BHA Voltaire Lecture with Prof. Brian Cox
I was at the BHA's Voltaire lecture this evening. It's an annual talk, and this year it was given by Brian Cox - who was /excellent/.
Prof. Cox has catapulted to the forefront of UK science in the last year, particularly after his recent - brilliant - BBC1 show 'Wonders of the Solar System', and the lecture sold out weeks in advance. His subject was the nourishment science provides to both the imagination and the economy.
The former was a great primer on the current frontiers of physics and the work of the LHC, as well as an ode to exploration. It covered everything from the Standard Model and the search for the Higgs Boson, to the astonishing images being sent back by space probes - he had a couple of very new, as-yet-unprocessed shots from Cassini, showing ice geysers on Enceladus (it was awesome). Prof. Cox has a gift for explanation - think Lawrence Krauss, or Dawkins on biology - and he didn't shirk from the more complex areas. For example, he showed how (hopefully I'll get this right) the fundamental mathematics of the fundamental forces beautifully falls out of field invariance equations. I love theoretical physics, and while many of the concepts were familiar (although not always so clear in my head), this last info was all new.
So was the economic side of the talk. I was photographing the lecture so couldn't catch everything, but, roughly: science research & development gets only a few billion of the UK's budget (which is a low percentage compared with most first-world countries) yet makes up 40% of the GVA economic output (more than finance). This needs fixing. It's hard to disagree.
It was engaging and fascinating - I want to see it again to pick up all the bits I missed. Beforehand I managed to photograph the Prof for a uni project, which I'm very pleased about. I haven't been starstruck at a BHA gig for a while (Dawkins) but I was tonight - hopefully I didn't say anything too weird. He was very friendly, gracious and down-to-earth, and certainly knew his cameras. After the lecture he spent an hour signing books and posing for photos, too. I'm glad he's becoming a household name - he's a great advert for science all round.
(written on WordPress for iPhone - please forgive any formatting weirdness.)
Time-gated ballistic imaging
I've no idea what this paper is about, but it has the best Abstract ever:
We have developed an optical technique called ballistic imaging to view breakup of the near-field of an atomizing spray. In this paper, we describe the successful use of a time-gated ballistic imaging instrument to obtain single-shot images of core region breakup in a transient, single hole atomizing diesel fuel spray issuing into one atmosphere. We present a sequence of images taken at the nozzle for various times after start of injection, and a sequence taken at various positions downstream of the nozzle exit at a fixed time. These images contain signatures of periodic behavior, voids, and entrainment processes.
They just needed to reverse the polarity of the deflector array.
Via Young Jim.
Uni project: science-y Christmas cards
Six weeks ago I was given a broad photo project. The possible themes were 'still life', 'a journey' or 'a document', which meant I could shoehorn in anything I wanted; I just needed to come up with something interesting.
I had an idea. It only required dry ice, a prism, fifty light bulbs, and access to a physics lab. So one Saturday morning I was figuring all this out, and at the same time (in an uncharacteristic fit of forward planning) looking for decent non-religious Christmas cards. I idly tweeted about the dearth of good cards from the BHA/NSS, and Andrew of Apathy Sketchpad replied with a comment about making your own. Well, that did it. I couldn't let the opportunity pass, so I changed my entire project in an afternoon1.
So I wanted to produce images for non-religious Christmas cards. Not in an avowedly there-is-no-god way - no need to be a jerk about it - but (somehow) pro-science and secular wonder. My lofty dream result was images that evoked a sense of awe. Not at the aesthetics or my photographic skill or anything2, but at the facets of nature they represented. They'd have a festive air, but be about reality and the joys of discovery. I also wanted them to work as images on their own, but with a 'something else is going on here' for anyone interested. If that makes sense.
That's what I wrote in my project proposal, anyway. I figured this might be pretty difficult in practice, but really I just wanted to produce some cool science-y Christmas cards that I could actually send out. The only catch was the project needed to be on film, so I couldn't use Photoshop - everything had to be done in-camera.
Anyway, I had good fun with this project, and did eventually produce some actual cards (until WH Smiths ran out of photo-card printing packs, anyway). If anyone's interested, here are the final results (the captions were printed on the back of the cards):
The Candle Aquatic
(no Photoshop involved)
http://tinyurl.com/6owruo
Fibonacci Cones
Pine cones grow to the Fibonacci golden spiral:
http://tinyurl.com/6qk3kc
Oh say can you C
(yes, if you know one Smartie = 15mm)
http://tinyurl.com/5pqyff
Bauble Fractals
http://tinyurl.com/69n2hu
More info after the break, for anyone interested.
View satellites in Google Earth
A new Google Earth plugin lets you view all the orbiting satellites currently tracked by the US military. Doesn't sound very exciting, right? It's more interesting than you'd think - mainly because the sheer number is almost unbelievable. It's like a Cylon armada. Clicking on them displays their use and status, and lots are inactive. You can track their orbits, too. If nothing appears, it's geostationary1, but most have far more complex tracks than you'd think - particularly those further out. Astronomy Cast explaned the reasons behind the strange paths in 'Getting around the solar system', although I've apparently forgotten most of it already (I hate that).
- apart from the Ryman satellite, which is geostationery [↩]
LHC on The Big Picture
The Big Picture blog has twenty-seven pictures of the currently cooling Large Hadron Collider. They're stonking, and the final shot really captures the scale of the thing. It should be up and performing experiments by the end of the year, and with a bit of luck the Higgs Boson1 will make front pages all around the world.
The comments are insane, as lots of people think the LHC is going to kill us all. I particularly liked:
What a way to go!! Beats frying from global warming or being swept away in a tornado or hurricane or drowning in a meltdown of the polar ice cap!! Wasn't CERN featured in The DaVinci Code?
You don't come across the Argument From Dan Brown so much these days, but I'm glad it's still around. I think it was Angels and Demons, though. I'm one of the few who quite enjoyed that book (I didn't take it seriously), but the CERN bit was excruciating: a terribly put-upon Catholic assistant feels proud to be alive when every scientist in the facility is numbed into stunned silence by the Most Wonderful Religious Speech Ever. *shudder*.
- original typo: Higg's Bison [↩]
The exciting future of photography
There's a cool discussion over at Photocritic regarding the future of photography. Are revolutionary changes in the pipeline? Or will current concepts just evolve?
I think it'll be a matter of increased data collection. In the same way that a RAW photo currently (kinda) stores an extra two stops of exposure data, I think future sensors will be able to capture far more than just the final image. Quickly taking a range of exposures wouldn't be a problem with current technology, and some decent post-processing software would be able to even out any differences due to motion-blur. Couple this with the plenoptic camera, which can focus after the event, and you've got a quasi-3d recreation of the scene inside your computer, and you can compose your photo after the effect. Would this detract from the skill of taking photographs 'in the field'? Possibly, in some respects. But so what?
It brings up an point I've been wondering about: is there any physical reason why current CCDs require roughly the same exposure times as film? Is it that they became commercially viable once the technology reached the level of film, or is there more to it? Can we expect future CCDs to be incredibly light sensitive? Will grainy low-light photography become a thing of the past? Or is it a physics thing - we simply need x number of photons to resolve an image? My limited physics knowledge suggests that limit is a way off, but I could be wrong. Could future CCDs capture the full dynamic range available to the eye?
A commenter brought up an interesting extension to this, something that I haven't thought about for a while: what's with film and CCDs being worse than the eye anyway? Admittedly the eye isn't actually as good as we think - what we see as a high dynamic range visual field is as much to do with our visual system continually re-exposing and filling in the image with as much detail as possible - but nevertheless it's still superior to film / CCDs. I think. A modern CCD can handle, what, seven stops of exposure in a single image? Could this be increased? Hell, what's to stop us eventually putting rod and cone cells onto a sensor? In an octopus-like manner, of course - the human setup would be silly.
Other commenters have ideas regarding photography as a social tool. Future photos will no doubt contain both time and GPS data. Flickr already supports searching by tag, place and time. A massive distributed network of such information would be a powerful tool against crime and for the seeking of wonderful things. Add video and sophisticated face-recognition software into the mix and things go mental. There'd be implications for privacy, as well as how much coolness the brain can handle.
I don't think any of this is way out there. Some of it is way closer than the horizon. I think it's a very exciting time to be alive and into photography.
Gravity Trains
Over at the appropriately named Damn Interesting I found out about Gravity Trains:
About four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.
Hooke's calculations showed that if the technology could be developed to bore such holes through the Earth, a vehicle with sufficiently reduced friction could use such a tunnel to travel to another point anywhere on the on Earth within three quarters of an hour, regardless of distance. Even more amazingly, the vehicle would require negligible fuel. The concept is known as the Gravity Train, and though it seems inconceivably difficult to construct, it has received some serious scientific attention and research in the intervening centuries.
They're literally straight line tunnels from one point on the Earth to another. Jump in and gravity does the rest. Were it possible to design a system with no friction, you'd arrive at the exit as your speed reached zero - at which point, presumably, something would have to stop you falling back in. No matter how large the vehicle or how great the distance, the travel time would be about 42 minutes (approximate because the Earth isn't a perfect sphere). The article has much more detail, as well as the extreme technological hurdles that would have to be overcome to build one. I'm surprised this concept hasn't turned up in any sci-fi I've read, although maybe it has without me registering it as a plausible device.
Smoot
The 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics has been won by John C Mather and George F Smoot for their work on measuring the cosmic microwave background. It's clearly a major honour, but I bet the question they're asked most today is 'are you the guy who was rolled over Harvard Bridge?'
Incidentally, Google's built-in calculator understands smoots.
Dark matter really exists
It's long been known that with a clear view we can see only 5% of space. By looking at the movements of galaxies,as well as gravitational lensing, we can infer that they have substantially more mass than can be seen by telescopes. It was postulated that this might be taken up by dead stars, but careful surveys in our own galaxy have shown that these make up only a very small proportion. 25% of the universe seems to be dark matter, something only detectable by its gravitational effects. Dark energy makes up the other 70%, and is a different beast altogether - whatever is causing the accelerating expansion of the universe seems to be smoothly distributed, and that's pretty much all that's known. Dark matter is at least something we can get a handle on: some kind of particle we haven't detected yet, presumably.
But what if dark matter isn't caused by another particle? What if current gravitational theory is wrong for large distances, making it look like there's far more mass than really exists? This has always been a possibility. However, a new study has revealed positive evidence for the existence of dark matter, a major development for something which could only be inferred up until now. It's still possible that gravitational theory is wrong, but this seems less likely with confirmation of dark matter's existence.
Cosmologists looked at two clusters of galaxies which collided 100 million years ago - very recent in cosmological timescales. Most of the visible mass of galaxy clusters is made up of hydrogen between individual galaxies. Dark matter does not, it is thought, collide with normal matter, so it was theorized that in a collision between clusters the gases would slow each other down but leave dark matter untouched, as shown in this animation. Eventually the mass of the dark matter would re-attract the gas, but a recent collision would show a large amount of dark matter offset from the gas clouds. And so it proved. There's definitely something there.
It's very cool. Physicists and cosmologists at least know there's really something to detect, and aren't worried about a refinement of gravitational theory rendering years of searching pointless.
Cosmic Variance explain it all with much more detail.
Cannonball logic
Following on from the last post, the podcast also has a logic puzzle, and last week's question was:
You're in a boat that's floating in a pond. You're holding a cannonball. If you drop the cannonball over the side, will the level of the pond rise, fall or remain the same?
Mr Thinks-he-has-a-good-knowledge-of-physics here got it completely wrong, because I didn't think it through properly. There's no trick - cannonballs don't float or anything - it's pure science. What do you think? Highlight below for the answer.
Answer: The level of the pond goes down. When in the boat the weight of the cannonball displaces a certain amount of water. But when in the water it's only the volume that matters - water doesn't care about the density (and therefore the mass, and therefore the weight) of what's in it, just the space it takes up. A cannonball is obviously more dense than water, so the volume displaces less water than the weight, so the water level goes down. I fully expected the level to stay the same, thinking that the displacement wouldn't change. If not that, then maybe it'd go up. Going down was my last choice by a long way.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
