Thursday November 26, 2009
This time of year, people are of course focusing on how to roast that turkey for Thanksgiving. But did you know that scientific principles lie at the heart of roasting a turkey? (If you didn't, then you haven't been paying attention ... scientific principles lie at the heart of everything!)
Source: Lisa Peardon / Getty Images
Well, now you can learn the thermodynamics of cooking a turkey. It may be a bit too late for this year's cooking of the holiday bird (and for that I truly apologize ... we've had baby craziness around the Jones household), but there's still time to incorporate some of these principles into cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving, or definitely for Christmas.
And what, you may ask, about the thermodynamics of turducken? Unfortunately, I am pretty sure that turducken does, in fact, defy all laws of nature (despite my earlier admonition to the contrary).
Friday November 20, 2009
With the upcoming restart of the Large Hadron Collider, the short attention span of our nation has already turned to the next big thing. At the end of October was a Symposium on Accelerators for America's Future, and the overall consensus seems to be that scientists, if they want a new particle accelerator, they need to be better about communicating the worth of accelerators to the general populace, in areas such as nuclear energy, prevention of nuclear terrorism, clean water, food packaging, and medical treatments. (When conducting my own work during a 1998 undergraduate research internship at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility, the facility was just beginning to use their accelerated proton beam to treat optical tumors. Many of the undergraduate research projects over that summer were focused on preparations for that new application, which has since become the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute.)
One of the major proposals as a successor to the Large Hadron Collider is a muon collider being proposed by Fermilab. The collider would accelerate muon particles, which are about 200 times heavier than electrons, into beams that would collide with each other, creating interactions more energetic than electron collisions. They followed up the report with a possible schematic of what a muon collider could look like.
A benefit of muons over electrons is that, since they are heavier, they won't emit as much electromagnetic radiation (and lose as much energy) when going around a circular accelerator ring. Such an accelerator could be built in the existing Fermilab facility.
The muon collider isn't the only possibility out there. Both the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) are proposed as well, and while all could in theory be built, there's a question of how any of them will actually get funded, especially in the United States, where budget deficits make any major national project of this type highly unlikely.
Thursday November 19, 2009
In an intriguing take on the Large Hadron Collider, authors Anton Radevsky & Emma Sanders have (together with collaboration from CERN and UK publishing house Papadakis) created a pop-up book based on the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment. The book, Voyage to the Heart of the Matter: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN, focuses on the ATLAS experiment, which seeks to discover the Higgs boson. This is the final particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics which remains to be observed in an experiment, and it's prediction is based on the need of a particle to generate mass in other particles.
I don't have a copy of the book (yet), so I can't actually endorse it ... but judging just from the YouTube video, it looks quite impressive, and I'm looking forward to seeing the book in person and hopefully getting an opportunity to perform a full review of it. In the meantime, the holidays are coming...
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Thursday November 12, 2009
A few weeks back, my family was playing our standard dinner table game, which my mother purchased us. It's a small metal tin that contains several cards, and on each card is a game that can be played at the dinner table. For example, in some of them, you make noises and the other people have to guess what you were trying to sound like. In others you close your eyes and are given fruits and vegetables that you must identify by touch. Some cards have short stories which are read aloud and then discussed. It's a fun dinner-time activity.
Well, to get back to the narrative, a few weeks ago we were playing this game and the card told us to perform an experiment. We got some dirty pennies (3 dirty pennies, to be precise), placed them on a rag, then poured ketchup (or catsup - your call) onto them. We then waited for five minutes.
After five minutes, we wiped the ketchup off the pennies and ... voila, clean, shiny pennies. It was a really amazing trick, and one that I'd never personally witnessed. (If interested, you can have more Chemistry Fun with Pennies.)
Well, a few days ago, my four-and-a-half year-old son found some dirty pennies and told me that we should clean them. I smiled and asked if he remembered how we did that, and he said we did. I asked him "What did we use to clean the pennies?'
His reply: "Three dirty pennies, ketchup, and five minutes."
The reason this story is so fascinating to me is that he remembered the "five minutes," and cited it as a necessary component of the process. He didn't realize it, of course, but he was being incredibly scientifically thorough. When you conduct an experiment, time must of course be taken into account.
In experiments, often the time is embedded in the steps, making it easy to overlook. It's part of the process, not part of the materials you need to gather together. Yet, in a way, you do need to plan for the necessary time for the experiment, just as you have to plan for the materials. In contrast, many recipes explicitly list the prep and cook time clearly along with the ingredients. Experiments would do well to follow a similar format.
In this era of instant gratification, I do sometimes wonder if we'll raise a generation that's okay with taking time to get results. My son, at least, knows that you've got to wait five minutes to clean pennies with ketchup ... which is, I suppose, a good start.
