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MacGyver Physics
counterfriction writes "This month's issue of Symmetry, a magazine jointly published by SLAC and Fermilab, is featuring an article that points out the sometimes extemporaneous and unconventional solutions physicists have come up with in (and out of) the laboratory. From the article: 'Leon Lederman ... used a pocket knife, tape, and items on anyone's grocery list to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do now show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity, as scientists had long assumed.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_problems_solv ed_by_MacGyver
Hey I love MacGyver. I watched it as a kid and now I watch the DVDs with my fiancee who has fond memories of watching the show with her grandmother as a kid. However that doesn't stop me wincing at how bad the physics (and all the science is) in that show. Anyway it's not MacGyver physics unless there's a baddie waiting in the wings to kill MacGyver and the "experiment" foils their plan to do so, preferably causing the bad guy to fall flat on his ass or be blown up.
Seriously though. Why associate ingenuity with a tv show (even if it's a good one)? It's like describing math breakthroughs as "reminiscent of the TV show 'Numbers'". These shows are inspired by the real science more than they inspire it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Or has it?
Ever wonder why the cat doesn't count as an observer? What does it feel like to be alive and dead at the same time? Do you have to have a soul to observe life or death?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
When repairing some of the main computing systems, at Fermilab, I would joke that I needed a rubber chicken to repair the problem quickly, otherwise it would take a few hours. The one Christmas, one of the Ops staff bought me a pair of them. From then on, the joke was, when called at 3AM in the morning, did I have my chickens handy?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...or at least I tried to, and the link even appeared in the preview, but somehow it got eaten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
Great mind, horrible human being.
Hell I'm a grad student and I don't get treated like that. Dismantling someone's experiment out of some higher-ups whim is not what I would consider normal, or I'm just really lucky to have a supervisor that I can actually talk to instead of him expecting me to treat him like a royal subject or anything.
Now there's a lot of "don't-knows" in that little story, but that goddamn student is in the lab at an hour that I wouldn't consider normal working hours (on the weekend, no less), so it's probably safe to say that he/she's been working on that experiment for quite some time or simply just having a bad luck of getting elbowed all the time so there's no other hours available. Imagine waiting for a time slot in a lab and then when you're finally can get some work done, it's suddenly getting ripped apart by someone who has already elbowed your time many times over. If I were in that position, I would be considerably pissed and very likely to do something about it.
The point being, even if you're Einstein and Newton incarnate combined, you have no right whatsoever to do whatever you please to anyone else. Lederman should have the decency of helping the student to put his/her experiment back to the way it was before, it's very plausible that he has the ability to. However, judging from his tone of no regret in the interview, most likely he didn't care and just left the student to pick up the pieces of his brilliant experiment.
... at the Rogers Commission hearings.
C-clamp: $1.79
Styrofoam cup of ice water: $.50
Watching the expressions on the faces of NASA scientists who had inconclusive data from millions of dollars of testing? Priceless.
Also he allegedly was the only person to see the Trinity blast - as he figured the auto windshield glass would protect him from the UV, just as long as he ducked before the blast wave hit the glass.
Plus the one about Enrico Fermi at Trinity: he put some pieces of paper on the ground, scraped their start and finish positions in the sand with his toe, and based on the distance moved, the paper mass, and the distance to the blast, estimated the yield pretty darn close for that method.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I might be going off the deep end here, but the fact of the matter is, the universe is expanding quite rapidly and there is nothing that says that physics constants can not change over time. One "constant" that has changed and actually is not a constant at all, is the fine-structure constant (Read this to mean: the electric charge. ) The coupling of photons to electrons change, effectively changing the electric charge with distance. Hence, the fine-structure constant is known as a running-coupling constant. There are experiments under progress right now that are trying to measure the fine-structure constant from very-far-away galaxies, or back in time. Ok, maybe I am talking about cosmological scales here, but it would be funny if humans evolved, and some billions of years later, someone reading about some experiment like Rutherford's re-did it and got different results...
Back to the subject: yep, it is pretty crucial to get undergrads to repeat old experiments, especially ones like P-violation, Moessbauer, optical-pumping, muon-lifetime, which have all contributed to our current understanding of physics as a whole. Afterall, if they continue in physics, they might be stuck on experiments like mine, where one does not get data for the next "n" years. (I consider myself a physicist now for 10 years and have not been on a running and data collecting experiment yet. I am very happy that I got to do all those old-experiments in my undergrad years. Good old junior lab... )
There is a beautiful essay by Feynman about the classical rats-in-a-maze experiment, and how the scientist discovered that he had to change many conditions of the maze before the rats would learn how to run the maze themselves, instead of relying on other navigational information.
Feynman also comments that this scientist's work with rats was more or less completely ignored, and the rest of the field continued to run their rats-in-a-maze experiments the traditional old-fashioned way.