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Comment Physicist's commentary and original article (Score 4, Informative) 460

For those who are interested, the scientific journal has a companion article here. It describes the design and sensitivity of the experiment, as well as some of the context. There is also a link to the actual journal article to the right, but you may need institutional access to download it.

Comment Re:Man-portable supercooling? (Score 1) 298

The basic technique is called a Magneto-Optical Trap, or MOT for short, although they probably use a few extra steps to create a Bose-Einstein condensate. As an atomic physicist, I have a couple of MOTs in my lab, and the whole thing will easily fit in a 1-meter long box. These things are actually being miniaturized quite effectively, and sensor packages using cold atoms are being built that fit in your hand. I bet a government-sponsored project could get them a bit smaller still. For example, here's a story about a DARPA project that's working to make a cold-atom based inertial guidance package for missiles that will be 20 cm^3.

Comment Re:this article doesn't have enough posts yet... (Score 4, Informative) 230

we know that simply observing an experiment can change the outcome. We don't know why that is either, AFAIK ... So it seems that consciousness and attention can have effects in the physical world, the mechanism of which we cannot explain.

We most certainly *do* know why observation affects an experiment. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action - if you make a measurement of the state of a system, that variable is known to some degree of precision. Its conjugate variable is thus made uncertain to a degree prescribed by the uncertainty principle. This has nothing to do with consciousness or a living observer.

A simple double-slit experiment works because of the uncertainty in the position of the particle. The wavefunction interferes with itself as it comes out of both slits and affects the possible positions it can be observed at on the detector. If you measure whether the particle passes through one of the slits, it's position is no longer uncertain, the wavefunction changes, and the experiment reflects that. This is well-understood quantum mechanics, although the popular press likes to pretend we don't know anything about it. And yes, IAAP (I am a physicist).

Comment Re:"the math of GR" -- how much math is that? (Score 1) 358

I can second the recommendation for Hartle (the title is Gravity: an Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity). It's a great introduction that I used as an undergrad, but be warned - it's still pretty complicated, even as an introduction. The nice part about it is that it develops the concepts of curved spacetime as you need them to investigate interesting physical systems, like the geometrized version of Special Relativity (which gets you time dilation and the Twin Paradox) or Schwarzschild black holes. My favorite section is where it discusses the metric of the entire universe, which describe the expansion of space and what happens to spacetime in the distant future.

As to Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler - avoid it until you've gone through some more introductory texts. It's really easy to get in over your head and get discouraged in that text, as they dive in head-first with hard-core math.

Comment Re:The First Amendment is Obsolete (Score 2, Informative) 141

If you think that a "fat slob" paying more for his insurance means that you'll pay less, you have a very naive view of insurance companies. Or companies in general. Also, how diligent do you think they'll be to check that you're not a fat slob? Remember that banks have been foreclosing on houses that weren't even in default!

Comment Re:PSA (Score 1) 125

I'm a physicist; I work in a laser lab. I never capitalize 'laser', and I've never seen it capitalized in any contemporary publication. Frankly, explicitly capitalizing acronyms gets really annoying once they enter common usage. It just gets in the way of effective communication.
Power

Submission + - Hybrid Cars No Better than 'Predicting' Cars

eldavojohn writes: "There's no doubt been a lot of analysis done recently on energy consumption, especially on the road. Now, a study released today reveals that cars with traffic flow sensors built into them can perform just as efficiently as hybrids. The concept of an 'intelligent' car that communicates with the highway or other cars is an old idea but the idea of them using sensors to anticipate braking could vastly reduce fossil fuel consumption. From the article, "Under the US and European cycles, hybrid-matching fuel economy was reached with a look-ahead predictability of less than 60 seconds. If the predictability was boosted to 180 seconds, the newly-intelligent car was 33 percent more fuel-efficient than when it was unconverted." Now, the real question will be whether or not you can convince consumers that the three minutes of coasting up to a red light or halted traffic is worth the 33 percent less gas and replacing your brake pads/cylinders less often."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - World's first tricorder created by Purdue

aeoneal writes: According to Science Daily, mass spectrometry is no longer limited to what can be taken to the lab. Purdue researchers have created a handy 20 lb. device that combines mass spectrometry with DESI (desorption electrospray ionization), allowing chemical composition to be determined outside of a vacuum chamber. Purdue suggests this could be useful for everything from detecting explosive substances or cancer to predicting disease. Researcher R. Graham Cooks says, "We like to compare it to the tricorder because it is truly a hand-held instrument that yields information about the precise chemical composition of samples in a matter of minutes without harming the samples."

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