired at a three-foot-long fixed target: iron plates alternating with layers of a special emulsion sandwiched between them.

Those emulsions captured the tracks of any electrically charged particles produced by the extremely rare (about one in one million million) tau neutrino interactions, which were then electronically recorded by scintillators. The emulsions were then photographically developed so that scientists could analyze the data, looking for the telltale distinctive short track with a kink that indicates a tau lepton, the result of a tau neutrino interacting with an atomic nucleus. They were literally connecting the dots: small black dots left by particles passing through, which could then be connected to retrace the particles’ paths.

After the experimental run in 1997, it took three years of painstaking analysis to sift through all the data, winnowing some six million signatures down to 1000 candidate events. On July 21, 2000, scientists from the DONUT collaboration announced they had identified four tau neutrino signatures demonstrating an interaction with an atomic nucleus. The experiment also validated a number of new techniques for neutrino detection, most notably the emulsion cloud chamber, which significantly increased the number of neutrino interactions.

Leon Lederman, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jack Steinberger and Melvin Schwartz for the discovery of the muon neutrino, called the achievement “an important and long-awaited result. Important because there is a huge effort underway to study the connections among neutrinos, and long awaited because the tau lepton was discovered 25 years ago and it is high time the other shoe was dropped.”

Among the questions physicists were still pursuing was whether neutrinos might have a tiny bit of mass, which could dramatically alter scientists’ estimation of the overall mass of the universe, because they are so plentiful. This in turn has implications for estimating the rate of expansion of the universe. And if neutrinos do have mass, whether they could oscillate and change flavors over time as they traveled through space. For instance, would it be possible for a muon neutrino to change into a tau neutrino via oscillation?

That question was answered with a resounding yes in 2010. Scientists with the OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory reported that they had found four instances of the telltale signature of the tau neutrino among a stream of billions of muon neutrinos generated at nearby CERN -- the first direct observation of a neutrino transforming from one type into another. Experiments are ongoing to further explore this phenomenon and determine specific masses for neutrinos.

With the discovery of the tau neutrino, only one more particle remains to be found to complete the Standard Model of Particle Physics: the elusive Higgs boson. Fermilab’s soon-to-be-retired Tevatron is racing against the clock to make one more significant discovery before it exits the particle physics stage, competing with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It will herald the dawn of a new era in physics – and possibly yield a few more unexpected surprises.

 

drunken masters of lingua franca

We're having a bit of a thematic installment of Friday Fodder this week. See, I regrettably missed this year's Acoustical Society of America meeting in Seattle, but I still managed to rifle through their impressive collection of lay language papers covering talks presented at the meeting. I already covered the watershed work on muting the noise of flushing low-flow toilets a couple of weeks ago. But there were also tons of papers relating to speech: researchers at looking at the voice physiology of transgender people; how men and women imitate each other and what this might tell us how gender, emotion and just plain old acoustics impact those imitations; and how to identify the sexual orientation of speakers based on just their voices.

There was even a paper on "understanding casual speech," which I guess must be, like, hard and stuff for some folks. And now I'm happy to report that Abby Kaplan, who works in the linguistics department at the University of Utah, had some interesting things to say about drunken speech patterns -- namely, whether it's harder to pronounce certain sounds or words when intoxicated.

This might strike many readers as "Duh!" science, but as Kaplan discovered, actually demonstrating in a rigorous fashion what we all instinctively feel to be true -- based on personal experience -- isn't quite as simple as it seems. (Nor is she the first to be intrigued by this question. Via Language Log, I learned that there is a 1902 treatise by a guy named Edward Wheeler Scripture, The Elements of Experimental Phonetics, that toys with the notion of studying the phonetics of drunken and other unusual speech patterns through recordings.)

Let's start with the assumption that certain sounds and words are more difficult to pronounce than others (an effect that is exacerbated if, like me, your vocabulary was acquired through extensive reading -- I habitually put my emPHAsis on the wrong syllABle). "Intuitively, it seems obvious that some sounds are harder to pronounce than others," Kaplan writes. She points to the "th" sound, as in "think" as being rather rare in the world's languages, and a stumbling block for many ESL students.

Linguistic theory holds -- so far -- that some phonetic speech patterns involve substituting easier sounds for harder ones. The most common example is how [p] is ponounced [b] in some languages (Korean, Malaysian) when it occurs between two vowels, while in other languages [b] is pronounced [v] when between two vowels. But how do we know if these quirks occur because one sound really is easier than another? Well, you can always conduct a controlled experiment with participants reading a list of words first while sober, and then while intoxicated, since the latter sate impairs verbal (and other) functions.

And here is where the fun begins, because in order to test this hypothesis, Kaplan had to get her study participants quite drunk. I'm guessing she had quite a few volunteers. They were plied with equal parts vodka and orange juice until they reached a blood alcohol content level of between .10 and .12, just above the legal driving limit in the US of .08) -- until, one assumes, they started to sound like the title character played by Dudley Moore in the original Arthur from the 1970s:

Kaplan's findings: (a) drunken speech is indeed different from sober speech (the "Duh" aspect); and (b) "the overall range of sounds that people pronounce is smaller in drunken speech than in sober speech," which is consistent with Kaplan's original thesis, with one caveat: the participants didn't always choose the easier sounds when they were drunk. Sometimes they pronounced more of their [p]'s like [b]'s when drunk, but then, they also pronounced more of their [b]'s like [p]'s. So you can't really say, based on her study, that one sound is easier than the other. And this, says Kaplan, has some interesting implications for the prior assumptions made by linguists:

"If drunken speech really does involve saying `easier' sounds, then these results are a challenge for what linguists have traditionally believed about the sound patterns described above.  These results suggest that neither [p] nor [b] is easier to pronounce between vowels, but rather that some sound intermediate between the two is easier than both.  If it's not true that [b] is easier to say between vowels than [p], then there must be some other reason languages replace [p] with [b] in this context.... One important goal for future research is to try other methods of studying 'easy' and 'hard' sounds, and see whether the results of those methods are consistent with the results of this experiment."

Arthur's slurred speech is made more difficult to understand, one presumes, by his pronounced British accent. Over at The Last Word on Nothing, Sally Adee has an amusing post on why a British accent makes phrases like "chuffed" and "can't be arsed" -- even random dialogue from Jersey Shore -- sound posh, whereas when Adee herself attempts those phrases, her native-German-laced-with-Long-Island-and-a-bit-of-Baltimore accent simply isn't up to the "can't be arsed" challenge: "When a Brit delivers the phrase, those three little words are transformed into gleaming pearls of wit. But in my mouth, that 'r' is like hitting a ten-foot pothole in a clown car.”

I think we should all be able to say "chuffed" and other amusing Britishisms if we feel so inclined, even if it makes our friends roll their eyes -- possibly even with a fake British accent. C'mon, it could be funny, as well as pretentious. Jen-Luc Piquant deliberately puts on airs for her fellow avatars in Cyberspace; she thinks it makes her sound more sophisticated to affect zee 'eavy Gallic accent, n'est-ce pas? I don't have the heart to tell her that it just makes her seem like a prat. Who am I to judge?

Heck, sometimes I find myself imitating (badly) people's regional accents in casual conversation in spite of myself. I recall as a teenager, during church fellowship hour, finding myself in conversation with a well-spoken, articulate high school senior girl, who was making a valiant effort to reach out to the shy, socially awkward sophomore (i.e., me -- people don't believe me today, but I was painfully shy through much of college), fidgeting before her and struggling to maintain eye contact. I did my best to match her liveliness, her vocal inflections -- except then she got a strange look on her face and abruptly walked off. She thought I was mocking her (I wasn't). It was one of many failed attempts to fit in with my church's social structure.

The tendency of people to imitate tone of voice, gestures, and other elements of conversational style is something that is well-documented by linguistic studies, according to Sara Phillips, a linguist at Ohio State University. Phillips and her collaborators decided to explore one commonly imitated factor in particular: regional dialects, most notably, how certain vowels are pronounced. Northerners, for instance, might flatten out the vowel sound in "block" such that it seems closer to "black," and make a subtle distinction in vowel sound when they say "caught" or "cot," compared to Midland speakers. "We wanted to see if speakers imitate only idiosynchratic properties of the talker's voice, or if they imitate properties of the talker's dialect, too," writes Phillips.

So they had participants repeat words and phrases of certain regional dialect talkers, recording the utterances of both. These were designated A, B and X, in which B was the speaker's normal pronunciation, A was the speaker prnouncing the same word in imitation of a dialect speaker, and X was the original dialect speaker's pronunciation. Then they played the recordings back for a control group of listeners who were asked to determine whether A or B sounded more like X. (There are sound files so you can hear for yourself.) Anyone who chose A seemed to be picking up on the imitated accent of the dialect. Or were they? Phillips et al. coupled their study with an acoustic analysis, and came to a somewhat different conclusion:

"It appears that speakers were imitating aspects of pronunciation that are not known to mark dialect, such as the duration of the vowel or final consonant of the word. In our experimental materials, the Northern talkers produced longer vowels and consonants than the Midland talkers.  This difference may have resulted in the appearance of dialect imitation, even though participants were really only imitating idiosyncratic features of the talkers’ speech. If they were imitating dialect features, we would have expected to find effects of vowel pronunciation instead.  While we did find weak evidence for vowel imitation, the effect was not significant.

Taken together, these results suggest that while speakers imitate characteristics of individual talkers’ speech, they do not necessarily imitate well-known dialect markers. It may be that our effect of dialect on imitation was due to peculiarities of our speakers rather than real differences between the Northern and Midland dialects.

Okay, but has anybody bothered to study what it is about foreign accents that makes the speakers so difficult to understand? Mais, oui! I give you graduate student Alison Trude and her faculty advisor, Sarah Brown-Schmidt, both of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign's psychology department, who conducted a series of studies looking at a listener's ability to understand a native English speaker and a native Quebecois speaker both speaking English words and phrases.

A classic illustration of the difference is the respective pronunciations of "bee" and "beet." While a native English speaker will pronounce the "ee" in both the same, the Quebecois will pronounce "beet" with a short "i" sound, so that it sounds like "bit." It was an elaborate experimental setup involving tracking eye movement as participants viewed computer images of various objects while listening to accented and unaccented words describing those images. Supposedly this told the researchers how quickly they understood the words.

The prediction: "Previous research has shown that participants spend more time looking at pictures whose names sound more alike, so it was predicted that participants would look at the picture of the beet more when hearing the English speaker say 'bees' and would look at the picture of the beet less often when hearing the French speaker say 'bees,' because in the French accent, 'bees' and 'beet' sound less similar."

The actual result was just the opposite. Participants looked at the wrong picture more often when listening to the French speaker, and adapted more easily if they heard each of the accented words pronounced with the same ending ("beet", "seat", or "feet"). It also helped if the accented words didn't sound like another English word, since there was less room for further confusion. So Trude and Brown-Schmidt concluded from their experiments that (a) if you're talking to someone with  foreign accent, having that person utter a string of words that sound similar will help you adapt to their accent; and (b) you'll have more trouble if the accent causes you to confuse two real words in English, i.e., the "beet" vs "bit" example (or "beep"). Per Trude and Brown-Schmidt:

These findings show that we as listeners have very particular expectations about how speech should sound. Some theories say that when listening to a foreign speaker, we relax the rules of pronunciation and are more accepting of things that don’t sound quite right because we understand that he or she cannot speak the language perfectly. However, these results suggest the opposite: native speakers of a language are listening for well-formed words, regardless of who’s talking.

This might have a useful application in bringing foreign actors to Hollywood, for example. Arnold Schwarzenegger notoriously kept his lines to a bare minimum in Conan the Barbarian in his early acting days, all uttered in heavily Austrian-accented English. And Hong Kong martial arts master Jackie Chan's move to American films was hampered by his broken English and heavy Chinese accent; ditto for Jet Li, who had, like, three lines in Lethal Weapon 4. And thus we come full circle back to our theme of drunken speech with a look at a unique style of martial arts: Zui Quan, which loosely translates as "drunken boxing." (Yeah, it's just an excuse to bring up Jackie Chan and include an awesome video clip. What of it?)

Chan immortalized the style in two films, Drunken Master I and Drunken Master II, wherein his protagonist gains the upper hand in climactic fight scenes by becoming inebriated --although it's important to strike the right balance: earlier in DM-II, Chan's character becomes a bit too drunk after a fight with his father, slurring his speech and warbling a little ditty called "I Hate Daddy," before getting the crap beaten out of him by thugs because he's too inebriated to fight at all.) In reality, Zui Quan practitioners only imitate the physical movements of drunkards; they are not actually drunk.  Per Wikipedia:

"The postures are created by momentum and weight of the body, and imitation is generally through staggering and certain type of fluidity in the movements. It is considered to be among the most difficult wushu styles to learn due to the need for powerful joints and fingers. ... Zui Quan techniques are highly acrobatic and skilled and require a great degree of balance and coordination, such that any person attempting to perform any Zui Quan techniques while intoxicated would be likely to injure himself.

Even though the style seems irregular and off balance it takes the utmost balance to be successful. To excel one must be relaxed and flow with ease from technique to technique. Swaying , drinking, and falling are used to throw off opponents. When the opponent thinks the drunken boxer is vulnerable he is usually well balanced and ready to strike. When swigging a wine cup the practitioner is really practicing grabbing and striking techniques. The waist movements trick opponents into attacking sometimes even falling over. Falls can be used to avoid attacks but also to pin attackers to the ground while vital points are targeted."

You can see Zui Quan in action in this eight-minute choreographed fight scene from Drunken Master II, when Chan was at the height of his athletic prowess. (And remember, he does all his own stunts, so he really is falling backward onto a bed of hot coals. Ouch!) Definitely one of the Best. Fight. Scenes. Ever.

friday fodder #12

It's been a deadline-centric week so blogging has been light, with only the occasional foray into interesting things on the internet. For instance, Jen-Luc Piquant was tres desole to learn from the folks at Jezebel that caffeine-infused leggings won't make her ass get smaller; it's back to the Cyber-Elliptical for her! But we were thrilled to discover, via Isis the Scientist, that there is an entire blog devoted to a Jell-O Shots Test Kitchen. Also? Technology Review will be having an entire special issue devoted to science fiction stories -- we can't wait! But there were also more substantive bloggy items as well; we offer a sampling below for your weekend perusal.

Don't Toss Out Your Cell Phone Yet! It's baaack! The specter of cancer-causing cell phones! Folks are freaking out again over WHO's latest public service announcement regarding evidence for a correlation between cell phone use and brain cancer. Bear in mind that WHO is not making the claim that cell phones cause cancer; it knows full well that correlation is different than causation, and the biological and epidemiological evidence just doesn't meet (yet) the standard of causation -- unlike, say, smoking and cancer, where the link is very well established. Sadly, this distinction is being lost in much of the media coverage and public response. Orac lays it all out for you here and he's pretty fair as well as respectfully insolent; for a less personal take on the actual data, check out Ed Yong's piece at Cancer Research UK.

When Physics Gets Counter-Intuitive, Part I. Scientific American continues to pump out well-written, thought-provoking guest blog posts on fascinating topics, and this week they featured physicist Vlatko Vedral describing his latest research into a counterintuitive conundrum of quantum mechanics that appears to violate a principle (if not an actual law) of thermodynamics:

"Everyone who has ever worked with a computer knows that they get hotter the more we use them. Physicist Rolf Landauer argued that this needs to be so, elevating the observation to the level of a principle. The principle states that in order to erase one bit of information, we need to increase the entropy of the environment by at least as much. In other words we need to dissipate at least one bit of heat into the environment (which is just equal to the bit of entropy times the temperature of the environment).... Our new paper argues that in quantum physics, you can, in fact, erase information and cool the environment at the same time. For many physicists, this is tantamount to saying that perpetual motion is possible! What makes it possible is entanglement...."

When Physics Gets Counter-Intuitive, Part II. Over at Skulls in the Stars, Dr. SkySkull regales us with two related posts on the weirdness of water and the "Mpemba effect": namely, that under just the right circumstances, hot water can freeze faster than cold water. Per the Good Doctor: "In 1963, a Tanzanian secondary school student named Erasto Mpemba noticed that hot ice cream mix froze faster than cold ice cream mix.  He pointed this out to a visiting physics lecturer, and the two published their experimental observations in 1969." It's weird, and it's not entirely understood, which makes for some fascinating reading.

The Physics of Blood Spatter. Via io9, we learned that physicists at Washington State University got all C.S.I. in the lab to investigate patterns that might indicate the exact height of the blood-spurting wound. And they did it with a couple of boards, some string, Ashanti chicken wing sauce and Ivory dish soap (the latter two ingredients were combined to get just the right consistency for the test droplets). Dexter would be so proud.

Truth is Stranger Than Webcomics. So, I'm assuming you all read Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal regularly, so you saw this comic about how George de Hevesy used "aqua regia" to melt down Max von Laue's Nobel Prize medal during World War II to protect the gold from the invading Nazi hordes. But did you know it was a true story? I didn't! Fortunately, The Stray World was on the case and gives you the backstory, along with a nifty demo video for good measure.

The Natural Science of E.B. White. So, my pal Michael Sims has a new book out, The Story of Charlotte's Web, exploring the biographical back story to this childhood classic. And he's also written a fascinating article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about White's attitude towards animals and nature, which was far more nuanced than many critics have assumed to date. Sure, he could make a young child weep over Charlotte's inevitable demise, as if one had lost a true friend; but he wasn't prone to cheap sentimentality either (hence the power of his famous novel). Michael makes a strong case, and also delves into White's realization that science and fiction/storytelling do, in fact, make excellent bedfellows:

In writing Charlotte's Web, White developed much of his fanciful, empathetic story from what might seem the least likely direction—natural science. After watching a real-life spider spin an egg sac above his barn doorway, he determined a likely species for her so that he might learn her characteristics. Turning to scientific sources, both recent and antique, he carefully researched the life cycle of spiders: how they spin orb webs and egg sacs, how they trap prey and lay eggs, how in the spring the spiderlings balloon and disperse on filaments of web. "I discovered, quite by accident," he wrote, "that reality and fantasy make good bedfellows."

From the first, his scientific research and his whimsical imagination encouraged each other. He envisioned Charlotte performing certain actions in her web, such as writing letters that showed up well enough for people to see, and immediately he turned to scientists to learn by what chemistry and acrobatics she might accomplish what he had in mind. He pounced on an unexpected tidbit of information in a source book, such as the detail that stream-side spiders have been known to catch small leaping fish in their webs, and soon Charlotte was retailing these facts as anecdotes about her extraordinary family.

Double the Fun With Rube Goldberg Devices. Some folks are trying to raise money via Kickstarter to take their Life-Sized Recreation (a kinetic sculpture) of the popular kid's game, Mouse Trap, on the road in all its Rube Goldberg-ery goodness:

And because you can never have too much of these contraptions, we bring you (via Popular Mechanics) a video of the winners of the 24th Annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest held at Purdue University, who built the most complicated such device yet. To wit: "It starts with the Big Bang, re-creates the extinction of the dinosaurs, holds a jousting competition, flips over an album, and simulates World War II, a shuttle launch, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the alleged apocalypse in 2012. In its precisely executed review of history, "The Time Machine," a Rube Goldberg contraption built by members of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, incorporates a record-breaking 244 steps—all to water a single flower." It's Short Attention Span Science!

Journalism Train Wreck of the Week: Finally, John Rennie has a hilarious takedown of a "news story" -- Jen-Luc added the scare quotes in a pique -- at the Mail Online that he has dubbed "The Alpha Cavewoman Fiasco." Granted, the Mail is an easy target, but it's always a treat to watch John whip out the Scalpel of Sarcasm. His post also has the best lead of the week: "If a news story about human evolution mentions Raquel Welch or One Million Years B.C. in the lead paragraphs, you should lower your expectations for the rest because it is shallow and hackneyed. If it mentions The Flintstones, you should probably skip the rest because it is juvenile. But if it mentions both Raquel Welch and Wilma Flintstone twice in the first six paragraphs, you should sigh with relief: because you will never read anything more stupid in the rest of your life."

from the fringes

Just got back from a whirlwind road trip to San Francisco, where the unqualified highlight after a long rewarding day was meeting up with uber-mensch Steve Silberman and a host of local science writers (some I knew, most I met for the first time) at a cozy Italian place in Haight-Ashbury (I think). Bay Area science writers are an awesome bunch. We drank copious amounts of wine, laughed a lot, and my only regret is I didn't think to move to the other end of the table midway through the meal to chat with the folks over there. Mea culpa. Despite all the driving, we did manage to stay somewhat abreast of cool things on the Intertubes, so can still bring you the weekly roundup.

The Many Worlds of the Multiverse. Yanno, when I first heard about Hugh Everett III's "Many Worlds" hypothesis, I initially confused it with theories about the multiverse. I'm told it's a common confusion among those of us who happen to lack physics PhDs. But this past week, two physicists -- Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind -- posted a paper on arXiv arguing that perhaps. Debating the subtle nuances between them is, frankly, a bit above my pay grade, but fortunately the Time Lord weighed in over at Cosmic Variance with a thoughtful analysis. Quoth he: "These two ideas sound utterly different. In the cosmological multiverse, the other universes are simply far away; in quantum mechanics, they’re right here, but in different possibility spaces (i.e. different parts of Hilbert space, if you want to get technical). But some physicists have been musing for a while that they might actually be the same."

The Quantum Fallacy. Over at New Stateman, Michael Brooks has an intriguing article about the latest theoretical attempts to connect quantum mechanics with consciousness. This is something that usually sets a physicist's teeth on edge, with a few notable exceptions. Brooks' article is behind a paywall, but worth a read; or you can read Ian O'Neill's summation at Discovery News. For a very different take on consciousness, check out Malcolm MacIver's latest ruminations on how consciousness evolved and the supremacy of vision over at Science Not Fiction.

The Physics of My Little Pony. Self-explanatory, really, but major props for creativity! Friendship is magic... or is it?

Art, Art, Baby. The New York Times featured multimedia artist Cory Arcangel this week in anticipation of the opening of his new show, "Pro Tools,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art:

Arcangel, 32, is known for work that imports a sense of humanity into the technological realm, in part by making sure the technology it uses is never too slick. Unlike electronic media artists who rely on state-of-the-art equipment to make their work, Mr. Arcangel collects outmoded computer games, decrepit turntables and similar castoffs that pile up in Dumpsters and thrift stores or are posted on eBay whenever a fresh crop of gadgets has rendered them obsolete. Through a bit of ingenious meddling, he reboots this detritus to produce witty, and touchingly homemade, video and art installations.

How Do You Lose a Pyramid? Jen-Luc Piquant isn't sure, but she knows exactly how to find one: infrared satellite imaging! This week the BBC reported that a new satellite survey of Egypt revealed evidence for 17 "lost" pyramids, and "more than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements."

Crazy-Cool Patent of the Week. John Ptak combs through wacky historical patent applications so you don't have to. Among this week'd finds: the Atom Bomb Suit, a "solitary, encapsulated, iron maidenesque survival sarcophagus," submitted in 1958. It even came with a handy attache case for storage, because who knows when a bomb might drop? "The bomb(s) would go off, and there you would be, standing with your back against the wall, or laying in the gutter pressed against the curb, just another piece of the dead city, another piece of metal waiting to decay."

Is There Anything Metamaterials Can't Do? The latest news on metamaterials, courtesy of 80 Beats, is that they could one day be used to improve wireless power transfer -- currently possible, but only in tiny amounts -- thereby enabling us to charge our devices without the hassle of cords and wires. How do metamaterials help? Well, according to a study published last week in Physical Review B:

Using current techniques, the amount of energy needed to charge personal electronics could, if transmitted wirelessly, burn up whatever’s in its way—up to and including the device it’s supposed to charge. What’s more, energy tends to dissipate through open space, making this sort of power transfer extremely inefficient.

But the researchers calculated that certain metamaterials—specifically, ones with effectively negative index of refraction—could transmit the needed power without frying anything. The metamaterials could be used to make a superlens that would stand between the power source and the device, essentially focusing the energy so it doesn’t scatter. According to their analyses, a hypothetical metamaterial array composed of thin copper-fiberglass loops, and resembling a set of Venetian blinds, could do the trick.

When You Wish Upon a Neutron Star. Over at io9, physicist David Goldman explores what would happen if someone, say, decided to travel to a neutron star intent on harvesting its "gooey" neutrons. It's not good news for human beings, given the density and immense gravity of such objects. Think "explosive decompression." I'm guessing it's as gruesome as it sounds.

Angry Birds... Plus a Constant. Rhett Allain of Dot Physics finally tackles a truly pressing science question: is the launch speed in the wildly popular Angry Birds game constant? Seriously, it's a wonderful example of "found physics," complete with charts and graphs and equations. Jen-Luc Piquant hereby refrains from making a joke about the air speed velocity of African swallows (laden or unladen).

 

space squid, atomic dance, and people magnets

It's time for the weekly cool science links post -- Vegas edition! The Time Lord whisked me off to Sin City for my birthday, and we've been indulging in great food, a bit of poker, sidecars at the Bellagio, and he even went with me to see Bridesmaids because Time Lords are totes secure in their masculinity. We're returning to our usual hard-working ascetic existence this very moment, but it's been a great week for weird and wonderful science on the Interwebz.

Space Shuttle Awesomeness. Okay, the big news for space geeks this week was the final launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor on Monday, complete with wow-worthy pix and videos. Among the various items hitching a ride on Endeavor were bobtail squid, a set of LEGOs, C. elegans (earthworms) descended from the survivors of Columbia's final flight, and a ChipSat experiment to test the viability of fingernail-sized micro-satellites in space -- plus one major experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, to study high-energy cosmic rays and search for evidence of dark matter and dark energy.

Strangeness is Not Conserved. Jon Butterworth's column in the Guardian highlights a guest post by Lily Asmuth on her three least favorite quarks, Up, Down and Strange. "There are in fact six quarks now, but the others are much more exciting and deserve heir own stories. All of matter is made of the first two and electrons. Every single atom in the Universe has nothing in it other than some combination of up quark, down quark and electron. The strange ones inhabit particles that only exists transiently, before decaying to something stable that contains only normal up and down quarks."

A Poem About Love and Math. New Jersey teacher and star of the poetry slam circuit Chad Anderson performs his most requested piece. (He loves her like math: infinite and precise.)

Inventive Timepiece of the Week. Physicists can't just use a stopwatch like normal people. The folks at Physics Buzz provide a detailed account of the time-keeping device the American Physical Society's Physics Central team concocted for the American Visionary Art Museum's annual in Kinetic Sculpture Race, in which human-powered sculptures wind around the Baltimore harbor. All you need to build your own similar device is some plastic tubing, a funnel, some PVC pipe, water, corn oil, mineral oil, 91 percent rubbing alcohol, and a bit of food dye (red and green). Check out the link for more details.

Surely You're Joking. Wired's Joel Warner has a fun, lengthy feature on the science of jokes and humor, specifically, "one man's attempt to explain every joke ever." There are handy charts and diagrams, categories and subcategories, for those interested in seeing how this system applies to the humor in their own lives. Next one hopes scientists will turn to the pressing question of why trying to explain a joke renders it not funny.

People Magnets. The Guardian's M.J. Robbins offers a witty critique of the phenomenon of "magnetic people" that seem to be springing up all over Eastern Europe these days. After admitting he once craved a magnetic nose as a child (who wouldn't?), Robbins debunks the supposed video evidence, concluding, "There's nothing in the videos that can't be explained by sticky skin and some careful positioning." He might still get something like his magnetic nose, though: he ends the piece by citing a 2006 Wired feature (also well worth a read) on folks with magnetic implants in their fingertips. Science! It's like magic, only so much cooler!

Cool Physics History Moment Of the Week. Turns out I share my birthday with (a) late night host Craig Ferguson (kudos to Phil Plait for noticing), and (b) a pivotal 19th century experiment by physicist James Clerk Maxwell and Thomas Sutton, whereby they took the world's first color photograph. The two men "used three projectors fitted with red, green, and blue filters to combine three black-and-white photos of a tartan ribbon shot through similar filters, thereby forming the world’s first color photo and, consequently, the 'basis of nearly all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of colour photography.'”

The Science of Condiments. Ketchup and mustard are practically staples in the American diet, and this week a couple of folks decided to find the science hidden in their condiments. First, over at HiLoBrow, Tom Nealon has the latest installment in his De Condimentis series, with a look at the history and science of mustard. Apparently for centuries it was used medicinally, not as a condiment. "Pythagoras claimed that it would cure the bite of the scorpion and Pliny suggested it for improving lazy housewives. As late as the Renaissance, Guillemeau suggested it for weaning babies." Other uses included dispersing snake and fungi poisons, curing coughs (mustard is "a terrific expectorant" for breaking up phlegm), as a laxative, and "simulated menses and urine." Second, io9's Esther Inglis-Arkell reports on the surprising truth about snake venom and how it enters the victim's bloodstream. Apparently it works a lot like ketchup. Snake venom, she writes,

"... is one of many deliciously-named thixotropic liquids. Ketchup is another. The running joke about how ketchup stays stuck in the bottle until a certain amount of shaking makes it flow so fast it floods the top of a burger has its foundation in fact. Thixotropic liquids behave like gels or foams, hanging loosely together, until a sideways force is applied. Sometimes it's rhythmic pounding on the side of a bottle. Sometimes it's fast vibrations. Sometimes it's the movement of prey, or the natural absorbtion of the prey's muscle tissue. When a sideways, or vibrational, force is applied to a thixotropic liquid, it flows fast. So the snake's venom holds together until it gets into the prey, and then gushes into the surrounding tissue."

When Atoms Do a Digital Dance. New Scientist posted an amazing video called "Dancing Atoms," showcasing a collaboration between ballet dancer Roberto Bolle and a team lead by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which motion capture technology creates a digital avatar of Bolle dancing. "It's unlike any ballet you've ever seen - a swarm of swirling particles gradually form the shape of a dancer and transform into a lifelike model before they explode into digital bits for the grand finale." Check it out!

Finally, we give you the Video Mashup of the Week: The opening credits from Dr. Who/Series 5, set to the theme song from Buffy. WINNING!