The physics of Christmas

The Economist reviews the new 3D movie “Arthur Christmas”:

The screenplay, written by Aardman’s Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith, makes a serious stab at the mathematics. Some 23% of the world’s seven billion people were assumed to be under age eight—which is probably not far off the mark. So, with 1m elves working in teams of three, each team rappelling down ropes from Santa’s hovering stealth-ship has to deliver presents to 4,760 children during the 24 hours of Christmas Eve. Hence the 18 seconds or so the movie allows for each stocking to be filled.

The sound of irrational numbers

Amazing work by Michael John Blake. He makes music out of the irrational numbers pi and tau. This is accomplished by assigning each note and chord to a number. It is surprising how good this sounds.

You can download the Tau song from CD Baby.

(via New Scientist)

Can the quantum state be interpreted statistically?

An interesting take by Matt Leifer on Matthew Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph's recent foundations of quantum mechanics paper:

The question is whether a scientific realist can interpret the quantum state as an epistemic state (state of knowledge) or whether it must be an ontic state (state of reality). It seems to show that only the ontic interpretation is viable, but, in my view, this is a bit too quick. On careful analysis, it does not really rule out any of the positions that are advocated by contemporary researchers in quantum foundations. However, it does answer an important question that was previously open, and confirms an intuition that many of us already held. Before going into more detail, I also want to say that I regard this as the most important result in quantum foundations in the past couple of years, well deserving of a good amount of hype if anything is.

Also, check out Scott Aaronson's analysis of the results.

Science vs. Wonder

I have often hear people say that science kills wonder. By dissecting nature through a rational process we lose the magic, myth, and story behind it all. Robin Ince, host of the BBC Radio program The Infinite Monkey Cage gives an entertaining TED talk that argues against this point of view. Feynman eloquently conveys this idea in this video, and Carl Sagan was the master when it comes to sharing the beauty science brings to the world.

For me, the question I have been trying to answer is who am I? Poetry, art, photography, and my conversations with others provide me with insights into myself. But so does science. As a physicist I study and try to discover the rules that govern nature. These rules are often encoded in mathematics that is intimidating for most. Yet these rules contain a beauty and elegance that rivals the greatest verses of any poet. I believe that physics is a poem that nature has written about how the universe works.

No matter how big we think the universe is, it is bigger. The stars we see in the sky, some of which would take thousands of years to reach riding a beam of light, are our closest neighbours. The same force that causes an apple to fall to the Earth also keeps the Earth in orbit around the Sun and is what collapses a star into a black hole. The carbon atoms that make up our bodies were once forged in the heart of a star. Studying physics is a humbling experience.

Science has only increased my capacity for wonder. I view science on equal footing with poetry, art, music and dance. If you don't see the wonder in nature it is because you are not looking hard enough.

Futurama Physics: The Secrets of Fresnelling

A nice post that goes into some more detail on the aforementioned Futurama video.

Futurama: What's in the box Schrödinger?

This is why I love Futurama. In less than two minutes they cite Lorentz invariance, refraction, and Schrödinger's cat. It should come as no surprise how science savvy this show is; the writing staff is stacked with scientists and David Cohen, one of the co-developers, has degrees in physics and computer science. From this 2007 Wired piece:

Futurama was geek-friendly to begin with: Episodes are built around sci-fi staples like parallel universes, spaceship battles, and time travel. But look more closely and you'll spot fleeting jokes that are geekier than a Slashdot comments thread, gags about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, particle physics, and the P=NP problem.

There is also this excellent interview by SEED magazine with the writers of the show.

OK GO sing the Muppets theme song

This is easily my favourite version of the Muppet Show's theme song. OK GO is one of the most creative bands out there and the Muppets have been taking Youtube by storm. It was inevitable that they would eventually meet up.

In a similar vein, here is a great interview Kermit did for the opening of the latest instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean. I am glad to see Kermit has still got it after all these years. Has there ever been a reporter who performed at the top of his or her game for so long?

Say goodbye to the most amazing iPhone yet

Funny sketch by College Humor.

Siri: Did you want me to search for flower shops nearby?

(Via John Gruber)

Quantum theorem shakes foundations

This could be one of the most exciting result in a generation that has come out about the foundations of quantum mechanics. I have just downloaded the article and started to wade through it. In the meanwhile here is what Nature News has to say about it:

Their theorem effectively says that individual quantum systems must “know” exactly what state they have been prepared in, or the results of measurements on them would lead to results at odds with quantum mechanics. They declined to comment while their preprint is undergoing the journal-submission process, but say in their paper that their finding is similar to the notion that an individual coin being flipped in a biased way — for example, so that it comes up 'heads' six out of ten times — has the intrinsic, physical property of being biased, in contrast to the idea that the bias is simply a statistical property of many coin-flip outcomes.

I can't wait to get back from Ottawa to talk to my colleagues about this. Here is the link to the preprint of the paper by Matthew Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph.

Canadian Science Policy Conference 2011

I am attending the 3d annual Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa, ON this week. It has been a different experience compared to what I normally deal with. At one point, I even ended up being involved in a panel discussion.

I have also run into a number of people who I have not seen in years. The first day of the conference has been good, and I am looking forward to the next two days worth of sessions.

Watch TEDxUW live online tomorrow

Tomorrow I'll be speaking at TEDxUW.  If you cannot make it in person, you can watch the event live online.  My talk is at 11:45 AM ET. Preparing for this talk has been an interesting personal journey. I am looking forward to the event. The TEDxUW team has done an outstanding job.

Mind=Blown

A Lindy Hop story by Ford Canada

Ford made this great feature about Aimee and Alex, two Lindy Hoppers, and their trip into Toronto to dance. The final destination in the video is the Dovercourt House, the site of the big Saturday dance. When I was in Toronto the Dovercourt was like a second home to me. So good to see it again.

Billy Nye the Dance Guy

Who would have known that Bill Nye is a fellow Lindy Hopper!

I am speaking at TEDxUW

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at the inaugural TEDxUW event hosted at the University of Waterloo. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and is a series of global conferences that feature excellent and inspiring talks. I have been a big fan of TED ever since I heard about it three years ago. TEDxUW has a great organizational team that is putting together an awesome event. November 12th cannot get her soon enough.

Here are a couple of my favourite TED talks:

[embed width="620"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LCwI5iErE[/embed]

[embed width="620"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT9poH_D2Iw[/embed]

[embed width="620"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UGC2nLnaes[/embed]

Steve Jobs Remembered

There has been an overwhelming response to the passing of Steve Jobs. Here are some of the things that have been said that I have found moving.

Walt Mossberg from All Things Digital has put together a collection of anectodes about his various encounters with Steve. My favourite is about the infamous meeting of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the fifth All Things Digital conference:

For our fifth D conference, both Steve and his longtime rival, the brilliant Bill Gates, surprisingly agreed to a joint appearance, their first extended onstage joint interview ever. But it almost got derailed.

Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple’s iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs. He quipped: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell.” When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged, because my partner Kara Swisher and I had assured both men that we hoped to keep the joint session on a high plane.

In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs: “So I guess I’m the representative from Hell.” Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water he was carrying. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph, with both men acting like statesmen. When it was over, the audience rose in a standing ovation, some of them in tears.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber posts this beautifully written memory of seeing Jobs at WWDC this past summer with a grass stain on his sneakers:

I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.

The front page of Wired.com has a series of tributes to Steve Jobs from various technology titans, including this from Bill Gates:

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely." — Bill Gates

Arstechnica is running an article called The first time I used an Apple computer was... that the various staff members are contributing to. Here is an excerpt from Ryan Paul, Arstechnica's Open Source Editor:

I went through several boxed sets of Lord of the Rings over the years, reading them with love until they fall apart. My Apple II has fared better—it is still fully functional after all this time. I kept it as a memento of the challenges I overcame when I learned to program. But after Steve’s words encouraged me to think about the joy that the Apple II brought me in my childhood, it has become a much more powerful symbol. It is the light that holds back the bitter cynicism that I’ve accumulated with age. It reminds me that magic still exists, as long as we believe.

John Siracusa, also from Arstechnica, has a touching story about the photo of the original Macintosh team he had hanging on his wall as he grew up:

In a post-Steve-Jobs world, there is no longer an excuse for large corporations to be less bold than start-ups. Elegance, character, artistic integrity, and ruthless dedication to design can no longer be derided as luxuries of those who don't have anything to lose. Apple is now one of the largest, most successful companies in the world, but it still behaves as if all of its employees could fit in a 9x7-inch photo.

Finally, there is the commercial The Crazy Ones produced in 1997. Originally Steve Jobs was to narrate the commercial, but the aired version was done by Richard Dreyfuss. Here is the never aired Steve Jobs take.

Steve Jobs's Stanford Commencement Address

From Daring Fireball

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Thank you Steve

Steve Jobs has died far too young. It is amazing how much he accomplished in his 56 years. He was one of those once-in-a-generation visionaries who transformed the computer, consumer electronics, movie, telecom, and music industries. He built a company that thinks different and is structured differently to every other company out there.

Apple, under Steve, blended that tricky mixture of engineering savvy with artistry to create devices for the rest of us. From his teenage years working for HP and Atari he had a fascination with computers and burning vision to make computers accessible to everyone. He mastered the art of addition through subtraction and fearlessly murdered his darlings.

I was just talking to Jaime this morning about what the world would have been like without Jobs. No iPhone, no Apple II, no Macintosh, no iPad, no iPod, no Pixar, no iTunes, and so much more. The technology world would be far starker and desolate without his transformative vision.

It is this vision that intrigues me the most. I recently read the interview that Playboy Magazine carried out with him in 1985 when he was 29. At that time Apple had just introduced the Macintosh which was a radical departure from any commercial computer system previously available. In the interview Steve talks about one day wanting computers to be ubiquitous devices able to communicate and network with one another to improve our lives. Steve wanted to make the computer as simple to use as an appliance so that the vast power that they represent could be accessible to everyone. He talks about the day a computer could act as a type of digital assistant capable of responding to natural language commands to help us in our tasks. With the iPad I believe that Steve has come closer than anyone else to turning the computer into an appliance (in a good way), while with yesterday's unveiling of Siri the iPhone can now act as a digital assistant. It took 26 years from the time of the article, but the vision he shared in that Playboy article has finally become a reality.

On a personal note, I switched to using a Mac seven years ago at the start of my PhD. Not for a single day have I regretted that decision. The Mac, and the generally superior software available, have dramatically reduced the friction I experience when using a computer.

Thank you Steve for making my life better.

The Ultimate Lindyhop Timelapse 2011

This past weekend I attended The Ultimate Lindyhop Showdown in New Orleans. Showdown is an awesome event that features excellent dancing, amazing competitions, and mind-blowing music. I spent the entire weekend in the French Quarter listening to the street bands who seem to populate every corner. There is no shortage of good music (and dancing).

Normally I would take copious quantities of video at an event like this, but there were already dozens of people filming the dances and competitions. Instead, I decided to do something different. Some 15,000 photos later I had enough material to create a timelapse of the weekend (Watch it in HD if you can). The music is a recording I made on the Saturday night of Meschiya Lake & Her Lil' Big Horns. Meschiya is a tremendous performer. I can't recommend her album Lucky Devil enough. If you have a spare $11 sitting around, it is definitely a worthwhile investment.

A big thanks to Amy Johnson and her team. I can't wait for next years event.

Is Geology a real science?

This is the first in a series of posts by fellow physicist Marco Piani on the science in the television show The Big Bang Theory.

In Season 5 Episode 1, "The Skank Reflex Analysis", we see Sheldon face "certain death" during a paintball battle, standing defenseless and shouting out "Geology isn't a real science!", in this way triggering the angry reaction of the geology paintball team:

Why does Sheldon say that? We know that Sheldon has, let us say, a "mild" superiority complex when it comes to science. He is a theoretical physicist, and thinks that Physics is the discipline that deals with the fundamental laws of nature, hence the queen of sciences. All other scientific disciplines come second, and he goes as far as to consider engineers "umpa lumpas of science" in Season 1 Episode 12

But in the paintball scene Sheldon does not simply make fun of geology as a "lesser" science; he actually expresses his belief that geology is not a real science. His is a pretty harsh statement, and we understand why the geologists are so pissed off not to think twice before shooting Sheldon down!

While we do not endorse Sheldon's words, let us try to understand the possible reasons behind his verbal attack.

The question we should ask ourselves is: "what characterizes science?" It is actually a tough question, and there is an entire branch of philosophy that deals with it. It is clear that we will not even scratch the surface of the issue in this post. Nonetheless, we can at least say that one of the key concepts is that of "scientific method", that is, of how scientists proceed in establishing the body of knowledge called "scientific knowledge". What this method is or should be, and whether scientists actually adopt it in their normal practice are exactly the kind of questions addressed by philosophy of science. One widespread point of view (closely related to the ideas proposed by Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)) is that science advances through the empirical falsification of hypotheses formulated to explain the results of observations. That is, hypotheses are made that in principle would allow to "compress" the information collected in numerous observations. For example, when we have a pen in our hand and we open the hand, the pen falls. The same happens with an apple, or a ping pong ball; thus, we may tentatively express our belief that "when we let go of any object, it always falls". Such a hypothesis can then be "tested", by letting a new object fall. If it does fall, our hypothesis—that all objects fall—is corroborated by observation, and we gain confidence in it; if it doesn't (e.g., if we let go of a string attached to a balloon full of helium, and it flies away), we have to go back to the drawing board to design a new theory that is compatible also with the new event we have experienced—the balloon and the string flying away. What is important is that we did test our hypothesis, verifying whether predictions made assuming the truth of our hypothesis actually happen. Even more importantly, we are ready to change our "theory" if its predictions turn out to be wrong. Of course, this is a simplification and an idealization of the scientific process, and real life research activity can be very different from this:

We are now in the position to better understand Sheldon's statement. For example, we can imagine that what Sheldon is pointing out is that geology does not allow for an easy implementation of the scientific method. One problem is that geology deals with processes—like the formation of mountains, or the drifting of continents—that take place in very long periods of time. So what a geologist can see is often only a snapshot of these processes (as if we could only see a picture of the object halfway between our hand and the ground, rather than the whole motion). On the other hand, a related problem is that geologists cannot set up controlled experiments that can be repeated to test their theories: we are given one Earth, and the geological processes that happen on its surface as well as in the underground are mostly out of our control. We are almost always limited just to witness them. Of course, what geologists actually do is much more than witness passively. As usual you can find more information on Wikipedia:

Actually, what might have triggered the criticism against geology of that snobby theoretical physicist of Sheldon, is the relevance of "applied geology" in the modern world, which goes from mining to environmental issues.

Even if, like Sheldon, I am a theoretical physicist, I am very happy to call geologists "fellow scientists". I must add that I am also a peaceful man, but I know that my inner geek will sooner or later induce me to take part in a paintball battle. Scientist or not scientist, surrender, or be stained!