Physics Buzz

As the clock winds down toward a potential shutdown of the U.S. federal government, many observers doubt a deal will be struck in time.

A shutdown would send at least 800,000 federal workers home temporarily until Congress compromises on a budget, and only employees deemed “necessary to protect life or property" will stay on the job. That includes uniformed military personnel, federal law enforcement, and guards for government buildings and facilities.


So what does this mean for federal scientists and their supporting staff? Many federal scientists will be sent home during a potential shutdown, but plans vary significantly for different federal agencies. Here's a quick breakdown for a few agencies supporting physics research:

Reusable, magnetic nanoparticles can remove crude oil from water.
When 4.9 million barrels of crude oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico following the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, cleanup crews rushed to deploy floating barriers to contain crude oil collecting on the water's surface. However, this did nothing for the oil that never reached the top.

About a month ago, the Lawrence Livermore lab posted this gorgeous old poster of the electromagnetic spectrum onto its Flickr page. It's an amazing artifact of scientific education from 1944, complete with  images of retro radio equipment, hospital radium rays and one of the first commercially available television set.

Putting together a chart like this can be as much of an undertaking as publishing a book. It's an under-appreciated art form, and sometimes takes a coordinated team of editors, designers and consultants years to produce a final product.

The driving force behind its creation in the late 1930s was Dwight Barr, a consultant for the W. M. Welch Scientific Company. He spent two years of his life designing and editing it, with the project at times taking over part of his house. Once published, nearly every major university and scientific institution bought a copy.

This week on the podcast, we talk to Professor of Applied Mathematics Rainer Hollerbach, about how he and his colleagues at Leeds University think they have a solution for the Mystery of the Moving Magnetic Field.

What's the Mystery of the Moving Magnetic Field, you ask?

Well, the earth's magnetic field is drifting westward, and no one knows why. It's a mystery! The movement does not take place everywhere on earth, but is concentrated near the equator. People first noticed this westward drift in the 18th century; it really threw a wrench in the use of magnetism for navigation because after a few decades, maps of the magnetic field were no longer accurate. In the 20th century scientists discovered that the earth's magnetic field comes from the liquid outer core, which explains why the motion can occur in one place and not in others; however, scientists still don't know what's driving the motion.

Listen to the podcast to hear how the inner-most layers of our plan…

Physics engines may form the backbone of many video games, but very rarely does physics take center stage in a game's plot. In my experience, most educational games that aim to teach physics lack the immersion and fun factor to retain a player's attention for extended periods of time.

Particulars is not one of those games. It's simple, fun, and addicting. Along the way, you'll even learn quite a bit of particle physics. Best yet, there's a free demo available now. The independent game studio behind Particulars, SeeThrough Studios, plans to release a finished version of Particulars in early 2014, and you can catch a glimpse of its gameplay in the video below.



Particulars throws you into the subatomic world, granting you control of a lonely down quark. Soon, however, you'll encounter a number of subatomic friends and enemies: anti-down quarks, up quarks, and eventually larger particles like neutrons.

Omid Kokabee, a University of Texas, Austin, graduate student who has been imprisoned in Iran for more than two years, received APS's Andrei Sakharov human rights prize for refusing to collaborate on the country's nuclear program. In May, an Iranian court sentenced him to ten years in prison for "communicating with a hostile government" and receiving "illegal earnings." The so-called "illegal earnings" were the student loans he received while in Texas.

Kokabee, who is an Iranian citizen, was arrested in January of 2011 when he traveled to Tehran to visit family over his winter break. While waiting for his flight to return to the United States, he was pulled aside by the security forces at Khomeini Airport. They brought him to Tehran's notorious Evin prison, where numerous political prisoners are held. The Iranian authorities kept him in solitary confinement for 36 days, before allowing family members to visit. Twice, court appearances were ca…

Barenaked Ladies: It's All Been Done

Every physics student has heard the story about how some prominent thinkers at the end of the 19th century were convinced that we had discovered all there was to know about physics. Only a few years later, all those physics pessimists were proven to be utterly, completely, unbelievably wrong as blossoming quantum mechanics and relativity theories combined to make up Modern Physics. Over the next century, lasers, transistors, GPS, MRI machines, PCs, cell phones, fission bombs, fusion bombs and countless other wonders were the direct result of this whole new branch of physics.

In the years since, the tale of the rise of modern physics has helped to squelch most murmurings that maybe, just maybe, we're getting to the point of knowing it all. The most concise summary of the argument I know of is a quote by Arthur C. Clarke.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says t…