physicsworld.com Blog
December 4, 2008
BLAST takes off
The BLAST team. Credit: Mark Halpern
By Margaret Harris
Things are not going well for the astrophysics “balloonatics” at the bottom of the world. After weeks spent waiting for decent weather, their Balloon-Borne Large Aperture Submilimeter Telescope, or BLAST, has hit a stumbling block. Fairly literally, in fact: the fragile, sensitive instrument has just slammed into the truck being used to launch it. “Oh, you’re (expletive) kidding me,” someone cries in the background, as the stricken telescope sways gently beneath its balloon in the still Antarctic air.
“Step by tedious step, we stumble away from abject failure,” says Barth Netterfield, a Canadian astrophysicist and co-star of the feature-length documentary BLAST, which chronicles the 18 rocky months leading up to the equally rocky launch of the telescope. “And that’s on a good day.” It’s a statement that will bring grimaces of recognition to many an experimentalist’s face, and as a summary of the film, it’s as good as any. If you’re reading this as a PhD student, and your experiment is not going well, take heart: at least it isn’t scattered over a 120-mile stretch of frozen wilderness, with the bulk of it halfway down a crevasse.
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December 2, 2008
First pictures of LHC magnet damage
By Michael Banks
Whilst trawling the web this morning I came across a few blog posts showing the first pictures of the damage caused by the magnet failure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on 19 September.
The pictures were apparently shown during a presentation by the lab’s director general Robert Aymar on Friday at a meeting of the European Committee for Future Accelerators held at CERN.
The US/LHC blog posted a link to slides of Aymar’s talk. However, within an hour of the post (on 1 December) access to the talk had been restricted. Fortunately, particle physicist Stephanie Majewski from Brookhaven National Laboratory, who is at CERN for a year, posted the pictures from the talk on her blog.
From the two images, probably the more striking picture is the one that shows the region between the magnets that was crunched due to the pressure as the helium escaped into the tunnel. The other image shows a magnet unattached from its mount, which is secured to the concrete floor in the tunnel.
CERN is planning to release a full report in early December about the damage to the LHC, outlining the repair schedule and plans for operation in 2009.
December 2, 2008
Seeing is believing
By Matin Durrani
Two silent round flashes on a dark screen. That was the image witnessed by researchers crowded into the control room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva on 10 September that heralded the successful passage of the first beam of protons around the 27 km collider. Later that day physicists watched as one of the LHC’s main experiments - the Compact Muon Solenoid - generated its first images from the debris of particles produced when the proton beam was deliberately steered into a tungsten collimator block.
Particle physics has long been a rich source of iconic images - from the tracks in the bubble chambers of the 1950s to the particle collisions that signalled the detection of everything from the W-boson to the top quark. But visualization has a proud history in other areas of science too. Ever since Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609 and saw mountains on the Moon and spots on the Sun, researchers have sought to see beyond what is possible with the naked eye. Indeed, astronomers now claim to have directly observed extrasolar planets for the first time.
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November 27, 2008
NJP shines a light on cloaking
By Hamish Johnston
Our very own New Journal of Physics has just published a special issue on cloaking and transformation optics — a subject dear to our hearts here on physicsworld.com.
The first article in issue — by cloaking wizards Ulf Leonhardt and David Smith — begins with a quote from the late Arthur C Clarke that sums the field up nicely. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
So, what kind of magic has been unveiled in the (virtual) pages of this special issue?
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November 26, 2008
An ethnic theory for plane crashes
By Joao Medeiros
Malcolm Gladwell (Courtesy; Brooke Williams)
Malcolm Gladwell, the virtuoso author of Tipping Point (which covered the work of physicists like Duncan Watts and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi) and Blink, came to London for one day to present his new book, Outliers, to a packed audience at the Lyceum Theatre.
Gladwell is a maverick science journalist (or what “maverick” used to mean pre-Sarah Palin). He invented “pop economics” with his writing, spawning a whole new class of books like Freakonomics, The Long Tail, Here Comes Everybody, …. He works for the New Yorker, where he regularly writes about his niche subject: everything.
Gladwell is not a typical science journalist. He’s an original observer (not necessarily an original thinker — he defines himself as a communicator of science) that is driven by his own curiosity rather than following the agenda of scientists. Whereas most science journalists browse the scientific literature in search for the “what’s hot in science”, Gladwell follows his own instinct and curiosity. He starts his stories by asking by asking very simple questions about pretty much anything that crosses his way: “What is Cesar Milan ( from the TV show “The dog whisperer”) secret?”, “Why is there only one variety of Ketchup?”, “Why do we usually relate genius to precocity?”, etc etc These are questions that most people probably dismiss as random daydreaming divagations.
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November 26, 2008
Adopt ‘dual-track” policy on nuclear weapons, scientists tell Obama
By Hamish Johnston
A report released yesterday by a group of US scientists including representatives of the American Physical Society urges president elect Obama to follow a “dual-track nuclear arms control and refurbishment/updating policy”.
This, says the report, is in line with Obama’s “vision of a nuclear-free world, and the continuing need to have a credible US deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist”.
Although this “I’ll drop mine when you drop yours” approach makes as much moral sense as mutually assured destruction, the pragmatist in me knows the best we can hope for is that the US and others refrain from developing any new weapons — something the report calls for. And of course, pray that no-one (government, terrorist or otherwise) is demented enough to actually use one.
On more cheery notes, the report urges Obama to address the challenge of boosting global reliance on nuclear energy while controlling the risks of weapons proliferation.
The report also calls for the US and Russia to come to a new agreement on the simultaneous reduction of their nuclear weapons stockpiles.
November 25, 2008
Even more physics on film
Anton Zeilinger being interviewed in London
By Hamish Johnston
First it was Einstein and Eddington, then Leon Lederman …now, it’s Anton Zeilinger’s turn to hit the silver screen — or at least your computer screen.
Zeilinger was in London earlier this year to accept the inaugural Isaac Newton Medal from the Insititute of Physics .
He also delivered the 2008 Isaac Newton Lecture, which was recorded and can now be viewed on the IOP’s website.
Zeilinger, who is at the University of Vienna spoke on “Quantum Information and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics”. You can also view an interview with the medal-winner on the website.
Our physics on film series continues shortly when Margaret Harris reveals whether her universe will ever be the same after BLAST!
November 24, 2008
Fermilab on film
Still the frontier? Bison graze at Fermilab. Credit: Fermilab
By Margaret Harris
What does it feel like to work for an organization that — despite its considerable fame and all the talent it has nurtured over the years — is frankly on the verge of being outclassed? This is among the many questions raised by The Atom Smashers, an oddly moving little film about life at Fermilab in the months before its European rival, CERN, switched on the Large Hadron Collider. It’s scheduled to air on American public television stations starting from 25 November as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series, with repeats around 27 January; check local listings for specific dates and times.
The documentary focuses on the period between early 2006 and late 2007, and there is plenty of material for filmmakers Clayton Brown, Monica Long Ross and Andrew Suprenant to explore here. Over the course of the film, scientific enthusiasm collides with sharp budget cuts and promising results that don’t pan out — all while a neon “doomsday clock” marking the days, hours and minutes to LHC’s first collisions ticks down in the background.
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November 24, 2008
And the most popular cover is…
And the winner is…September 2008
The results are in and your favourite Physics World cover comes from the September 2008 issue of the magazine (right). The collage of galaxies was inspired by an illustration in John D Barrow’s book Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science.
The cover, which garnered 13% of the 1303 votes in our recent survey to mark the 20th anniversary of Physics World, contains 56 striking images of galaxies that were derived from actual photos taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The cover highlights the Galaxy Zoo project, which recruits members of the public to help classify the thousands of galaxy images taken by the SDSS telescope in New Mexico.
My favourite cover — a brilliant homage to the late American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein — was runner up with 11% of the vote.
March 1998 is done in John Richardson’s “Lichtenstyle”
The cover of the March 1998 issue was created by the UK-based cartoonist John Richardson and shows “Alice and Bob, the central characters in many quantum information papers”. You can view a gallery of Richardson’s art here .
Pop art is also the theme of the third-place cover from November 2001, which uses 8 slightly different “Schroedinger’s cats” to illustrate the concept of quantum cloning à la Andy Warhol.
The cat belonged to then features editor Val Jamieson (now at New Scientist), and I’m told it only had one eye — the other being cloned in our design studio. Sadly, the final measurement has been made on this cat.
The covers were voted on by our readers from a shortlist of 20 chosen by Matin Durrani and Dens Milne.
…and which cover was the least favourite? It’s the cover from July 2006 that illustrates an article on Hollywood physics — this attracted about 1% of the vote.
November 2001 is a salute to Andy Warhol
November 20, 2008
Einstein and Eddington film
By Margaret Harris
Andy Serkis as Einstein and David Tennant as Eddington
Albert Einstein is certainly the most famous scientist of the 20th century, and probably one of the most important in all of human history. So great is Einstein’s reputation that it makes that of Arthur Stanley Eddington — a fine observational astronomer and a gifted popularizer of science — seem like footnote fodder. Yet without Eddington’s 1919 eclipse expedition, which provided early proof of general relativity, Einstein’s discoveries might have languished for years before becoming known outside the German-speaking scientific community, let alone amongst the general public.
The connections between Einstein and Eddington are the subject of a new film from the BBC, starring David Tennant of Doctor Who fame as a troubled, repressed Eddington and Andy Serkis (best known as the model for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films) as a flawed but likeable Einstein. Einstein and Eddington airs on BBC2 on 22 November at 21:10 and is well worth a watch — if mostly for the human drama, rather than the scientific content.
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