Zombie Feynman

Because I was too busy getting over the flu this week to do any physics:

Physics on Stage

We just finished watching the PBS video of the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. It was a little tough going, but the kids got through it. From the PBS companion website:

Copenhagen is about Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two of the great scientific minds of the 20th Century, trying to make sense of a meeting they had in September 1941, while World War II raged around them. From the vantage point of the hereafter, the spirits of Bohr and Heisenberg, along with Bohr's wife Margrethe, are uncomfortable with the many unanswered questions from that fateful evening in 1941, most significantly: why did Heisenberg, a Nobel Prize winning physicist leading the German atomic bomb team, go to Copenhagen to meet with his old mentor Bohr, a half-Jewish Dane living in Nazi-occupied Denmark?

The website gives a little more background on the events and how Frayn shaped them into a play, as well as how the film version chose to visualize them. There's also a page of resources about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Quantum Mechanics, the Atomic Bomb and other scientific and literary aspects of the play. However, Frayn says on the website that a lot of the science was cut out of the play -- so maybe we should make the effort to read it as well.

A few months ago, at my suggestion, we read Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia with our bookclub. Arcadia is less obviously about physics, and it is also funny, so I think the kids probably enjoyed it a little more than Copenhagen. Although it's somewhat bawdy, Arcadia does touch on a lot of higher math and physics. If you understand something of those concepts, it adds to the comedy. I was lucky enough to see a live performance of Arcadia by the theater department of Skidmore College several years ago. The entire freshman class read the play, and it was taught in several different departments. (You can see some essays dealing with different aspects of the play on the Skidmore website.) However, it is rarely performed, and I can't find a video of the play for the kids. Hopefully they'll get to see it sometime.

There are other plays, stories and novels dealing with physics that we may get to at some point. But in the meantime, you can see some of my other suggested literary tie-ins by clicking on the link for my Amazon store in the sidebar on the right of the screen.

7 Wonders of the Quantum World

Over at New Scientist, Michael Brooks tours the quantum effects that are guaranteed to boggle our minds.

From undead cats to particles popping up out of nowhere, from watched pots not boiling – sometimes – to ghostly influences at a distance, quantum physics delights in demolishing our intuitions about how the world works.

PBS Nova's The Ghost Particle and The Particle Adventure

I picked this DVD of The Ghost Particle off the library shelf because it deals with neutrinos, neutrally-charged particles which were originally believed to be massless energy, but which are now believed to be the basis for all mass in our universe. Although a little dated (it's from 2004) it was short and interesting. There is a PBS Nova companion website, but I don't think it adds much to the video itself. The classroom activities involve guessing what's in a box -- good perhaps on a conceptual level, but not really "physics."

So we are working on putting together a lab in which we build a small cloud chamber to detect radiation from cosmic rays and/or slightly radioactive material (such as thorium mantles from Coleman lanterns). However, we still need a good background on subatomic particles. For that, I think I will have the kids look over a website called The Particle Adventure.

It gives information in little bite-sized portions, along with trivia questions such as:

For how many years have physicists known that there were more than just protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons? Answer: 60 years! In the 1930's physicists found muons, but hundreds more were found with high energy accelerators in the 1960's and 1970's.

 (Follow-up question:  How many components of matter other than protons, neutrons, and electrons did you learn about in high school physics? My answer: None!)

Tape Emissions

In 2008, scientists found that they could generate enough X-ray radiation to take an image of a researchers finger simply by unrolling a roll of adhesive tape. As the video above shows, the trick is to unroll the tape in a vacuum. According to Scientific American:

The reason, says Camara: electrons (negatively charged atomic particles) leap from a surface (peeling off of glass or aluminum works, too) to the adhesive side of a freshly yanked strip of tape, traveling so fast that they give off radiation, or energy, when they slam into it.

In a regular atmosphere, the electrons still give off radiation, but because the air molecules slow them down, they appear in the visible spectrum.

We tested this in a dark room (so dark that you can't see) using both adhesive tape and duct tape. Peeling the tape off quickly gave off a bright blue flash, but peeling it slowly produced a steady blue line where the tape was unrolling from the roll. With adhesive tape, at least, we could create the effect again and again with the same piece of tape. It's called called triboluminescence-- the same process that creates sparks when you bite into Wintergreen Life Savers.

Our little camera wasn't sensitive enough to pick up the blue flash, but here's a YouTube video made by someone with better equipment:

LaserFest Video Contest -- Win $1,000!

The American Physical Society is holding a contest for short videos that use lasers to demonstrate physics. I think we'll have to enter this one! From their website, physicscentral.com:

Do you love lasers? Ever wanted to unravel the mystery of the stimulated emission? Then the LaserFest video contest is for you. Take any laser you want and use it to somehow express a physics concept. Shine, lase, bounce and wave your way into physics history.

The winner will receive a trophy lovingly made by APS staff from some of our favorite laser toys as well as $1,000 cash. All entries must be received by May 16th at midnight.

Today is First Physics Day

The CERN Large Hadron Collider had its first stable event about an hour ago. Watch the live webcast!

The New York Times says:

Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, speaking from Japan, said the new collider “opens a new window of discovery and it brings, with patience, new knowledge of the universe and the microcosm. It shows what one can do in bringing forward knowledge.” He added: “It will also bring out an army of children and young people who will get into the private sector and academia.”

Yesterday I posted on GeekDad about our visit with Chad Orzel, author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, at his lab at Union College. One commenter felt that there is no reason for non-scientists to spend time trying to understand this stuff. But the reason is that physicists need the public to fund their research and understand the significance of their discoveries. It was lack of public interest that led to the end of the US's attempt to build the time of facility that now exists in Europe. According to the Times:

The first modern accelerator was the cyclotron, built by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932. It was a foot in diameter and boosted protons to energies of 1.25 million electron volts, the unit of choice for mass and energy in physics. By comparison, an electron, the lightest well-known particle, is about half a million electron volts, and a proton about a billion.

Over the last century, universities and then nations leapfrogged each other, building bigger machines to peer deeper into the origins of the universe. But the end was decreed in 1993, the U.S. Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a 54-mile 20-trillion-electron-volt machine being built underneath Waxahachie, Texas, after its projected cost ballooned to $11 billion.