Okay, I can see that point. I admit the language used was imprecise; I was trying to balance between describing what I was doing and keeping it short enough to work as a Slashdot snippet. Perhaps I leaned too far one way. The source article specifies "graduate level physics concepts" instead of just "graduate level physics." This was a submission issue, rather than a source material issue.
Funny, you are criticizing the lesson for the questions raised in this lesson, and then providing many of the exact answers that are coming in later lessons...
The protons have a mass that's relatively easy to measure. The charge is very well known, as is the interaction of moving charges with magnetic fields. If you fire a proton through a magnetic field, it will be accelerated into a circular motion, and the easily-measured radius of the circle (visible in a bubble chamber) will indicate what the mass is.
For neutrons, it's much harder. Early measurements at the time were imprecise compared to today's. Now that we better understand the mechanism of radioactive decay, we can find it through a roundabout means. When a neutron is not part of a nucleus, it is unstable, and decays into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino. The difference in masses between the neutron and the proton is a significant factor in the half lives of these decays, so that was used in the early days to compute the mass of a free neutron.
Griffiths' text is commonly used, but I wasn't thrilled with it. I'm of the "do the math right or not at all" mentality, and his use of the probability distribution with operators instead of the psi* operator psi proper methodology in the first few chapters forms bad habits with students. It only works because he carefully chooses examples whose operators do not involve derivatives. His electricity and magnetism textbook is fantastic, and his particle text is great, but I'm not happy with his quantum text. Joachain and Bransden made a text I much prefer (in its first edition; I haven't looked at the second edition, ISBN: 0582356911) and would recommend over Griffiths in this case.
The Bureau 42 authors don't use the site for profits. Most years, ad banner revenue is about the cost of renewing the domain name, and none of us get paid to post our stuff. We just have fun in our spare time. That's where this came from; when doing my M.Sc., I found I enjoyed teaching in labs far more than I enjoyed doing the actual research. That realization and a case of bilateral elbow tendonitis prompted me to switch to education. Now I teach K-12 (along with other tasks) at the private education company everybody in North America has heard of, which I love, but doesn't hit the higher level physics often. I wrote these lessons for fun, and shared this one with Slashdot because I thought the series came out well and that others might enjoy reading them.
Yeah, introductory quantum mechanics is introduced typically in second year, and then more detailed versions including Dirac notation show up in third and fourth year. The graduate level is where relativistic implications are usually taken into account, unless you take senior undergraduate particle physics.
Actually, I was working on the ATLAS detector that is in place at the LHC when I started writing for Bureau 42 almost 10 years ago. And I don't know how we profit off of something that's free...
My philosophy (which is in lesson nine, and probably should have come sooner; lesson one is more focused on why we need quantum mechanics, and the rest develops over time) is that the concepts and ideas of physics are represented by the math, but not defined by them. Math can certainly point out directions to look at and avenues to explore, and indicate connections between ideas we hadn't previously noticed, but as a student, I always found that the worst possible reason for a physics phenomenon was "because the math says so." This is about getting those ideas across for people who want to learn about the ideas. The ideas covered in the last two lessons are not typically introduced before grad school. (Lesson one starts at the high school level, which is all I wanted to assume from my audience.) Will you be a researcher when you're done? No. Will you have a better understanding of popular science articles relating to quantum physics? I certainly hope so.
It's hit the concepts dealt with at the graduate level, but I left the math out to make those concepts accessible to people who don't have the heavy mathematical background. I'm half way through writing next year's summer school (linear algebra, full mathematical glory, ending with tensors), and the 2012 curriculum will be Einstein's Relativity and have two parts to each lesson. The first part will be all conceptual, like this, and the second part will have all of the math. 2013 will be real analysis, 2014 assessment theory, and years beyond that haven't been pinned down. The "Bureau 42 teaches" link at the side has everything along these lines listed, with links if they've already been posted.
In its most basic form, LaTeX is similar to StarOffice. I think it's more correct to say that StarOffice's equation handling techniques are very similar to LaTeX's basic layouts. I could go on for a long time about this, but suffice it to say I used StarOffice for a year. Then I discovered LaTeX, and I haven't looked back since. It's a fantastic and versatile software package that does not require a mouse at any stage of the operation, and has very low system overhead.
Those of you who haven't explored the Sci-Fi news slashbox may be interested in my review of the first season of Stargate SG-1 on DVD that CmdrTaco mentioned. (Season two is due on September 3, if you care.)
Diplomacy is an excellent Risk-like game, but it's far more dependant on people than random chance. It's set in World War I. Each player runs a country, and they have to form allies and such to dominate Europe. There are no dice or cards; you move armies as you like, and the player with the most armies moving into a given territory wins. The fun part is the conversations and pacts you make between rounds. These conversations are for your own benefit only. You decide your plans, but there are no rules against stabbing each other in the backs. It's great fun!
I don't know about "Axis and Allies," but my grade 11 social studies teacher (Joel Short) does an annual trench battle. We arranged the desks in trenches, and threw balled up paper at each other. It really showed how hard it is to get the upper hand.
Of course, it might have worked better had he better anticipated us. Once a paper ball landed, it was harmless and could be used again. If it hit you before landing, you were dead. Our team had a bunch of people with bad aim, so we had four people to their eleven in the first few minutes. Then two of us re-filled the green garbage bags he brought the paper balls in, and dumped the whole thing into the enemy trenches. We died, but our team won.:)
I've got to chime in on the Kinesis Classic keyboards. I've been diagnosed with bilateral elbow tendonitis, so both arms have problems. When I use the normal rectangular keyboard my employer put in my office, I can work for, at most, two hours a day before the pain gets to be too much. When I use the normal ergonomic keyboards (such as the first issue of the Microsoft model, which I used to have) I managed to get about three or four useful hours of work done. With the Kinesis keyboard, I can get eight or nine hours in each day, without a problem. I don't know how much is the keyboard itself, and how much is the fact that I can put my trackball where the numeric keypad used to be, but it's helped me a lot. (If I hadn't upgraded, I doubt I'd ever finish the thesis I'm polishing off.)
Exactly. For example, a search for the Higgs Boson that doesn't find it would qualify for this journal, and might force us to rewrite large portions of current physics theory. (Basically, we'd have to redo just about everything fundamental that involves mass.)
I use Konqueror, actually. I haven't upgraded in a while, though. (I'd rather not disturb anything until after the final draft of my thesis is finished and submitted.)
Darin Morgan was only involved in a handful of episodes. He didn't really care for the show, so he wrote episodes that were a lot different than the norm. If memory serves, he wrote "Humbug" (circus freaks), "War of the Coprophages" (cockroaches), "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" (Peter Boyle as psychic guy; he won a guest actor Emmy for it), and "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" (Charles Nelson Reilly writing a book). He also acted in two episodes, as the Flukeman in "The Host" and the shapeshifter in "Small Potatoes." Any correlation between the quality of the show and Darin Morgan's departure is entirely coincidental.
David D. got married
and demanded that the show move to California so that he could be close to his wife.
Fox asked Chris Carter to move the show to LA. The tax breaks in Canada were reduced, so the cost per episode ended up being the same in both locations (since they were still flying a lot of the actors up from L.A.) David Duchovny mentioned that he'd support the move so he could be closer to his wife, and that's what the media jumped on. We shouldn't blame David Duchovny for something that wasn't his decision.
Re:Frank Herbert's Dune (and Best of Trek)
on
New Years Marathons
·
· Score: 2
The Best of Trek marathon was Boxing Day. Today's just the normal four-hour Star Trek block. (TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager daily).
For Canadian residents, Space: The Imagination Station is running the ''Frank Herbert's Dune" miniseries on New Year's Day, starting at 1pm Eastern Time (10am Pacific).
I know the timecodes are on the film. Much of the data itself is off film, though. (Some is still there; when it first came out, one of our projectionists left the Shindler's List CDs in while showing Jurassic Park. The soundtrack had elements of both in the theater. This must have happenned to a few people, as the DTS disks included failsafes to prevent this very shortly thereafter.)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I can see that point. I admit the language used was imprecise; I was trying to balance between describing what I was doing and keeping it short enough to work as a Slashdot snippet. Perhaps I leaned too far one way. The source article specifies "graduate level physics concepts" instead of just "graduate level physics." This was a submission issue, rather than a source material issue.
Funny, you are criticizing the lesson for the questions raised in this lesson, and then providing many of the exact answers that are coming in later lessons...
Instead, based on what's in the first lesson, it looks like it will try to talk about a lot of things, explaining none of them really right.
So, which parts could I have explained better?
The protons have a mass that's relatively easy to measure. The charge is very well known, as is the interaction of moving charges with magnetic fields. If you fire a proton through a magnetic field, it will be accelerated into a circular motion, and the easily-measured radius of the circle (visible in a bubble chamber) will indicate what the mass is.
For neutrons, it's much harder. Early measurements at the time were imprecise compared to today's. Now that we better understand the mechanism of radioactive decay, we can find it through a roundabout means. When a neutron is not part of a nucleus, it is unstable, and decays into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino. The difference in masses between the neutron and the proton is a significant factor in the half lives of these decays, so that was used in the early days to compute the mass of a free neutron.
Griffiths' text is commonly used, but I wasn't thrilled with it. I'm of the "do the math right or not at all" mentality, and his use of the probability distribution with operators instead of the psi* operator psi proper methodology in the first few chapters forms bad habits with students. It only works because he carefully chooses examples whose operators do not involve derivatives. His electricity and magnetism textbook is fantastic, and his particle text is great, but I'm not happy with his quantum text. Joachain and Bransden made a text I much prefer (in its first edition; I haven't looked at the second edition, ISBN: 0582356911) and would recommend over Griffiths in this case.
The Bureau 42 authors don't use the site for profits. Most years, ad banner revenue is about the cost of renewing the domain name, and none of us get paid to post our stuff. We just have fun in our spare time. That's where this came from; when doing my M.Sc., I found I enjoyed teaching in labs far more than I enjoyed doing the actual research. That realization and a case of bilateral elbow tendonitis prompted me to switch to education. Now I teach K-12 (along with other tasks) at the private education company everybody in North America has heard of, which I love, but doesn't hit the higher level physics often. I wrote these lessons for fun, and shared this one with Slashdot because I thought the series came out well and that others might enjoy reading them.
Yeah, introductory quantum mechanics is introduced typically in second year, and then more detailed versions including Dirac notation show up in third and fourth year. The graduate level is where relativistic implications are usually taken into account, unless you take senior undergraduate particle physics.
Actually, I was working on the ATLAS detector that is in place at the LHC when I started writing for Bureau 42 almost 10 years ago. And I don't know how we profit off of something that's free...
My philosophy (which is in lesson nine, and probably should have come sooner; lesson one is more focused on why we need quantum mechanics, and the rest develops over time) is that the concepts and ideas of physics are represented by the math, but not defined by them. Math can certainly point out directions to look at and avenues to explore, and indicate connections between ideas we hadn't previously noticed, but as a student, I always found that the worst possible reason for a physics phenomenon was "because the math says so." This is about getting those ideas across for people who want to learn about the ideas. The ideas covered in the last two lessons are not typically introduced before grad school. (Lesson one starts at the high school level, which is all I wanted to assume from my audience.) Will you be a researcher when you're done? No. Will you have a better understanding of popular science articles relating to quantum physics? I certainly hope so.
It's hit the concepts dealt with at the graduate level, but I left the math out to make those concepts accessible to people who don't have the heavy mathematical background. I'm half way through writing next year's summer school (linear algebra, full mathematical glory, ending with tensors), and the 2012 curriculum will be Einstein's Relativity and have two parts to each lesson. The first part will be all conceptual, like this, and the second part will have all of the math. 2013 will be real analysis, 2014 assessment theory, and years beyond that haven't been pinned down. The "Bureau 42 teaches" link at the side has everything along these lines listed, with links if they've already been posted.
Those of you who haven't activated the Sci-Fi news slashbox might have missed this article about the same thing on Bureau 42.
</shameless plug>
In its most basic form, LaTeX is similar to StarOffice. I think it's more correct to say that StarOffice's equation handling techniques are very similar to LaTeX's basic layouts. I could go on for a long time about this, but suffice it to say I used StarOffice for a year. Then I discovered LaTeX, and I haven't looked back since. It's a fantastic and versatile software package that does not require a mouse at any stage of the operation, and has very low system overhead.
Those of you who haven't explored the Sci-Fi news slashbox may be interested in my review of the first season of Stargate SG-1 on DVD that CmdrTaco mentioned. (Season two is due on September 3, if you care.)
</blatant plug>Diplomacy is an excellent Risk-like game, but it's far more dependant on people than random chance. It's set in World War I. Each player runs a country, and they have to form allies and such to dominate Europe. There are no dice or cards; you move armies as you like, and the player with the most armies moving into a given territory wins. The fun part is the conversations and pacts you make between rounds. These conversations are for your own benefit only. You decide your plans, but there are no rules against stabbing each other in the backs. It's great fun!
I don't know about "Axis and Allies," but my grade 11 social studies teacher (Joel Short) does an annual trench battle. We arranged the desks in trenches, and threw balled up paper at each other. It really showed how hard it is to get the upper hand.
Of course, it might have worked better had he better anticipated us. Once a paper ball landed, it was harmless and could be used again. If it hit you before landing, you were dead. Our team had a bunch of people with bad aim, so we had four people to their eleven in the first few minutes. Then two of us re-filled the green garbage bags he brought the paper balls in, and dumped the whole thing into the enemy trenches. We died, but our team won. :)
I've got to chime in on the Kinesis Classic keyboards. I've been diagnosed with bilateral elbow tendonitis, so both arms have problems. When I use the normal rectangular keyboard my employer put in my office, I can work for, at most, two hours a day before the pain gets to be too much. When I use the normal ergonomic keyboards (such as the first issue of the Microsoft model, which I used to have) I managed to get about three or four useful hours of work done. With the Kinesis keyboard, I can get eight or nine hours in each day, without a problem. I don't know how much is the keyboard itself, and how much is the fact that I can put my trackball where the numeric keypad used to be, but it's helped me a lot. (If I hadn't upgraded, I doubt I'd ever finish the thesis I'm polishing off.)
Perhaps I shouldn't have posted until the server on the other end came back up. :)
Exactly. For example, a search for the Higgs Boson that doesn't find it would qualify for this journal, and might force us to rewrite large portions of current physics theory. (Basically, we'd have to redo just about everything fundamental that involves mass.)
I use Konqueror, actually. I haven't upgraded in a while, though. (I'd rather not disturb anything until after the final draft of my thesis is finished and submitted.)
Does anyone out there want to mirror that in a readable font?
The free version of StarOffice is OpenOffice, which was mentioned.
Darin Morgan was only involved in a handful of episodes. He didn't really care for the show, so he wrote episodes that were a lot different than the norm. If memory serves, he wrote "Humbug" (circus freaks), "War of the Coprophages" (cockroaches), "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" (Peter Boyle as psychic guy; he won a guest actor Emmy for it), and "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" (Charles Nelson Reilly writing a book). He also acted in two episodes, as the Flukeman in "The Host" and the shapeshifter in "Small Potatoes." Any correlation between the quality of the show and Darin Morgan's departure is entirely coincidental.
David D. got married and demanded that the show move to California so that he could be close to his wife.
Fox asked Chris Carter to move the show to LA. The tax breaks in Canada were reduced, so the cost per episode ended up being the same in both locations (since they were still flying a lot of the actors up from L.A.) David Duchovny mentioned that he'd support the move so he could be closer to his wife, and that's what the media jumped on. We shouldn't blame David Duchovny for something that wasn't his decision.
The Best of Trek marathon was Boxing Day. Today's just the normal four-hour Star Trek block. (TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager daily).
For Canadian residents, Space: The Imagination Station is running the ''Frank Herbert's Dune" miniseries on New Year's Day, starting at 1pm Eastern Time (10am Pacific).
I know the timecodes are on the film. Much of the data itself is off film, though. (Some is still there; when it first came out, one of our projectionists left the Shindler's List CDs in while showing Jurassic Park. The soundtrack had elements of both in the theater. This must have happenned to a few people, as the DTS disks included failsafes to prevent this very shortly thereafter.)