Uncertain Principles

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Uncertain Principles

Thoughts on physics, politics, and pop culture, by a physics professor at a small liberal arts college, plus occasional conversations with his dog.

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sm_cover_draft_atom.jpgYou've read the blog, now try the book: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner, and available wherever books are sold.

"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.

Chad Orzel "Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)

Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.

Research Blogging Awards 2010 Winner!

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Recent Posts

Links for 2011-05-04
Survey-Related Inadequacies
Education Reform Is Slow
Links for 2011-05-03
The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)
Proving Einstein Wrong...ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle
Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching
Links for 2011-05-02
Links for 2011-05-01
Toddler On Wheels

Recent Comments

Wilson on Ba-Ba-Ba BAAAA Ba, Ba-Ba-Ba BAA Ba-Ba Ba-Ba Ba (BOM BOM): National Geographic and ScienceBlogs
Alex on Education Reform Is Slow
quasihumanist on Education Reform Is Slow
Alex on Survey-Related Inadequacies
Alex on Survey-Related Inadequacies
becca on Survey-Related Inadequacies
Eric Lund on Survey-Related Inadequacies
Sherri on Education Reform Is Slow
Neil B on The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)
andre3 on Survey-Related Inadequacies

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May 4, 2011
Links for 2011-05-04

Category: Links Dump

Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance. Here are 4 reasons why you should hold more of your meetings online, even if everyone meeting works together on the same campus:"
(tags: academia meetings business inside-higher-ed culture)
Princess Masako - "She's Useless" | The Royal Universe
"Crown Princess Masako of Japan turns 47 on 9 December. It'd be nice to be able to say that she's celebrating her 47th birthday, but these days she doesn't seem to have a lot to celebrate. A statement issued by palace doctors to mark the Princess's birthday said that she was slowly recovering from the stress-induced illness that's plagued her since 2002, identified by palace spokesmen as adjustment disorder, but that her physical and mental condition is still unstable. The palace has been saying the same thing for years - that she's slowly recovering from a condition they identify as adjustment disorder, a condition that by definition is acute rather than chronic, not lasting for more than six months. Whatever she's suffering from, it pretty clearly isn't adjustment disorder."
(tags: japan culture world politics gender stupid)
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Better late than never
"No, I'm not talking about Osama, but about my reactions below to a New Yorker article about quantum computing--reactions whose writing was rudely interrupted by last night's news. Of all the possible times in the past decade to get him, they had to pick one that would overshadow an important Shtetl-Optimized discussion about complexity theory, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and the popularization of science? Well, I guess I'll let it slide."
(tags: science quantum physics blogs shtetl-optimized)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 6:46 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

May 3, 2011
Survey-Related Inadequacies

Category: Academia • Education • Two Cultures

I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person.

For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods that just aren't applicable to what I teach-- things like learning through community service. while there is some truth to the old cliche that you never really learn something until you have to teach it, something like turning a bunch of would-be engineers from our first-year mechanics class loose on a local middle school isn't really going to help anybody. Similarly, the hot trope of the moment, interdisciplinarity, really doesn't come into play when the main task I face is teaching a bunch of first-year students about Newton's laws. While you can sneak in the occasional biology or physiology-related example, those are pretty much physics through and through.

Still, as I went down the list checking "No" to each of the areas they chose to highlight, it was hard to avoid feeling like I was horribly inadequate as an academic. When, in fact, it's just that the survey isn't a good fit for the sort of thing that we do.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:47 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Education Reform Is Slow

Category: Academia • Class Issues • Economics • Education • Politics • Social-Science • Society

Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing.

The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't made the dramatic improvements they hoped for:

In a first-of-its-kind computer analysis, iWatch News analyzed the graduation rates and test scores in 10 major urban districts -- from New York City to Oakland -- which collectively took in almost one-fourth of the total money poured in by these top four education philanthropists.

The results, though mixed, provide dispiriting proof that the billionaires have not found a one-size-fits-all solution to education reform and that money alone can't repair the desperate state of urban education.

For all the millions spent on reforms, nine of the 10 school districts studied substantially trailed their state's proficiency and graduation rates -- often by 10 points or more, the analysis found. And while the urban districts made some gains, they managed only 60 percent of the time to improve at a rate faster than their states. Those spikes weren't enough to materially reduce persistent gulfs between poor, inner-city schools, where the big givers focused, and their suburban and rural counterparts.

That sounds damning, but not necessarily of the billionaires' efforts. The way a lot of this is phrased makes it sound like they did really superficial and inadequate comparisons, and the "methodology" notes in the sidebar they give don't have enough detail to tell whether they really did the comparison stupidly, or just wrote about it badly. Of course, they also make a point of noting that the metrics they used are the same used by some of the wealthy foundations involved, which may make the exact nature of the failure kind of a moot point.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:38 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Links for 2011-05-03

Category: Links Dump

A SETI Infographic « Microcosmologist
"And to put things into perspective, I've whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:"
(tags: science space astronomy politics funding blogs pictures)
Physics Buzz: Hinting at dark matter
We haven't seen dark matter yet. We haven't, right? Sitting in a plenary talk at the APS April meeting today I started to have my doubts.
(tags: science physics particles experiment astronomy)
News Desk: Notes on the Death of Osama bin Laden : The New Yorker
Steve Coll "annotate[s] some of the initial headlines," providing a lot of background o Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and other topics.
(tags: us war world politics news history magazines blogs)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

May 2, 2011
The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)

Category: Atoms and Molecules • Physics • Politics • Science • Silliness • War • World

Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist:

[O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.

As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat, given that electrons are a key component of ordinary matter. But for the sake of silly physics blogging, let's take this seriously for a moment. Suppose that Osama bin Laden really could make himself utterly devoid of electrons: would that be a good way to hide?

To answer this, let's think about some of the physics involved. If bin Laden were totally electron-free, that give him a large positive charge, of one electron charge unit per proton in his body. These positive charges would attract the negative charges in nearby matter, and repel the positive charges. The resulting polarization turns nearby objects into electric dipoles, which leads to a force drawing those objects toward him. This is the process whereby you can stick balloons to the ceiling by rubbing them on your head first-- the rubbing transfers some electrons from one object to the other, and the now-charge balloon polarizes atoms and molecules in the ceiling, creating a force that keeps the balloon in place.

Given that, how much force would an electron-free Osama exert on his surroundings?

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 4:58 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Proving Einstein Wrong...ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle

Category: Atoms and Molecules • Chemistry • Experiment • History of Science • In the News • Optics • Physics • ResearchBlogging • Science • Thermo/StatMech

ResearchBlogging.orgLast summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen's group at Texas which was mostly reported with an "Einstein proven wrong" slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little unfair to Einstein. It does draw media attention, though...

The experiment in question involves Brownian motion, and since I had to read up on that anyway for something else, I thought I might as well look up this paper, and write it up for the blog.

OK, so what did they do that Einstein said they couldn't? The title pretty much give it away: they measured the instantaneous velocity of a particle undergoing Brownian motion. They made very careful measurements of the position and velocity of a tiny glass bead suspended in air, and showed that they don't fit the prediction of Einstein's model of Brownian motion.

Let's pretend that I'm too lazy to click that link above and read about Brownian motion, and have you explain it quickly here. Brownian motion is a sort of jittering motion of small particles suspended in a fluid. The motion was observed by lots of people, but takes its name from the British botanist Robert Brown, who was the first to rule out the presumed explanation that had been believed to be the cause, namely that the jittering was the motion of tiny living creatures.

What's this got to do with Einstein? Are these things jittering at the speed of light, or something? Einstein's most famous for his work on relativity, but his background was in what we'd now call statistical mechanics. His Ph.D. thesis, one of his five great 1905 publications, was about the diffusion of molecules in a solution, and provided a clever way to estimate Avogadro's number. Following closely on that work was a paper explaining Brownian motion-- Abraham Pais says in Subtle Is the Lord... that it was finished just 11 days after the thesis. Einstein's model for Brownian motion made a quantitative prediction that could be directly measured, and put together with the work of a few other people at around the same time, this helped conclusively settle the question of the existence of atoms.

Wait, what? I thought people knew about atoms in, like, ancient Greece, and stuff. The name comes from the atomist philosophies of the ancient world, but up until the early 20th century, there was active debate about whether the notional atoms used in physics and chemistry were real microscopic particles or just a convenient mathematical fiction. Einstein's work on Brownian motion helped conclusively prove that atoms are real physical entities.

OK, how? Einstein showed that the characteristic jittering of Brownian motion could be explained as collisions between the atoms making up the fluid colliding with the larger particle and causing it to move. Any object in a fluid is constantly bombarded from all sides by the background atoms, and each collision causes a corresponding change in the motion of the observed particle. When you carefully work through the implications of this, you find that on average, the displacement of the object from it starting position should increase in a very particular way-- as the square root of the time since the measurement started.

And Einstein said this could never be measured? No, what Einstein said was that this average displacement was the only thing that could be measured. That is, he said that the only thing you could hope to measure was the aggregate effect of vast numbers of atomic collisions, through the displacement, and not the instantaneous velocity changes caused by the collisions.

And that's wrong? Well, it was perfectly true in 1905. The technology for doing this sort of thing has advanced quite a bit over the intervening 105 years. Hence this paper.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching

Category: Academia • Class Issues • Education • Politics

The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who's heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than other professions with comparable educational requirements, and then castigated as incompetents. And we wonder why top students aren't interested in education.

The other by R. Barker Bausell, offers a simple and seemingly objective standard for evaluating teacher performance: measuring their time on task.

This is hardly a new insight. Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.

There was no secret to their success: the efficient teachers hewed closely to the curriculum, maintained strict discipline and minimized non-instructional activities, like conducting unessential classroom business when they should have been focused on the curriculum.

Sounds great. And it leads to a simple and direct evaluation method:

For example, it means that administrators don't have to wait until test scores are evaluated, usually at the end of the year, by which time students have already fallen further behind. They could simply videotape a few minutes of instruction a day, then evaluate the results to see how much time teachers spent on their assigned material and the extent to which they were able to engage students.

Indeed, the very process of recording classroom instruction would probably push some underperforming teachers to become more efficient.

Good thing there's nothing the least bit creepy and Orwellian about this. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:28 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Links for 2011-05-02

Category: Links Dump

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - NYTimes.com
"WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that. When we don't like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don't like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources."
(tags: education economics society culture nytimes politics)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 6:54 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

May 1, 2011
Links for 2011-05-01

Category: Links Dump

Acculturating students to science § Unqualified Offerings
"A student with a very enthusiastic yet serious demeanor, and very responsible habits, recently asked if he could work in my research group. He has few relevant skills at this point, and my crew is pretty full, but I want to help him, so we're applying for some programs that support undergrads in research. He isn't a physics major, but he has broad interests, and I think we need more people like him. In the process of reading drafts of his application essays, he sounded incredibly naive, and his writing skills could stand considerable improvement, so I began to despair. But somebody took me on when I was a kid who didn't know squat, so I have a favor to return. In reading his naive statements, I started to think about what I actually got from undergraduate research. I was working in a space science lab, helping build an instrument. Now I do theoretical optics applied to biology. Not much connection there. So, what did I get?"
(tags: science blogs unqualified-offerings physics academia education)
The REAL Death Of The Music Industry
"So let's correct the inaccurate conclusions one might reasonably draw from the misleading Bain chart: Wrong: The music industry is down around 40% from its peak in 1999 Correct: The music industry is down 64% from its peak. Wrong: At least the music industry is almost 4 times better off than in 1973. Correct: The music industry is actually down 45% from where it was in 1973. Wrong: The CD era was the aberration. (Mr. Gruber's reasonable take) Correct: The CD peak was only 13% better than the vinyl peak, not over 250% better as the Bain chart implies. The overall conclusion is that the music industry is actually doing much worse than the Bain chart implies: 10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today. 26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today."
(tags: economics music internet presentations business technology culture)
Lawnmowers and $40 nachos | slacktivist
"You've experienced this. More than once. You're at a restaurant with a large party of friends or co-workers or castmembers or -- riskiest of all -- people from church, and everybody is on one tab. The bill gets passed around the table and the money gets piled up in the middle and you wind up $20 short -- not to mention the tip. "Who didn't put in?" No one says anything. Everyone insists they paid more than enough for their share, with plenty of extra for the tip, but you're $20 short, so somebody is lying. More than one somebody, probably. But since no one fesses up, you end up tossing in way more than you should have had to and those $5.99 nachos wind up costing you $40. That's the sort of experience that makes it seem easier and even cheaper to just buy your own lawnmower."
(tags: society culture blogs slacktivist economics environment)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:08 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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