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| Pain(t), pie, relativity, quantum levitation | Oct 18, 2011 9:24 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:(Ugh, what's worse than painting a bad painting is painting a bad painting but not realizing it's bad until you've finished it all up and scanned it in at close to 7:00am the following morning. And then you see if you can rescue it by dashing black and white ink all over it, and of course that doesn't work (and the painting is now completely obliterated, which is just as well). So then you figure welp, time to start over from scratch. And thus we get to today's page. At least it has energy, only two badly clashing scale and perspective systems, rather than three. Man. Anyway just so I can say I salvaged *something* from the wreckage, here's the part of the rejected attempt at the page that, if you can ignore the zombie-like, dead pose, might not be completely and utterly bad in all aspects:
=p)
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It's looking like Frame Up Studios in Seattle's artsy Fremont neighborhood will be hosting a show of my artwork in January--starting Friday January 6th, which is the day of the local "Art Walk." So that should be neat, and you can bet I'll bug you more about it as the date gets nearer. :D
Also there is a pretty yummy pie shop right next door to it, apparently called simply "pie"; their logo is a top-down view of a whole pie, with "pie" printed on it. Pretty effective advertising. :d
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Feedback on the ad free GIANT COMICS subscription idea was generally positive, so I've been working on getting that hooked up--image file uploads and lost password retrieval it was today, mostly.
That's boring but fortunately people who've hooked up with A* on Google have been sharing some cool science things over the past few days!
First, you may remember that about three weeks ago there was a big flap having to do with a team of French and Italian scientists at CERN who claimed to have clocked a neutrino beam they fired from Switzerland to Italy as having traveled faster than the speed of light, which is supposed to be impossible--light speed being the fastest speed possible is one of the foundations of Einstein's General Relativity and modern physics in general, you might say.
So of course even uneducated nitwits like myself were like pfft yeah sure, and in fact it kicked off a big push to explain how they screwed up their result so badly. Well, The Physics arXiv Blog picked up on a paper with a plausible-sounding explanation: the team was coordinating the clocks timing both ends of the experiment by using clocks on GPS satellites passing overhead, but they didn't take into account the speed of the satellites relative to the ground: "From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance traveled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter." So apparently once you take good ol' relativity into proper account, the speed of the neutrinos was in fact the speed of light. (This makes me wonder too if satellite clocks already take into account the faster passage of time at higher altitudes (being farther away from the time-dampening effect of the Earth's gravity well), and the slower passage of time due to higher travel speeds. ... Aha! They do.)
It seems like that would be a pretty elementary mistake to make for smart dudes at a place like CERN, so I suppose there are some French and Italian particle physicists with a certain amount of egg on their faces at the moment, if that clock thing was indeed the issue. I wonder if Einstein would have been amused by this or not. =p
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And you've probably heard of how superconducting materials can levitate magnets pretty nicely over their usually liquid-nitrogen-cooled surfaces, but have you seen what happens when you put a superconducting material over a bed of magnets? What you get is apparently called "quantum levitation," which has been known since the 30's, but darned if I've seen a demonstration like this before. It's...pretty amazing, but don't take my word for it, just check out the video:
video on Youtube
There's a lot of "it locks the magnetic field in place" talk in the video which doesn't sound very well explained to me, but the Wikipedia article is also rather rough going for the layman; something to do with the magnetic field ending up surrounding the superconducting material rather than going through it, and apparently we don't have a complete scientific theory for explaining the whole thing yet. Anyway the important thing is that it looks really cool.
EDIT:
Correction: it appears the demonstrated phenomenon was "flux pinning," not quantum levitation. See the next day's news post for an excellent explanation of both.
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