Wheat-dogg’s world
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Not to me, really, but to my site’s visibility. Two years ago I wrote a post debunking the so-called “water gas”/HHO/Brown’s gas technology of running your car on water. Then, starting in January this year I have had several visitors commenting positively and negatively on the post. I suspect it has something to do with gasoline prices rising above $4 and diesel prices inching toward $5 a gallon.

I won’t go over the whole “water gas” scheme here, but the gist of my argument is that it (1) is unsafe and (2) not a cure-all. I won’t even get into the whole “oil company conspiracy” thing, since paranoid people cannot be made un-paranoid no matter how much you try to reason with them.

Rather than do the sensible thing and DRIVE LESS, PEOPLE!!, many US drivers are looking for a magic bullet to maintain their wasteful use of fuel to putter around town. We are so damn spoiled here. Despite our rising fuel costs, we still pay less than Europeans have to years. Detroit (and to some extent Japan) encouraged us to buy big-ass cars and SUVs (fancy trucks, in my book) that get crappy fuel mileage, which suckered US car buyers into these land yachts that now suck their wallets dry at the gas pump.

So now I guess they’re looking up ways to pay less at the pump on the ‘Net, and have stumbled upon the water gas guys, and my post. Good luck, suckers!

While its lawyers haggle in court about copyright issues, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed continues its inevitable decline into theatrical obscurity. The anti-evolution “blockbuster” pulled in gross box office receipts this weekend of only $102,690, and the number of theaters carrying the flick is now down to 210.

The movie opened April 18 with a great deal of hullabaloo in 1,052 theaters and pulled in an impressive (for a schlockumentary) box office receipts of $2.97 million. Its receipts and theater count have dropped precipitously since then, despite the predictions of its creators that it would be a box-office smash.

Instead it will probably fade into DVD obscurity, once certain legal problems are resolved. Currently, the makers of the film are under a court order not to distribute the flick any further while a copyright infringement suit is settled.

Premise Media, the creator of the movie, licensed several songs, but failed to obtain permission from the copyright holders of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” A short section of the song is used as a foil to suggest that “Darwinism” inevitably leads to atheism.

Lennon’s family and publisher filed suit against Premise Media and its associates April 24 alleging copyright and trademark infringement, asking for at least $75,000 in damages and the immediate withdrawal of the movie in its present form from all theaters. A few days later, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing further distribution of Expelled, including DVD releases.

Once upon a time, I was an erstwhile physics major at Princeton University, but in the two years I spent lurking around Palmer Lab* and Jadwin Hall I never ran into John Wheeler. I regret that now. Wheeler by all accounts was not only brilliant, but supremely likeable (like most of the profs in that department, by the way).

Wheeler coined the term “black hole” in 1967 for the corpse of a massive star after it went supernova: hole because its mass punched a hole in space-time, black because it sucked in all available light. Wheeler also gave a name to a central theorem about black holes — that we can only observe their mass, angular momentum and electric charge — by quipping, “Black holes have no hair.”

Wheeler was an accomplished theoretical physicist, who participated in the development of the hydrogen bomb, our current understanding of astrophysics and many other topics. A member of the Princeton faculty from 1938-1976 (I switched majors during his last year), Wheeler taught for awhile at the University of Texas before returning to Princeton as professor emeritus.

There are plenty of stories in the ‘Net about Wheeler, but to get a flavor of the man’s personality, here are two exceptional links: The Daily Princetonian’s obituary and a memoir at Cosmic Variance, written by Daniel Holz (Princeton ‘92), who unlike me actually got to work with Wheeler.
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* I’m dating myself here. Palmer Lab is now part of the Frist Campus Center, external shots of which appear in the TV show, House M.D., as the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

It took a while, but the Roman Catholic Church has finally accepted Galileo was right after all. A statue of the 17th century scientist is planned for the Vatican Gardens.

Four centuries ago, Galileo’s image would instead have been on the Vatican’s post office “most wanted, feared armed with pen and dangerous” bulletin board. He stepped on a lot of ecclesiastical toes, including the Pope’s (never a good career move for a Catholic), by stating in print for all to read that the Church was wrong about the Sun orbiting the Earth.

Instead, Galileo, using observational evidence obtained with a telescope of his own design, argued that Polish astronomer and cleric Nicolaus Copernicus was correct. The Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun. Galileo insinuated that the Bible, the Church and Greek philosopher Aristotle were all wrong in teaching the Earth was stationary.

We know now Galileo was correct. In fact, the Vatican might have suspected the same even while arresting and trying Galileo for heresy. After all, Copernicus intended that the Church use his work in developing a new calendar, which it did in 1582. It was Galileo’s attitude that ticked off Church authorities, who were in the midst of dealing with those troublesome Protestants all over Europe.

Under threat of excommunication (or worse), Galileo in 1633 was forced to retract his statements that the Earth was just another planet orbiting the Sun, banned from publishing any further work on the subject and placed under house arrest (in his villa) until he died in 1642. His books (and Copernicus’) were pulled from the shelves of all Catholic libraries and placed on the Vatican’s banned-book list for two centuries.

Caption: Áurea (Fernanda Torres) talks to Luiz (Enrique Diaz) in Casa de areia.

On our day off Monday, I ended up watching TV in the afternoon and stumbled upon a Brazilian movie on Starz, Casa de areia (House of Sand), that to my surprise had references to Einstein’s relativity theory in it.

The plot is minimal. The movie’s effect comes from the acting and the ironic turns in its main characters’ lives.

Áurea is a young, city-bred woman whose husband has the crackbrained idea of moving to a godforsaken plot of land on Brazil’s arid northeast (O Nordeste). Her mother, Dona Maria, accompanies them. The husband dies before the birth of Áurea’s only child, Maria, leaving the women essentially stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Áurea wants to leave in the worst way, while Dona Maria would prefer to stay. There are no men to tell her what to do, Dona Maria says. After nearly a decade stuck in O Nordeste, Áurea arranges to leave with a wandering peddler who sells salt and other sundries to the few people living in the region.

But the peddler dies en route to the women’s house. Áurea and their neighbor, a reserved man named Massu, go in search of the peddler. Along the way, Áurea tells Massu she will finish the trip on her own, following tracks in the sand. After two days, she comes across the campsite of a group of scientists photographing the solar eclipse of 1919.

Once in a while, a student will ask me a question that sends me back to the books (as it were) to learn something new. He wanted to know about zero point energy (ZPE), and Wikipedia was not helping him out much.

I couldn’t either at the time, so I dutifully poked around the web to learn more about ZPE. For a “zero,” the concept has some pretty far-reaching effects.

As it turns out, ZPE (and its cousin, the zero point field) is connected to the very questions of where mass and inertia come from, and may provide an explanation of why electrons, for example, have both wave and particle properties.

Anyone who spends any time at all learning physics sooner or later learns that everything in the science is connected. So it is with the ZPE, it seems.

First, we need to understand what the ZPE is, then we can investigate how it connects to all these other basic physical phenomena.

In classical physics, it was assumed that the internal kinetic energy of a substance could theoretically be reduced to zero, by cooling the substance to absolute zero (-273 C or 0K). And indeed, we can chill things down to a mere fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for a couple of reasons, impossible to reach zero, however.

My otherwise trustworthy Geo Metro has been sidelined for a month, because I suspected terribly expensive repairs were needed. Instead the problem was something very simple, and I feel damned foolish.

We were driving the short distance to the local Jay C supermarket one day when the Geo just quit running less than a mile from our house. It had done this before, and would usually start right up again after sitting for a while. So we got a lift to the market and back home, and let the Geo sit alongside the road to cool off.

After waiting a reasonable length of time, we walked back to the car, started it up and drove it home.

The next day, it refused to start. With a shot of starter fluid, the motor would run a bit, then die. OK, I said to myself, it’s gotta be something in the fuel injection system: bad pump, bad injector, bad electrical relay. The next chance I got, I checked the car for the obvious, John-can-fix-it items in the fuel system.

We have just finished our first five weeks of school, and my Physics First students have had their first run-ins with three of the most basic, yet most confusing concepts in physics: inertia, velocity and acceleration. After 23 years of teaching the subject, I have come to realize that I need to spend quite a bit of time trying to solidify these concepts in students’ minds.

Blame those stinking preconceptions, or the obtuse explanations in physics texts, but it is just really hard to get students to grasp those three concepts. Sure, they can memorize the definitions, but few really understand what they mean. Without a decent comprehension of them, learning later concepts (like force and momentum) is appreciably harder.

One misconception about inertia is that it is a force. That is, to some students, inertia is a force that keeps you at rest. A passable first definition, but then these students fail to realize that inertia also keeps you going. When the idea of force comes a bit later in the course, then they confuse inertia with real forces like gravitation and friction.

Inertia is a property of matter. It is internal, not external. External forces support an object, or resist other external forces, or push or pull an object. Inertia cannot make an object move by itself; it only maintains the motion that the object already has. If the object is at rest, it “wants” to stay at rest. If it’s moving in some direction at some speed, it “wants” to keep that speed and heading.

He takes pictures in your kitchen of solar spectra.

My sister-in-law has this crystal ornament in her kitchen window. On Easter, the sun was hitting it just right, so I snapped this photo of the dispersion, catching the blue end of the spectrum.

And this one of the dispersion pattern on her fridge:

Pretty, huh?

And don’t we all …

It’s close to the end of the year (Classes end 5/16 at my shop.) and as usual I find myself looking at the Procrustean bed of my syllabus. How do I fit in five weeks of material into three weeks’ equivalent of classtime?

Chop chop chop.

At this time of the year, I am trying to wrap up the year with light and the atom. We have covered electricity and magnetism already, made the connections between the two, and are now studying how electromagnetic waves are the logical result of EM induction.

Except there’s that pesky wave-particle duality and quantum physics, two of the most important (and difficult to comprehend) aspects of modern physics. Rather than plodding through the wave descriptions of the behaviour of light, I now have to condense a century’s worth of research into roughly 20 days of classtime and make it understandable.

When you think about it, the progress of science and technology since 1850 or so has been phenomenal. Most of the devices we take for granted now have roots back in the 19th century. Cellphones, after all, are just the descendents of Marconi’s radio sets. But cellphones, and their cousins, computers, depend on the quantum understanding of electronic behaviour. So, to provide students with some passing idea of the how things work requires me to cover wave-particle duality and QM.

In three weeks.

Hang on to your hats, kids. It’s going to be a rough ride.