Collected Links (06/01/2022)

• Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf) -- Wikipedia -- well written and thorough.
• "Gravity is Not a Force" -- Veritassium -- really great but does not define what is meant by a "force" -- i.e. the title is misleading because he means "gravity is an effect of space-time, which effect some people might call a "force" but it is not a "force" acting independently from that effect (and let's not get too deeply into gravitons or the Standard Model or gravitational waves)." In the Standard Model bosons are particles that form fields, but bosons are also the consequence of fields. Einstein famously did not believe in "spooky action at a distance," and the idea of a space-time field with a mediating particle (gravitons) is consistent with General Relativity. So, saying "gravity is not a force" is a little misleading since it ignores what might be meant, when closely examined, by "force."
• Newton's method of calculating pi -- Veritassium -- superlative video --  includes getting from πr to πr² -- also includes great stuff on Pascal's triangle in negative numbers and fractions and continuums -- shows (without overtly saying so) why Newton was a brilliant mathematician -- Newton's method developed from integration and series and development of (1+x)².
• Newton's Pendulum (Gangnam Style)
• Göbekli Tepe -- at Reddit -- at Wikipedia -- quote from Reddit: "built around 9500BC while Britain was still connected to Europe and humans hunted mammoths in Siberia. We are closer in time to the construction of Stonehenge and the Giza Pyramids, than [Stonehenge and the ancient Egyptians] were to [Göbekli Tepe]."
• Fox News: "Biden keeps repeating false Second Amendment claim, despite repeated fact checks" --  -- the quoted language that is asserted to be false is "You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed." Fox News, of course, provides no evidence that ordinary people could just go out and buy cannons. Fox News, of course, provides no evidence that, in the words of the Second Amendment, that ordinary people would "keep and bear" cannons. It seems absurd to believe (without evidence, natch) that some people kept cannons, say, at their households or even on their person. Cannons at the time were very difficult to make. The only evidence is that cannons were bought and sold for military or quasi-military use. (N.B. "quasi-military" because the U.S. military as a body was loosely organized and depended on state militias and not in any substantial way on a federal military body in the years after the American Revolution. See, e.g.) Fox News, citing Politico. claims all weapons were unregulated because it asserts there were no formal federal gun laws until 1934. That's nuts. There were numerous state gun restrictions before that time. Moreover, restrictions on ownership (and practical inability and common understandings of prohibitions) were a product of the common law not written laws or regulations, as law at that time was driven by common law not statutory law. Fox News's and Politico's suggestions to the contrary  are, frankly, wrong and indicated of legal and historical ignorance. Indeed, the Constitution's explicit provision for issuing Letters of Marque and Reprisal shows the understanding that the use of weapons such as cannons had to be authorized -- it was not some sort of freely floating around right. Fox News also states as a fact "The Second Amendment as it is written does not limit who can 'keep and bear arms' or what kind of arms people can keep and bear." Actually, the Second Amendment does not say any types of weapon or any amount of weapons can be owned. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly made this clear (see specifically Section III of the Court's opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which is the watershed "pro-gun rights" decision from the Supreme Court and still makes this clear). Indeed, the clerks for Justices Scalia and Stevens recently made this clear -- Scalia and Stevens wrote, respectively, the Court's opinion and main dissent in Heller -- in a lengthy and detailed op-ed.  The assertion that Biden's statement is false, extends back to Politifact, which called it "dubious," not false, i.e. not a lie. It was "dubious" because Biden did not, gratuitously, point to a specific case where someone was prohibited from owning a cannon. But that is incorrect: it puts the "proof" requirement on the wrong person: if you say private individuals could go around owning cannons, in the sense we mean, not for military purposes as they existed then, then I think the onus is on you to prove it. As discussed above, I think that notion -- that private laypeople owned cannons -- edges on the absurd for several reasons. Having that view, as Biden evidently does, is  not a lie. Fox News's story is intended to cement in the reader the belief that Biden is dishonest. Biden, like all of us, makes plenty of mistakes. He certainly says many things poorly. He has, without question, told lies during his life and long political career. This the statement here, right or wrong (and it may be right) isn't a lie.. Fox News knows that and goes ahead, anyway. Again, this story was pushed to me today by Fox News. It's not like Fox News is also pushing stories that are truthful. 
• Fox News, again! Michael Sussman, a lawyer connected with Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential campaign, was found not guilty of lying to the FBI. The supposed "lie" was hawked by Fox News as a major scandal involving Clinton and the Democrats. Fox News repeatedly suggested the supposed "lies" were actual criminal conduct and involved "massive fraud" and was, in fact, "the biggest political scandal in modern history." Sussman was prosecuted by a special prosecutor selected by Trump; the supposed "lie" involved Trump's alleged wrongful conduct in relation to Russia. So, there was a patent conflict of interest from the get-go as Trump appointed a prosecutor to investigate and prosecute a political opponent's campaign over statement's about Trump. According to Mother Jones (on a story pushed to me, BTW), the special prosecutor's investigation has actually strengthened the case against Trump. Anyway, the jury was not out long before ruling for Sussman and rejecting the Trump special prosecutor's prosecution. Fox News's response? The result was due to "jury nullification." "D.C. juries are famous for failing to follow the facts and the law." The jury was "biased" and composed of "Hilary Clinton peers." And more and more. Fox News is not just mendacious but prolific.

The Bead Chain Experiment

Our physical world is simply an amazing world.

Via Tim! from 3 Quarks Daily.

Magnetic Putty "Eating" A Magnet

Via Miss Cellania.

The Making and Breaking of Prince Rupert's Drop

Prince Rupert's Drop is a string of glass with a bulb on the end formed by pouring molten glass into cold water. The glass immediately sets on the outside of the stream, which insulates the inside of the stream causing it to cool more slowly. As a result the bulb on the end is very hard to break but any stress farther up the strong will cause the whole thing to instantly explode. Here it is in ultra-slo-mo (which is very cool):

What Hurts More: AC or DC?

The way to determine this is to to test:

Bottom line: AC hurts a lot more than DC. But they both hurt a lot.

Score 1 for Edison.

The Minute Physics List of Great Science Sites

Henry Reich who created and produces the great YouTube channel Minute Physics (which I ought to link to more, really), has produced a list of his favorite science sites. It's actually really good (why should I be surprised?):

Here's his list:

• Big Red Button - http://inception.davepedu.com
• xkcd - http://xkcd.com/1131/
• xkcd what if? - http://what-if.xkcd.com/3/
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?...
• Empirical Zeal - http://www.empiricalzeal.com/
• Sean Carroll - http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/b...
• Terry Tao - http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/12...
• It's Okay To Be Smart - http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/...
• I ¶#@*ing Love Science -https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLove...
• NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day -http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
• Radiolab - http://www.radiolab.org/2012/dec/17/s...
• HyperPhysics - http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/...
• The Scale of the Universe - http://htwins.net/scale2/
• The Character of Physical Law -http://research.microsoft.com/apps/to...
• Fake Science - http://fakescience.tumblr.com/post/12...

              Youtube Channels he lists:

• Veritasium - http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium
• Sixty Symbols - http://www.sixtysymbols.com/
• Periodic Videos - http://www.periodicvideos.com/
• Crash Course - http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse
• The Brain Scoop - http://www.youtube.com/thebrainscoop
• Smarter Every Day - http://www.youtube.com/destinws2
• Vi Hart - http://www.youtube.com/vihart
• George Hart - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTl0...
• Numberphile - http://www.numberphile.com/
• Vsauce - http://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce
• TED-Ed - http://www.youtube.com/teded
• MinuteEarth - http://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth

Infrasounds and Homing Pigeons

Diagram A shows all releases and random directions pigeons flew; diagrams B,
C, D, and E show different release dates; dashed lines are the correct direction

While we're talking about pigeons, yesterday The Atlantic had an interesting piece about the disappearance of homing pigeons -- who are excellent navigators -- when released from one specific location. One day, though, they flew home with no problem.

After years of not being able to answer the question, the answer has been recently published in The Journal of Experimental Biology: it's infrasounds. Much as human perception is limited to a narrow range of light waves, our hearing is limited to a narrow range of sound. While humans can hear sounds to  ~ 20 hertz, pigeons can hear sounds as low as .05 hertz.

The ocean (or sounds resulting from the ocean) apparently is the dominant source of sounds at that low level even hundreds of miles from the sea. Topography, wind speed and direction, and temperature, however, affect sounds, allowing pigeons to navigate. They also, however, leave dead zones (and surely also places where sound is greatly amplified). The location where the pigeons got lost was normally a dead zone. The one day they didn't get lost was one day where likely high level and not readily apparent atmospheric conditions filled it with sound and allowed the pigeons to find their way.

Pigeon navigation, then, requires not only the ability to hear these sounds but the ability to make a mental map (or remember the sounds they've heard) on one hearing to guide their way back. It's not a common human skill, even for for visual cues.

Two Developments in Solar Cells

Solar cells are, of course, one of the great hopes for a renewable energy source, but they're expensive to make and install and not that efficient. (See also these general articles on solar efficiency and grid parity.)

Two recent theoretical developments may improve the situation, though neither is a cure all (and there is no cure all for solar power without radically different approaches than silicon based solar cells).

First, scientists in Finland have developed a nano surface (theoretically) that traps a large amount of light -- a better development than current anti-reflective surfaces which still allow a significant amount of light to pass through. They believe the surface is capable of being printed on at low cost.

Second, Swedish and German scientists, along with a scientist from China, have developed a method for growing micro wires of indium and phosphorus which can capture and convert more sunlight to electricity. This process hopefully can be further tweaked to increase efficiency and may be developed for application on industrial scales, though that seems a ways away. This method also apparently lends itself to multijunction solar cells in which multiple layers of different types of solar cells capture more sunlight, though still less than 50%.

As a bonus, Scientific American has a nice interactive graphic on solar cells work.

A Simple Electric Motor

This can also be used as a battery tester. Just sayin'.

A New Surface Coating that Repels Almost All Liquid

Scientists at the University of Michigan published a paper and released the obligatory press release on their development of a new method of coating surfaces. Oh, the press release isn't that bad as it's easily comprehensible. Here's how the scientists' abstract describes the result:

Superomniphobic surfaces display contact angles >150° and low contact angle hysteresis with essentially all contacting liquids. In this work, we report surfaces that display superomniphobicity with a range of different non-Newtonian liquids, in addition to superomniphobicity with a wide range of Newtonian liquids. Our surfaces possess hierarchical scales of re-entrant texture that significantly reduce the solid–liquid contact area. Virtually all liquids including concentrated organic and inorganic acids, bases, and solvents, as well as viscoelastic polymer solutions, can easily roll off and bounce on our surfaces. Consequently, they serve as effective chemical shields against virtually all liquids—organic or inorganic, polar or nonpolar, Newtonian or non-Newtonian.

Look, I hate it when people pick on intellectual work for being written above their level, and I am trying to avoid going there (mostly because I don't want to admit this is above my level) -- and I don't mind looking up the words I don't understand. "Superomniphobia" doesn't appear in any of the dictionaries I've checked, though what the authors mean isn't too hard suss out. ("Hydrophobia" is resistance to wetting with water. Although "omniphobia" is commonly used to mean the human fear of everything (also known as "panphobia"), it apparently has been co-opted to mean resistance to wetting by many types of liquids -- even "viscoelastic polymer solutions" -- not just water. So then you've got "supermoniphobia." I think they just like making up words. Also they should use "fluid" not liquid.) So out of respect for you I've added links for the other non-obvious parts of the description.

The science of "wetting" is actually a hot area, and there are a recent spate of "superomniphobic" coatings. Here's another really cool video:

John Baez's The Crackpot Index

John Baez, a well known physicist and more importantly the cousin of Joan Baez (I'm not sure why that is more important and I am sure he gets tired of hearing about it but everybody probably asks), developed the Crackpot Index a number of years ago to measure the degree of crackpottery of laymen who write to mathematicians and physicists about the layman's latest great discovery. We here at Galileo Feynman believe that "Dr." Baez is a hidebound reactionary and a self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy who created his index as part of the conspiracy to SUPPRESS ORIGINAL IDEAS.

A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:

1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
7. 5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
8. 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann" (sic).

Quantum Physicists' Beliefs about Quantum Theory

Physics arXiv recently published a paper on a poll on the meaning of results and the future of quantum physics, which was taken of physicists specializing in quantum theory, as well as a few mathematicians and philosophers attending a seminar on the subject. I thought the results were really interesting, so I reproduce some of the key results, below (as images from the paper -- the entire paper is an easy read and illuminating not only on the poll but physics disputes underlying it). I should note that none of the authors or poll participants is questioning the validity of quantum theory -- which extraordinarily well supported by experiment and observation. Indeed, even Albert Einstein, whose antipathy towards some of the broader interpretations of quantum theory is well known, was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

The Sins of Isaac Newton

Listed sins in the Fitzwilliam Notebook; note
the numbering of each one

Via Mental Floss and Neatorama comes a bit from the notebooks of Isaac Newton from when he was 19 years old in 1662, 350 years ago. (This, particularly, is the Fitzwilliam Notebook, which can be found at The Newton Project, a neat site that has images and texts from many other of his other notebooks.) A selection of his confessions:

      * * *
Putting a pin in John Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.

Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons

Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

Wishing death and hoping it to some

Negative Absolute Temperatures (!)

A "negative absolute temperature" is a temperature below 0° Kelvin. Zero degrees Kelvin is known as "absolute zero" for a reason. We have laws, people.

Well, anyway, now some highfalutin German physicists have gone and published a paper titled Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom reporting that they have "created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time," according to Nature.

Schneider and his colleagues reached such sub-absolute-zero temperatures with an ultracold quantum gas made up of potassium atoms. Using lasers and magnetic fields, they kept the individual atoms in a lattice arrangement. At positive temperatures, the atoms repel, making the configuration stable. The team then quickly adjusted the magnetic fields, causing the atoms to attract rather than repel each other. “This suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” says Schneider.

Well, I never.

What's next? Travel back in time?

I did use to have a math teacher who moved so slowly that I theorized that any substantial increase in slowness would require time to become negative. Yet, if one views temperature as the extent of vibration of a particle, then "negative absolute temperature" could be viewed as reversing time ... yes? Well, let's think that through ...

I have to admit I am a skeptic about the time thing, but then there is this thing with flipable interactions in Feynman diagrams where time is supposedly reversed -- supposedly for antimatter, though Richard Feynman, with his mentor at Princeton, John Wheeler, thought of that as one way of approaching quantum dynamics.

How We Know the Earth is a Sphere

And after these things I saw four angels standing on the fourcorners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.

Revelation 7:1-3

Yes, yes, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but still it is valuable to consider how we know things:

I would add we know the Earth is not flat for many other obvious reasons, like, if it were flat gravity would be markedly greater in its center, tidal forces would tear the Earth apart, meteorites or comets could make holes the Earth (depending on how thick the Earth was and how large the meteorite or comet), seismological tests would not make any sense (since they disprove the flat Earth), plate tectonics would not make much sense, satellites would not orbit the Earth in the manner they do ... we could just go on and on.

Instant Snow! (and Why to Start with Very Hot Water Instead of Room Temperature or Cold Water)

There's a persistent myth that cold water will boil faster than hot water (I guarantee it doesn't) and that hot water freezes fast than cold water (under some limited conditions it can). But in this video we see hot water instantly converted to snow in very frigid air. Cold water would not do this. Why? I'll let the tumblr Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics -- which is where I go this -- fully explain after the break, with a short amendment, but here's the short answer: the thrown hot water forms into small ice crystals as it freezes; cold water would stay more clumped together and become ice balls and hail.

Silicone Droplets on a Vibrating Sheet and Wave-Particle Duality

This video from Through the Wormhole, a series narrated by Morgan Freeman that used to air on the Science Channel in the U.S. offers an interesting analogy at the visible level to the quantum property of wave-particle duality. (N.B. The video's commentary is a bit over blown, and it is important to understand that, no matter how much we wish to be able to compare phenomena we know exist, due to repeated experiment, with ones we can easily see and grasp in everyday life, that is something of a fool's errand.  The forces that operate at the level of the very small are not ones anyone intuitively understands. You cannot intuitively understand it because, strictly speaking, there is no macro scale paradigm. That doesn't mean metaphors are useless -- they can be very valuable -- but we need to keep in mind they're metaphors.) Link via the tumblr Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics.

This is Normal in Some Universe (Maybe)

According to the multiverse interpretation of the Universe in physics (particularly astronomy and quantum dynamics) there is likely some parallel universe out there where this is normal:

It is also my theory that this entire video cannot be listened to in one continuous sitting without causing at least temporary insanity.  (Clip via John Walkenbach on Google+.)

The Great Swindle: A Provocative Essay on "Fake Ideas" and "Fake Emotions"

Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, one of the artists Scruton believes
engages in fake art. 

Roger Scruton, writing at Aeon Magazine, has a lengthy essay on the prevalence, in his view, on how "fake ideas" and "fake emotions" have "elbowed out truth and beauty" in modern societies. It's an old argument, though he expresses it well, if provocatively:

... There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. ...

... To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. ... The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. ...

        ***
The most important way of clearing intellectual space for fake scholarship and culture is to marginalise the concept of truth. ...

Scruton makes several errors. For one -- and most importantly -- he conflates truth and beauty. They fundamentally differ. "Truth" can be spoken of in at least a quasi-objective way since there is a measure for truth: the world we inhabit. "Beauty" is always a matter of debate, and people can quite justifiably bring different measures to the conversation.

Due to the Looming Hostess Bankruptcy, the Twinkies are Unharvested and Growing Out of Control

Actually, this is an excellent example of inertia in action (or inaction).