Author: dabacon

Posted on

Large Earth Collider

Oh noes: Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth:

BATAVIA, IL–In October, Fermilab scientists joined a growing number of physicists around the world in warning that the Very Large Earth Collider–a $117 billion electromagnetic particle accelerator built to study astronomical phenomena by colliding Earth into various heavenly bodies–could potentially destroy Earth when it sends the planet careening headlong into Mars, Jupiter, or even the sun.
…
Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC’s construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are “some troubling variables” whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth

Damn, and I’d just drawn up plans for the Incredibly Large Sun Collider (we can get ahold of the sun, so the joke goes, by traveling there at night.)

Posted on

Worldview Manager Hits Prime Time

The Optimizer ideas on Worldview Manager gets written up in Forbes.

The program will work by showing users a list of statements about a topic and then asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with each. At the end, the system will present users with a list of the statements they endorsed that contradict one another. It will also suggest that users reconsider those views and the assumptions behind them.
Similar teaching programs already exist for narrow fields, especially in technical areas of philosophy. Aaronson, though, is extremely ambitious for Worldview Manager and wants it to cover all the hot-button issues: gay marriage, the Middle East and more.
The program won’t take sides. In fact, two people with opposite ideas about, say, animal rights, could both get the equivalent of a passing score from the program, as long as their ideas were internally consistent.

For some reason this last line reminds me of a line from Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Please rank: consistent and wrong, inconsistent and correct, consistent and right, or inconsistent and wrong. Of course you will yell that it is impossible to be inconsistent and correct, but I just watched a PBS special on quantum gravity (the one where the narrator talks really really slow. Does this really help people understand?), so for now I believe otherwise.

Posted on

Laser Cooler Next Energy Secretary

Well I’m sure the physics blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Steven Chu is expected to be named by President-elect Obama to head the Department of Energy. Wait let me look. Yep: heisendad, varyingsean, chunothsu, angryphysicist, nanodude, lubotic, toinfinityandbeyond and thedeterminantsnotzero. (OK that last comes from non-physicists, but I couldn’t resist a linear algebra joke.)
Since I have little to add besides the fact that laser cooling rocks, I present the first few lines of a song that was sung by a band at Berkeley concerning the person Chu shared the Nobel prize with, Cohen-Tannoudji:

Cohen-Tannoudji
Does quantum mechanics
His book’s in two volumes
I think it’s satanic

And a question: the first cabinet member who has a paper on the arXiv?

Posted on

Physics Based License Plates

Via Zz, a link to Symmetry Breaking’s list of physics based license plates.
Sweet I’ll have to submit my old California plates:
If there is one thing I will regret in life it is that I missed one of the most “terrifiq” opportunities of all time. While I was at the Santa Fe Institute, I had my QUBITS plates and sometimes would park beside Murray Gell-Mann’s car which had a QUARKS license place. At one point Ben Schumacher, who invented the word “qubit”, visited the Santa Fe Institute. Damnit that was my opportunity to get a picture of two people who invented words in the dictionary starting with a “q” beside two cars with those words as license plates! Drats, that would have been priceless.
(For quantum computing people make sure you ask Andrew Landahl what his license plate is next time you see him.)

Posted on

A Bit Unclear on History

Guffaw!

Mr. Blagojevich seemed not to mind earlier news reports that his conversations had been recorded. “I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it,” he said, though he added that those who carried out such recordings sneakily, “I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.”

Posted on

Damn You Thomas Jefferson!

A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as “physics.” Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are “legacy libraries” where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas Jefferson is cheating. I mean I don’t have a copy of “Advice to shepherds and owners of flocks on the care and management of sheep”, which is tagged “Physics” but it seems to me that this book is most probably not about physicists (managing physicists is not like managing sheep, it’s like managing cats.)
The books I share with Thomas Jefferson are:

L’eloge de la folie by Desiderius Erasmus
The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
The plays of William Shakspeare : in ten volumes : with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators by William Shakespeare
Titi Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex by Titus Lucretius Carus

Posted on

Math Gains, But World Still Scheduled to End

In this era of the impending apocalypse, what the hell is a report about United States students actually showing gains in mathematics doing in the New York Times? Dude, media, get on message and send us some more doom and gloom! I especially need more gloom here in Seattle where the sun rises at 7:47 a.m. and sets at 4:18 p.m.
Update: Ah, science results are flat, so it’s the end of the world as we know it, according to The Washington Post. Thank’s WaPo for restoring pessimism into my world.