The Big Think

What’s it like to suddenly be able to see in 3D?

Exciting news. And it was skin cancer, which is particularly important to me and my family.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Bring it on!

Some cool science videos.

Physicist Brian Cox gave a talk at the recent Ted Talks conference on the impending operation of the Large Hadron Collider. It may sound geeky and inaccessible, but Cox is an engaging and genuine presenter. It’s very much an everyman, popular-science type talk, but it touches on a subject that I’m very interested in. Do yourself a favor and take 20 minutes to watch his excellent talk. That way you’ll understand the significance when, a year or so from now, I make an effusive blogpost that they’ve found the Higgs Boson.

On a sidenote, how can you not love Brian Cox? He holds a chair in particle physics at the University of Manchester, but looks more like a member of the Beatles. I hope this guy gets more face-time with the public. Who knows, we may have school girls swooning after a physicist- surely, something that’s never happened in this universe.

From the people-who-don’t-get-it department comes this story about a lawsuit in US court trying to stop the LHC from going online because it might, y’know, destroy the universe. Among other reasons this is a stupid idea is this: the LHC and CERN aren’t even in the US!

Matt has a good summary of the Large Hadron Collider. From his site:

To give some idea of what kind of energy we’re talking about, the everyday energy scales we live at are a few hundred (in energy units of electron volts…don’t worry about that, the relative scale is what matters). The surface of the sun is a few thousand.

LHC is going to get up to about 14,000,000,000,000. That’s impressive, but the highest possible, the Planck scale, is 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 … so we have a ways to go.

But here’s the fun part…like I said, physics changes as energy increases. But, it doesn’t change continuously. Things may look the same for a big range of energy, and as you increase, you don’t see anything new. At other points, however, there may be a HUGE change that happens really suddenly as you increase energy.

And the experimental work we’ve been able to do for a long time now has been in an energy range where theories don’t expect much to change. That is, until now.
The energy range the LHC will get to once they fire it up in a couple of months is just on the other side of where we expect the next big jump to be.

Matt is a good writer and teacher (in addition to being a crack Ratchet and Clank player). Check out his extended explication of the LHC.

In five hundred years I believe the world will look back on early 21st century humanity and will see Dean Kaman much the same way that we now look back on Leonardo da Vinci. Kamen has done a lot of things in his long and eclectic career, but I think he’ll be remember most not for the crazy thing he invented a few years ago, but for something much more mundane and important.

Kamen was on the Colbert Report last night showing off his latest invention. Colbert sticks to his schtick, unfortunately, and tries to milk some comedy out of an invention that I believe is truly revolutionary and important. Check it out.

Kamen is one of those guys that I’d really, really like to meet. He seems to have a knack (Segway jokes aside), for picking one or two really intractable problems and then focusing on them (with his brilliant team) until he gets them licked.

I mean, how cool is it to invent a relatively cheap water purifier that can basically change the lives of 1,200,000,000 people? How’s that for a contribution?

EETimes.com is reporting that a group of Canadian and German researchers have created a room temperature superconductor. This is huge news- really huge. Like, cure-for-cancer big in the energy world. I’m sure there are a myriad of details to work out, and it’ll probably be 10-15 years until we see this stuff commercially available, but if they could replace our entire electrical grid,including all of the wiring in our house (an admittedly non-trivial assumption), our energy usage would plummet significantly.

“If you put hydrogen compounds under enough pressure, you can get superconductivity,” said professor John Tse of the University of Saskatchewan. “These new superconductors can be operated at higher temperatures, perhaps without a refrigerant.”

He performed the theoretical work with doctoral candidate Yansun Yao. The experimental confirmation was performed by researcher Mikhail Eremets at the Max Plank Institute in Germany.

The new family of superconductors are based on a hydrogen compound called “silane,” which is the silicon analog of methane–combining a single silicon atom with four hydrogen atoms to form a molecular hydride. (Methane is a single carbon atom with four hydrogens).

Researchers have speculated for years that hydrogen under enough pressure would superconduct at room temperature, but have been unable to achieve the necessary conditions (hydrogen is the most difficult element to compress). The Canadian and German researchers attributed their success to adding hydrogen to a compound with silicon that reduced the amount of compression needed to achieve superconductivity.

So obviously now we need to deal with high-pressure here, but I’m sure they’re working on that. Room temp superconductors have been something of a holy grail in science for decades. If they really managed this feat then keep your eyes on this technology. Things are about to get really interesting.

Read more here.

I spent some time cleaning out the library this afternoon. Our “library” is really just the pretentiously named fourth bedroom in our house. Instead of an extra bed there are four bookshelves, a computer, and a lot of other stuff that needed to be sorted, tossed, or re-filed into other categories and locations to be tossed later.

I went through some of my books (they multiply, you know) and came to my Science Fiction section. Had a lot of Asimov books, naturally, a few Brin, Card, Sheffield, and a whole bunch of Arthur C. Clarke. 2001, 2010, 2069, 3001, The Rama series, on and on. I decided that his stuff passed the threshold of keepability (meaning: too good to toss. I chucked some old or outdated or duplicate stuff). So I re-shelved them and thought “gee, I’m going to have to read some of those again soon”. Clarke is one of those seminal, always-present writers in the SF world. His books were a big, big part of my life growing up. He was really the very first science fiction author of any standing that I read in my youth and I always appreciated how his style of writing was clear and complex at the same time. He could get across some pretty intricate ideas in a way that was easy to understand, without talking down to a 12 year old. In spite of his annoying tendency to kill his main characters at the end of his books in order to Make A Bigger Point, I’ve always liked his style of writing.

Clarke made his biggest contributions during the 60’s and 70’s and has been floating serenely on his fame ever since while living in, of all places, Sri Lanka.

I was surprised and saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke died in his home today at the age of 90. An era has ended.

The Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos. Thermite vs. Liquid Nitrogen. What’s not to like?

The Catholic Church decides to put up a statue to Galileo in the Vatican. Yes, really.

The Klein Bottle house.

How to commit mundicide. I love this kind of thinking. Wait, that sounded wrong…

What happens when scientific achievement becomes too fast to keep up with? Can we really then be said to be advancing if we can’t take advantage of the knowledge? Scienceblog looks into it.

Classical Values is linking to a couple of YouTube videos on the ITER fusion reactor prototype. The prototype won’t even be finished until 2020, with no definite plans to be building a real reactor until 2050. Talk about long-term! Still, this sucker is huge.

The History Channel is showing a 2 hour special this Monday on what would happen to the planet’s cities and infrastructure if all the people suddenly disappeared. Looks interesting, and I hope they put it online soon.

Anti-aging drug going into human trials.

Human clinical trials to test [SIRT1 activating] compounds in diabetes are slated to begin early next year, according to Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, MA, which developed the drugs. “As far as I’m aware, this is the first anti-aging molecule going into [testing in] man,” says David Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, and cofounder of Sirtris. “From that standpoint, this is a major milestone in medicine.”

more here.

I’m up in Waco for the annual Pigskin Review. The show rehearsals are going great. Dress rehearsal is tonight and I’m sure there will be much merrymaking since tomorrow is Halloweed (unfortunately, we don’t have a performance on Hallow’s Eve).

Last night in the middle of the night (literally), my host Matt took Scott and I to the science lab to play around with the lasers and do a makeshift dual-slit experiment. If you don’t know what that is, google “Dual Slit Experiement” and spend a few minutes self educating.

Matt had arranged the laser beam so that we were able to see the result of quantum waveform interference, which is weird enough, but then he put a second polarizer in the waveform and something truly wonderful and weird happened. I don’t have the time to describe it here, but it was really stunning. When he turned the polarizer we got to see a fundamental, welll, shift, in how the system reacted. Put plainly, suddenly the system “became aware that it was being measured” and changed the way it was behaving. I’m not doing the experience justice (mostly because it’s 1:30am and I’ve been leading rehearsals solid since 6pm tonight), but it was truly weird to see that between here and here the laser beam reacted in a quantum way and between here and here it reacted classically. There’s no way to describe it and science can’t explain it completely (and Matt would know since he’s a string theorist). I told Matt that I felt like a man who has been living in the desert since birth who suddenly gets to see the ocean. It was really staggering.

The Geek Tendencies of the rich and famous.

String Theory in Two Minutes or less. Hey Matt, turns out you didn’t have to go to school for a decade to get that PhD! Just watch this video and you’ll know everything you need to know.