Science, Reporters, Teaching, and More Coffee: Part II

Every year, or most every year at least, I head off to Eastern Washington University to teach and counsel at Satori, a summer camp for kids who like to learn stuff—and learn them we instructors do. But in between learnings, there’s a lot of time for conversation and a lot of time for a lot of coffee. Seeing as I’m a reporter now, I have an excuse to talk to anyone about anything, so I asked Thomas Hammer barista-manager Abby* whether she’d talk with me about science. She cheerfully obliged, though she also had to work. When she was off doing that, Satori director and Spokane school teacher Mike Cantlon filled in, making for an interesting back-and-forth that ranged from—well, this to that and a number of places in between.

Science, Reporters, Teaching, And More Coffee: Part I

Every year, or most every year at least, I head off to Eastern Washington University to teach and counsel at Satori, a summer camp for kids who like to learn stuff—and learn them we instructors do. But in between learnings, there’s a lot of time for conversation and a lot of time for a lot of coffee. Seeing as I’m a reporter now, I have an excuse to talk to anyone about anything, so I asked Thomas Hammer barista-manager Abby* whether she’d talk with me about science. She cheerfully obliged, though she also had to work. When she was off doing that, Satori director and Spokane school teacher Mike Cantlon filled in, making for an interesting back-and-forth of sorts that ranged from—well, this to that and a number of places in between.

In case you missed it...

A few, short, cool stories I did for ScienceNOW. Check them out. Comment and ask me questions in the comments!

When Predators Attack!
Watch out!

Toward Shatterproof Glass
Possibly helpful when dealing with predators.

How to cloak a Fisher space pen...or a satellite

There's an apocryphal story that, faced with the fact that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity, NASA paid a lot of money to develop the Fisher space pen. Meanwhile, the Russians used pencils.

"A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom" at ScienceNOW

My first story for ScienceNOW in quite a long time, and it's a fun one. Scientists at FOM Institute AMOLF took a picture of the quantum wave function of electrons as they emerged from hydrogen atoms.

Wave function? AMOLF? Google the latter. As for the former, the wave function is the fundamental piece of quantum weirdness, something that physicists have tried to wrap their heads around for eighty or ninety years — and failed. For more, read the story.

These are a few of my favorite sciences.

What's your favorite thing about the natural world? There are lots of things to choose from. The profound tension between natural selection and biological diversity. The fact that no matter how fast you're going, you'll never catch up with a beam of light. The way snowflakes form.

How the Universe got its mass: the Higgs explained (better)

By now, you probably know what the Higgs boson does — it gives everything in the universe mass. What you probably don’t know is why, and you could be forgiven for that given all the terrible explanations out there, including an uncharacteristically confusing and visually displeasing one by the guy that does the Ph.D. comics.

The Perils of Predicting Politics, or Hari Seldon Was Right

When Hari Seldon, the sort-of protagonist of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, developed a method of forecasting he called psychohistory, he never thought it could predict the future perfectly — any number of fundamentally random events might intervene and muck around with what he thought most likely to happen. Seldon had no illusions that he could predict exactly what would happen — instead, he argued he could compute how likely an event was to occur.

On Stupid Names and Poorly-Understood Statistics

Let's get one thing right out of the way: the "God particle" is a stupid, nearly nonsensical name for it. It's called the Higgs boson, and that's all I'm going to say about stupid names.

Walking Through Walls (Sort Of) at ScienceNOW

A long while ago, I taught a summer camp class called "How to Walk Through Walls." It was a physics class that culminated in the idea that matter is really made of waves of probability, and these waves could in principle transport through barriers — that is, you could in theory walk, metaphorically speaking, through a wall.

Well, you can't, but a team in Finland has proposed observing the effect, called quantum tunneling, in a mechanical system. That's something no one's done before, and if they succeed, it will be really, really cool.

Read the story here.

200 Words or Less: Newton's Third Law

Don’t worry too much when that schoolyard bully shoves you — according to Newton’s third law, you’ve already shoved back.

The law — for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction — really means that when one thing pushes on another, the second one pushes back just as hard in exactly the opposite direction.

It's easy to see what the third law is all about. Grab a friend and head to a skating rink. Once on the ice, stand next to your friend and gently push. She’ll go in the direction you pushed her, but you’ll go in the opposite direction. That's because when you pushed your friend, she pushed on you, too.

Now think about this: when you jump up in the air, you push on the ground, just like you pushed your friend. That means two things: it's the earth pushing on you that tosses you in the air, and you're pushing on the earth, making it move, if only a little bit.

Now, if the earth isn't immovable, can it be the center of the universe? The third law says "no," and along with other insights, it began to permanently undermine the idea of an earth-centered universe.

Bonus experiment! It doesn't fit in 200 words or less, but you can also feel Newton's third law. Grab your friend again, get a basketball, and pass it between you. Pay attention to what you feel on your hands — pressure. That's the force of the ball pushing on you when you pass it.

Newton's First Law — in 200 Words or Less

Reading my recent post about gravity the other day, it occurred to me that it might be fun to go back and do some basic science— in 200 words or less. Part exercise for me, part shot of science espresso for you. Today, Newton's first law.

It’s a humble but profound statement: objects in a state of uniform motion tend to remain in that state unless an external force acts on them. In plain English, Newton’s first law means that if you throw a baseball, it will go in a straight line at constant speed forever unless something pushes or pulls on it.

Of course, wind resistance and gravity are always pushing and pulling, so baseballs never go in straight lines at constant speed. To see the first law in action, find an ice rink or an air hockey table, and toss a puck along it. It’ll go straight at fairly constant speed for a while — longer, anyway, than a baseball would.

Why is the first law important? People once thought objects tended to stay motionless, so you had to push to keep them moving. They missed what’s obvious today: it’s friction that slows things down. Without friction, gravity, and other forces, things like hockey pucks and baseballs would keep moving forever.

Newton’s first law challenges us to think of all the forces involved, like friction and gravity. By doing that, it opens the door to a deeper, farther-reaching understanding of the physical world.

How Gravity Works

Some time ago, I promised an explanation of how gravity works — in particular, how general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, works. Today I'm going to deliver. This one's a little mind bending, so definitely ask questions if you're confused. I like questions. Questions are cool.

A Brief Note on the Myth of the Astrophysical Vacuum Cleaner

I've done some reporting on physics but have yet to write about my favorite science topic, gravity, here on the 'blog. Today, I want to tell you a little bit about something I know a fair bit about, black holes.

Black Holes and Extra Dimensions

Cool (and wacky) new story on using Sgr A*—the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, rather than the one in that Muse song—and gravitational lensing to search for extra dimensions.

Fun fact: I did final edits on this story over the phone this morning while we were driving north on the Grapevine section of I-5.

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Physicists Create Black Hole 'Light' in Lab at ScienceNOW

ScienceNOW just posted a story I wrote on a really exciting experiment: