Mercury

For some reason, the summer months always seem to get a little busy, and this summer has been no exception. I hope to write part 2 of the fluctuation-dissipation post soon, but in the meantime, here are a couple videos that I came across recently showing the rather strange properties of mercury.

 

 

Pretty weird, huh?

DIY Garage Work

Recently, I heard about a string of YouTube videos where Ben Krasnow of the Applied Sciences YouTube Channel makes a series of scientific instruments in his garage. One of the particularly impressive achievements is his homemade Scanning Electron Microscope, where he constructs a pretty decent instrument with approximately $1500. This is definitely outstanding from an educational viewpoint — $1500 will probably be affordable for many high schools and will enable students to see how to image objects with electrons.

Here are a couple videos showing this and another one of his projects where he uses a laser and a couple optical elements to construct a Raman spectroscopy setup:

 

 

 

Lastly, I’d like to point out that Christina Lee has put together an excellent set of Jupyter code (i.e. IPython Notebook code) to solve various condensed matter physics problems. It’s definitely worth having a look.

An Excellent Intro To Physical Science

On a recent plane ride, I was able to catch an episode of the new PBS series Genius by Stephen Hawking. I was surprised by the quality of the show and in particular, its emphasis on experiment. Usually, shows like this fall into the trap of giving one the facts (or speculations) without an adequate explanation of how scientists come to such conclusions. However, this one is a little different and there is a large emphasis on experiment, which, at least to me, is much more inspirational.

Here is the episode I watched on the plane:

Science and Hype

In the last few years, the media have picked up on a few physics stories that were later shown to be incorrect. Prominently, in the last couple years, stories of superluminal neutrinos and evidence for cosmic inflation at BICEP2 flooded the internet. Premature media coverage of high-temperature superconductivity in and the Higgs boson also occurred, but these findings stood up to the peer review process. Most recently, a rumor was started about the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO. There is an interesting take on these events, focusing on the already-infamous LIGO tweet, in a Physics Today piece by Stephen Corneliussen. I recommend reading it.

It is my personal opinion that the aforementioned scientific discoveries should not have been reported to the media until they stood up to the peer review process. This point of view is not meant to blame the media; we physicists are in fact more responsible for alerting the media than they are for reporting the findings. (Do you really expect a reporter not to report a story? They are just doing their job after all!) Of course, the peer review process is itself far from perfect (just think of the absurd case of Schon for instance) but at least it provides an extra layer of assurance concerning new results.

This is not a cut-and-dry issue, and I wholly acknowledge this, but I do think that we can do better than the current state of affairs.