Phrase of the day October 19, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Funny, Near Physics.add a comment
“Less invasions – more equations!”
Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama (protesting invasion of quantum anomaly by military force)
Guest bloggers: PEACE Act or how to solve all Wall Street problems October 14, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Funny, Near Physics.3 comments
It is a well-known fact that it is hard to find a job as a physicist – our profession is very competitive. So, with the skills earned in physics and math graduate schools, many of my colleagues end up on a street, a Wall Street that is, a tiny street in New York City, where they make their living. Apparently, this street has been a source of some financial news recently, which prompted my good friends and colleagues David Cinabro, Rob Harr and Zhi-Feng Huang to propose the following bill to be presented to Congress:
Preserving Every Americans Chance to Earn (PEACE)
A BILL
Given that it is well known that physicists and mathematicians are primarily responsible for the 2008 world wide economic crisis (see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/05/60minutes/main4502454.shtml), to preserve the American economy, and other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Preserving Every Americans Chance to Earn (PEACE) Act’.
SEC. 2. FUNDING FOR PROJECTS IN BASIC RESEARCH
For the purposes of preventing physicists and mathematicians from getting jobs in the real world where they can do actual damage by putting their ideas and theories into practice rather than having them criticized, peer reviewed, and published in obscure journals there is authorized to be appropriated, and there is appropriated $25,000,000,000 in this and in all following fiscal years to fund projects in basic research. This level may be raised at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury if ANY physics or mathematics PhD recipient cannot find a job in basic research.
SEC. 3. EFFECTIVE DATE.
This bill will go into effect immediately after passage in hopes that no more of these brainiacs are tempted by six or seven figure Wall Street salaries, and no more of the idiots who actually make decisions on Wall Street are confused by persons who are smarter than they are.
Phrase of the day October 10, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Uncategorized.add a comment
“Muons are a year yonger than John McCain”
WSU seminar speaker talking about history of discovery of muons.
2008 Nobel Prize in physics… October 7, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science.1 comment so far
… was given today to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.” A Nobel Prize in particle physics.
Nambu is well-known for his work on the origins of spontaneous breaking of symmetries in quantum field theories (in particular related to strong interactions, where he addressed spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry – which nowdays is a base of the standard language for description of low-energy pion interactions) and has many things associated with his name (Nambu-Goldstone bosons, Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, Han-Nambu quarks (which happen to have incorrect color charge assignment), etc.).
Kobayashi and Maskawa are given the prize essentially for the CKM (Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa) matrix. CKM matrix is a generalization of the Cabibbo’s idea that quarks actually mix – he used it to explain strange results in the physics of weak decays of strange quark, where properties of weak transitions of strange quark from non-leptonic hyperon decay rates differ from the ones in semileptonic kaon decays. Since, in particle phsyics, up-, down-, and strange-quarks belong to the first two generations of quarks, this mixing is described by a two-by-two matrix. Anyhow, Kobayashi and Maskawa generalized this idea to the case of three generations (3×3 matrix). It so happens that this “generalization” predicts a new phenomenon in weak decays of elementary particles: CP-violation orginating from the CKM matrix! In other words, it describes a difference between matter and anti-matter interactions in the Standard Model, which is needed for generating baryon asymmetry of the Universe (Ok, this now sounds like my “Introduction to particle physics” lecture for beginning graduate students)… Unfortunately, there is “not enough CP-violation” in the CKM matrix to claim explanation of the baryon asymmetry of the Universe from the Standard Model, BUT: this source of CP-violation was experimentally confirmed! And now studies of the CKM matrix serve as a base for indirect studies of New Physics in low-energy transitions — which, if discovered, will be used as additional information needed to classify possible New Physics possibly observed at the LHC, once they fix it… And that’s why Nobel Prize was given to Kobayashi and Maskawa.
Still, I can’t believe they didn’t give it to Cabibbo as well..
P.S. There is an intersting local story that was told to me once I got to WSU. Nambu is also considered one of the fathers of string theory (look for Nambu-Goto action). So the story is that in the 60s there was a quark-model conference at WSU hosted by Suraj Gupta, during which Nambu came up with his idea to describe hadrons in terms of strings. How about that?
Another Ig Nobel year… October 6, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Funny, Near Physics, Physics, Science.1 comment so far
The 2008 Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded. I didn’t win 
. But here are the winners (from the website of Improbable Research), this time with ciatations:
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NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
REFERENCE: “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips,” Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, Journal of Sensory Studies, vol. 19, October 2004, pp. 347-63.
PEACE PRIZE. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
REFERENCE: “The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake“
ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.
REFERENCE: “The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach,” Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60.
BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
REFERENCE: “A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),” M.C. Cadiergues, C. Joubert, and M. Franc, Veterinary Parasitology, vol. 92, no. 3, October 1, 2000, pp. 239-41.
MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine..
REFERENCE: “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” Rebecca L. Waber; Baba Shiv; Ziv Carmon; Dan Ariely, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 2008; 299: 1016-1017.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and Ágotá Tóth of the University of Szeged, Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.
REFERENCE: “Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism,” Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, and Ágota Tóth, Nature, vol. 407, September 2000, p. 470.
ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.
REFERENCE: “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?” Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-81.
PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.
REFERENCE: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.
REFERENCE: “Effect of ‘Coke’ on Sperm Motility,” Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine, 1985, vol. 313, no. 21, p. 1351.
REFERENCE: “The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola,” C.Y. Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang, Human Toxicology, vol. 6, no. 5, September 1987, pp. 395-6. [NOTE: THE JOURNAL LATER CHANGED ITS NAME. NOW CALLED "Human & experimental toxicology"]
LITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”
REFERENCE: “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations,” David Sims, Organization Studies, vol. 26, no. 11, 2005, pp. 1625-40.
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Once again, High Energy Physics is not among the prize-winners… but it did finally make it to mainstream media — apparently your scientific views on loop quantum gravity and string theory can lead to changes in your social status. Should not it always be so?
