Author: dabacon

Posted on

Scienceblogs Upgrade

Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won’t allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until…well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.)
So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don’t you instead go waste your time by:

  • By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog.
  • If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen’s Three myths of scientific peer review
  • The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics, probability, and the measurement problem. If you actually want to expand your brain instead of waste your time, this would be a good place to do so.
  • Copco and Iron Gate, will they be demolished in 2020? The county hopes to be involved.
  • Read articles from the perspective of a view not often heard at Secular Right
  • Read a book from the list of free books about the market put together by the Master of the Universe.
Posted on

Feynman on the Measurement Problem

I’d never seen this quote from Richard Feynman on the measurement problem:

When you start out to measure the property of one (or more) atom, say, you get for example, a spot on a photographic plate which you then interpret. But such a spot is really only more atoms & so in looking at the spot you are again measuring the properties of atoms, only now it is more atoms. What can we expect to end with if we say we can’t see many things about one atom precisely, what in fact can we see? Proposal,
Only those properties of a single atom can be measured which can be correlated (with finite probability) (by various experimental arrangements) with an unlimited no. o f atoms.
(I.e. the photographic spot is “real” because it can be enlarged & projected on screens, or affect large vats of chemicals, or big brains, etc., etc. – it can be made to affect ever increasing sizes of things – it can determine whether a train goes from N.Y. to Chic. – or an atom bomb explodes – etc.)

This is from a set of notes dating to 1946 as detailed in Silvan S. Schweber, “Feynman and the visualization of space-time processes” Rev. Mod. Phys. 58, 449 – 508 (1986).

Posted on

Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose

Special relativity holds a special (*ahem*) place in most physicist’s physicists’ hearts. I myself fondly remember learning special relativity from the first edition of Taylor and Wheeler’s Spacetime Physics obtained from my local county library (this edition seemed a lot less annoying than the later edition I used at Caltech.) One of the fun things I remember calculating when I learned this stuff was what “right in front of your nose” meant in different frames of reference.
Continue reading “Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose”

Posted on

Dad – 5 Years On

It is nearly impossible for me to believe that five years have passed since you passed away.
And hey, we’re still waiting for Mt. Shasta to explode, could you get working on that?
One day, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, I received a package in the mail from my father. In it was a small yellow squash with red dots painted onto it along with a strip of paper which read “what is this?” Well, Caltech is full of some pretty smart people, so we spent a few days trying to reason what this strange package that my father sent was. Small. Yellow. Squash. With red dots. Huh? After a few days I gave up and gave him a call. Okay, dad, what is that damn thing? “Oh, that’s simple,” he said, “It’s an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot zucchini!”
We miss you. Even your bad jokes.