Social Networks Get Rewound

TimeHop: Free 

If there is anyone out there who journals regularly,you know how enlightening it can be to go back on old entries to see how much you’ve grown. It’s also a good way to remember what you were passionate about or what concerns you had during a different time in your life.

Social networks are the diaries and journals of a more connected generation, but they can still serve the same purpose. Now there's a start up called Timehop that can rewind your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram tweets back a year, and send them to you, answering the questions “What was I doing?” or “How far have I come?” 

WIDE ANGLE: Social Networking

All it takes is a quick sign up, which adds the application to your Facebook and allows you to control how much access it has to your information. Daily emails will be sent that detail the history of your page from last year. According to an interview on TechCrunch, co-founder Jonathan Wegener wants to build the site into “the best way of recording, remembering and reconnecting around our digital histories.” The company just earned $1.1 million in funding, which will be used to add more engineers to the project.  

Via: TechCrunch

Credit: Timehop

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Popular Science App Integrates Augmented Reality

Popular Science has released a new app for the iPhone and iPad and also for Android, and this particular app, PopSci Interactive, is designed to help augment, not replace, the hardcopy edition of the magazine. The app is designed to work with the June issue, which is the magazine's annual "Invention Awards" issue (shown to the right). By hovering the iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphone's camera over the text of the magazine interviews, the device should begin streaming video of those interviews.

Note that this requires a camera, so it doesn't work with first generation iPads (like the one I own).

What do people think of this way of integrating technology into the magazine? Has anyone gotten their hands on the June 2012 issue to try it out yet? Is this the wave of the future or just a cool gimmick (or both)?

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The Casimir Effect - The Ultimate Free Ride ... into Space?

Science has at times sought to reach further than it can actually deliver, such as in the case of attempts to build a perpetual motion machine.

Some recent reports seem to be dancing dangerously close to this line, as they've reported on the invention of a new propulsion method for spacecraft, based on the work of a teenage Egyptian student named Aisha Mustafa:

The process supposedly uses a method known as the dynamic?Casimir effect, in which?vacuum energy actually results in a force acting on metallic plates. The effect is real, but can it be harnessed to create an effective propulsion system? Mustafa seems to be applying for a patent for her method and is seeking funding to turn it into a viable method of space propulsion.

A patent alone doesn't mean much, of course. After all, there's even a patent on a time machine (as described in Dr. Ronald Mallett's non-fiction book Time Traveler), but time machines (or even time communicators, since that's closer to the actual description of Mallett's device) still haven't been created yet. Just applying for a patent on something doesn't prove that the fundamental scientific concept is actually viable.

Only time will tell whether or not Mustafa's method is more science than fantasy.

View the original article here

Popular Science App Integrates Augmented Reality

Popular Science has released a new app for the iPhone and iPad and also for Android, and this particular app, PopSci Interactive, is designed to help augment, not replace, the hardcopy edition of the magazine. The app is designed to work with the June issue, which is the magazine's annual "Invention Awards" issue (shown to the right). By hovering the iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphone's camera over the text of the magazine interviews, the device should begin streaming video of those interviews.

Note that this requires a camera, so it doesn't work with first generation iPads (like the one I own).

What do people think of this way of integrating technology into the magazine? Has anyone gotten their hands on the June 2012 issue to try it out yet? Is this the wave of the future or just a cool gimmick (or both)?

View the original article here

How to Transform Physics

Today I received an e-mail containing the following question:

What is the apropriate [sic] way to spread my revoloutionary [sic] message on how to transform modern physics?

When you're at all in the public eye for physics, you get these sorts of requests on a fairly regular basis. I spoke a while back about a rather deft way cosmologist Sean Carroll discussed dealing with physics cranks. Still, this particular individual was polite, so I decided to respond at length, offering some of the insights taken from Carroll's earlier comments on this topic:

Not to be glib, but if you want to have the message taken seriously by the physics community, you'll need to get a doctorate in physics, so that you have a full and complete understanding of existing physics. You can then formulate your revolutionary framework within the language and terminology of the physics community as well as craft experiments that will provide evidence for your approach over the approaches of others. For example, how does your theory account for the array of fundamental particles which have been experimentally identified, as well as their individual properties? What sort of results does your theory predict for various types of particle collisions? That sort of thing.

If you are located near a university, another (less costly) option would be to contact the physics department there and see if they have any physics seminars that are open to the public. Researchers frequently present their findings at universities and going to these things (or to a more established scientific conference, but these things tend to be more costly) will give you an idea of the amount of rigor and detail that the physics community requires in presenting their results.

Consider a timeline of the major work by Albert Einstein:

1895 - Enters the Swiss Federal Polytechnic (i.e. begins rigorous study of physics)1905 - Publishes initial inklings of special relativity, photoelectric effect, and Brownian motions; Earns PhD1915 - Completes work extending special relativity into a full theory of gravity, general relativity1919 - Observational evidence from an eclipse confirms Einstein's predictions; general relativity is largely accepted by the physics community1921 - Albert Einstein receives a Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect

At best, the argument could be made that Einstein transformed physics after 10 years of intently studying physics, but if he'd never gone further than those original inklings of special relativity he wouldn't be remembered much today. Rather it took not only another decade of work, but rather about 15 more years of active engagement by a large segment of the physics community - Max Planck, Arthur Eddington, & Hermann Minkowski spring to mind immediately - in order to transform his correct intuitions into a workable theory.

The idea that anyone today would be able to do it with less effort than this is highly unrealistic and likely misguided.

One further note: The goal of going to physics seminars should genuinely be to learn about physics, not so that you can corner some poor unsuspecting postdoctoral student and explain to him or her how you're more clever than all of the brilliant physicists that they've spent the last decade or so of their life studying. This will not work. It's fine for you to strike up conversations and build relationships with physicists, but that relationship should be built from you trying to learn what they know.?This tip from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is useful here:

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

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Warped Space May Create Escher-like Universe

A new theoretical model posted onto the ArXiv website by Stephen Hawking and colleagues proposes something very curious: that space may actually reflect a curious structure that has more in common with the artistic style of M.C. Escher than the smooth fabric that is often taken as the cornerstone of general relativity. As described in New Scientist (registration required):

The images in question are tessellations, arrangements of repeated shapes, such as the images of interlocking bats and angels seen in?Circle Limit IV. Although these are flat, they serve as "projections" of an alternative geometry called hyperbolic space, rather like a flat map of the world is a projection of a globe. For example, although the bats in the flat projection appear to shrink at an exponential rate at the edges, in hyperbolic space they are all the same size. These distortions in the projection arise because hyperbolic space cannot lie flat. Instead, it resembles a twisting, wiggly landscape of saddle-like hills.

Hawking - together with University of California's James Hartle - have been working on an approach to create a quantum picture of cosmology since the 1980's, and the Escher-like structure fell out of that. The problem with their approach was that the expansion of the universe seems to indicate that the universe has a positive cosmological constant, and that makes their equations unstable and fairly useless.

However, the team (also consisting of Thomas Hertog, from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium) has recently realized that when a negative cosmological constant is put into the wave functions of the universe using their models, it turns out that the model can evolve over time to be very similar to a form of string theory developed by Juan Maldacena in 1997. This famous "Maldacena conjecture" stunningly linked the holographic principle to string theory and is seen by many as having the potential to translate string theory into a format that yields more direct insights, because it links a string theory model together with a quantum physics model and helps reduce the complexities arising from the extra dimensions. (Here is a link to the ArXiv copy of Maldacena's 1997 paper, for those interested in the more technical aspects.)

Hawking, Hertog, and Hartle certainly aren't done with their work ... in many ways, it creates more questions than it solves. That is, if the idea even works at all!

Already, physicist Lubos Motl has indicated on his blog that he doesn't have particularly high regard for the possibilities of this work being decisive and, in fact, it looks like possibly the calculations have been negated in his own comment thread! (Although the Hawking paper on ArXiv has been edited since then, so it's possible that the sign error he's talking about has been fixed and the paper is still there.)

The truth is that these models are sometimes introduced and get a bit of fanfare, but usually they don't really end up going anywhere ... or, if they do go somewhere, it takes years for them to get there. This model is so new that there's very little discussion of it yet, and it's through that discussion that scientists will help to determine whether or not it has any value. At present, I'm suspect, though ... and I'd urge caution from anyone before they begin declaring that our universe has some bizarre geometric structure that isn't experimentally verified!

Still, if the model could be extended and refined to match experimental data, and if it then makes predictions that could be further tested, it might represent some true progress at creating a theory that combines quantum physics with general relativity. And, if that works, then we'll have discovered that, once again, the universe really doesn't look the way that we expect it to ... and that would be a pretty neat discovery.

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Why the Heck Does Magneto Have a Graviton Shield?

I'm a gamer at heart and recently one of the games that I've been enjoying recently has been Marvel: Avengers Alliance over on Facebook. Readers of the blog will know I'm a big comics fan and recently talked about the science in the Avengers film. So when I was playing this Facebook game and Magneto activated his "Graviton Shield" power I immediately thought one thing ...

Huh?

Magneto is a villain who mostly goes up against the X-Men. That wasn't the confusing part, though, because there are X-Men characters in the game and Magneto has clashed with the Avengers over the years. No, the part that made me go "Huh?" is that Magneto is the "Master of Magnetism" ... ?So why the heck does he have a Graviton Shield?

Gravitons are hypothetical gauge bosons that mediate the force of gravity. As described in the comics (or in The Physics of Superheroes) Magneto's power is the ability to manipulate magnetic energy. The gauge boson that mediates the electromagnetic force is the photon, so if he wields magnetic powers then it is the photon that he should be able to create a shield of, not the graviton. This means that he can do all sorts of great things when manipulating charged particles like electrons or protons.

But a graviton doesn't have any electrical charge at all. (Or, to be precise, it has an electrical charge of zero.) Not only should he not be generating gravitons, but he shouldn't even be able to affect them!

Of course, I suppose there could be something much deeper going on here. Under string theory, the most fundamental type of object wouldn't be an electron or a graviton, but instead a tiny vibrating string of energy. Is it possible that Magneto has developed the ability to get these strings to vibrate at different frequencies, changing from an electron into a graviton?

This does, however, seem to be a bit outside of Magneto's wheelhouse, more the sort of power that is normally wielded by Molecule Man, who (despite the name) is shown to be able to manipulate matter at its most fundamental levels.

So it looks like this is another case of comic book & video game science abuse. That is, unless any of you loyal readers have a suggestion for how Magneto could manipulate gravitons. Offer your theories in the comment section and let's see if we can reverse-engineer an explanation that makes sense!

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Dr. Higgs, Your Boson Is Here

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider announced yesterday that they may well have found the long-sought after Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle," which is the final missing part of the Standard Model of particle physics. Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the particle back in the 1960's, but he was so far ahead of the technology that it took nearly half a century to actually get the first glimpse of the thing ... except, of course, for the glimpses that are all around us, if Higgs is right.

Peter Higgs awaits word from CERN on the potential discovery of the Higgs boson
Source: CERN

Because if he is right, then evidence of the Higgs boson is everywhere. See, the reason Peter Higgs needed to propose his theory was that the physical theories he had to work with at the time had one major flaw: they didn't explain why there was any stuff in the universe.

That's right. The very best scientific explanations that physicists could come up with had a gaping hole in the middle of them. They depicted a universe that was so elegant and finely tuned that ... it shouldn't actually have anything in it. For example, the gauge bosons that mediate the weak nuclear force (called the W boson and Z boson) should, according to theory, have absolutely no mass. But they do have mass!?So Peter Higgs set out to try to explain why and how matter itself could exist, in a way that was fully consistent with all of the known laws of physics.

The result was to propose a field in empty space, a field that permeates all of space, called the Higgs field, which has the right properties needed to give mass to these particles ... and, in turn, to cause the mass of all the rest of the universe, as well.

And, in quantum physics, fields can also be expressed as particles (one of the many weird things about quantum physics), so the resulting particle was called the Higgs boson. (It was called a boson because it had a spin of 0. If it had a spin of one-half it would have been a Higgs fermion, but then it wouldn't have been able to do what it needed to do!)

As with most things in physics, that's an over-simplification of the story. It sounds like Higgs came up with the whole idea out of nowhere, and he didn't. The ideas were built on the work of others and many others came upon similar ideas at almost exactly the same time, so even calling the resulting fields and particles "Higgs" can be a controversial thing to do. Still, the fact is that he was a key player in creating the model which, over the last almost-fifty years, has been refined to explain how the symmetries of the universe are broken in the precise way that we need in order to get matter.

And that model may be about to be confirmed by experimental evidence!

Congrats to you, Peter Higgs ... and to all the other players in this drama that is theoretical physics!

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Physics on Twitter

Last week, I was honored to be listed among the top "must-follow" physicists on Twitter, as named by The Huffington Post's Science section. While this was quite an honor, it did strike me that I should be keeping such a list myself ... and so here it is now: our Top Physics Feeds on Twitter. I'm sure that this list will grow over time, but if you want to keep up on the list, then it's simple enough... just go to the @AboutPhysics list page and subscribe directly to the Twitter lists that I maintain there! As I add new physics resources on Twitter, you'll instantly have access to them.

Or, of course, feel free to check back on the article regularly to see who has been added.

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Kepler's Laws Rule the Worlds (that's right ... all of them)

Earlier this month, fans of science may have heard a lot of commotion about the transit of Venus. The transit of Venus describes an event that happens at most twice a century in which Venus passes directly in a path directly between the Earth and the Sun. When the moon does this, it's an eclipse. When Venus does it, it's the transit of Venus.

The commotion was mostly related to the rarity of the event and the fact that it was truly beautiful, for those who were able to witness it. (Remember, don't stare directly at the sun to observe any astronomical event.) If you missed it, then you can check out the transit of Venus images over at About.com Space. Comedian/faux political pundit Stephen Colbert nailed it when he identified the transit of Venus as:

"Truly one of the most majestic examples of something passing in front of something else."

But once upon a time, the transit of Venus carried some pretty heavy stakes. In 1769, nations around the world (well, okay, mostly Europe) sent expeditions to measure the time of the transit of Venus. Using these calculations, they were able to apply Kepler's laws of planetary motion to figure out the distance between the Earth and the Sun. By having a more precise measurement of this distance, it improved a navigator's ability to calculate longitude while at sea, which ultimately had benefits for warfare and trade. (Back then, it seems, funding pure scientific endeavors wasn't any more popular than it is now.)

The reason this works is that Kepler's laws govern the motion of planets orbiting the sun, defining the paths that these planets take and the rates at which they move. Kepler derived these values from careful observations maintained by his mentor, astronomer Tycho Brahe, over the course of his lifetime. So, in other words, Kepler knew that his laws applied to the motion of the planets, but he didn't have a firm theoretical explanation for why this was. It was later shown that Kepler's laws could be derived from Newton's law of gravity, developed nearly a century later in 1687, thus providing Kepler's laws with a theoretical framework as well as the empirical support of evidence. It is always nice to have both, after all.

Kepler's Second Law:
A line from the sun to each planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time.
Source: Wikipedia via GNU Free Documentation License

With these laws firmly in place, the only thing that remained was to make measurements of?the transit of Venus and then apply some angular calculations to figure out the resulting details about the solar system ... which is where the 1769 transit of Venus expeditions come in.

The adventure of three of the major expeditions is described in thrilling detail in Mark Anderson's recent book The Day the World Discovered the Sun. ?I've got to admit that I'm not necessarily the sort of guy who jumps at the chance to read travelogues of eighteenth century scientific expeditions ... but if you are, then it should definitely rank high on your reading list!

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Beyond the Higgs: The Other Bosons

With all the excitement about the Higgs boson, it seems like a good time to think about the other bosons that we know about. The Standard Model of particle physics contains a total of four bosons (not counting the theoretical Higgs). These bosons are considered force carriers, because they communicate the three fundamental forces of physics that are explained by quantum physics. The bosons associated with these three forces are:

There are four bosons because the W boson and Z boson work together to mediate the weak nuclear force.

In addition to the above bosons, theories of quantum gravity also propose another type of boson, the graviton, which would mediate the gravitational force. To date, however, this boson has not been confirmed.

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