In a time when “cheap” textbooks cost $75 and the usual cost for a semester of textbooks easily can tip the $500 scale, Dover Publications is a nice relief for the college student looking for a good reference on a budget. This Dover book, Classical Mechanics, written by H.C. Corben and Philip Stehle, is an excellent, although somewhat dated, textbook on classical dynamics.

What I enjoy most about this book is its early discussion of what is meant by “particle”, and the limitations of this notion. This is something that is very relevant to an understanding of classical mechanics, but seems noticeably absent from such standards as Goldstein. Another noteworthy aspect of the book, in my opinion, is its treatment of several non-standard topics. There is an entire chapter on particle orbits in high energy accelerators, and the appendix gives a great discussion of Riemannian geometry and the use of quaternions.

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Posted: April 28th, 2007 under Reviews.
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The extra-solar planetary search added a new success recently, Gliese 581 C. Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star located approximately 20 light years away, with two other planets already located in this solar system. It was first reported today by a European team headed by Stephane Udry of the Université de Genève. The compelling aspect to this is that Gl581C has an average surface temperature estimated between 0 and 40 Celsius — this means that the planet could have liquid water on its surface.

This is compelling because it is the first planet found to be within the so-called “habitable zone” of a star. As has been suggested, this makes the planet the first candidate for a search for extraterrestrial life, as it is the first terrestrial planet found within the habitable zone of a star. This is also the most Earth-like planet as yet discovered.

The discovery was reported in a pre-print of the article “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets” while SPACE.com reported on the discovery in the general media.

Posted: April 25th, 2007 under Physics.
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Recently, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article by Hara Marano in Psychology Today entitled “A Nation of Wimps?“. The essential gist of this article is that hovering parents create children who cannot cope with the stresses of the real world. I have seen other articles to this effect before; one college administrator in another article referred to parents who must know about their child’s every action after they moved off to college as “helicopter parents”. This particular article gives a great deal of specific examples of how we have “softened” childhood for the coming generation.

Playgrounds are no longer a place for children to play together. Instead of allowing the child to figure out “how to play”, there is constantly a parent hovering around to make sure little Jimmy doesn’t fall and hurt himself. Parent-teacher conferences are more about making sure that the child has high grades, and what the teacher isn’t doing if the student doesn’t. I’m particularly fond of the 13-year old who has difficulty with “Gestault thinking”. Read more »

Posted: April 19th, 2007 under Education, Politics.
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    Some people use a tragedy like the recent Virginia Tech shootings to effect change, you improve society or to prevent something like this from happening again. But then, there are these people, who use such tragedies to forward their political agenda by stretching reality until it breaks to forward their own beliefs.

Just ignore the fact that there are hardly any school shootings in Europe, and they have been teaching evolution in the science classroom, unopposed, for decades. Never mind that people have been violent and angry at nothing for as long as there has been nothing to be angry at. Turn a blind eye to the reality that the same brand of religious fanatic in Islam condemns the teaching of evolution as much as any crazed Creationist in the US, and we can just look at Afghanistan to see where that gets us.

The thing that disturbs me the most is that Creationists are opportunists who have no scrupples about what they will blame on evolution. Claims such as these are almost impossible to refute; where do you begin breaking down the logical structure of a statement so wild and unsupportable? Suggestions would be nice, but really, how do you even refute what is being said? The statement has no basis in fact, no support from anything, and yet people will dogmatically blame Columbine, Virginia Tech, or the Yankees blowing it in the playoffs on the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Maybe we should just let all the rabid Creationists have their own state, and let them run it the way they want to. We’ll check back in twenty years. If they are living in a man-made Eden after then, perhaps they were right. But somehow I doubt that this would happen, and the rest of us would get stuck cleaning up the mess they would make.

Posted: April 19th, 2007 under Politics.
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To all interested, I have an update on my personal funding issues. I have received Federal Work Study money, and, due to a slight miscommunication, funding from an advisor this summer as well. I think I’m going to talk to him about maybe pocketing a little extra out of the FWS money, if he pays me $1000 less and I have a $1500 FWS grant, then we both win! Read more »

Posted: April 18th, 2007 under Physics, Personal.
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I’m not a neutrino physicist, so I couldn’t give you very good information, but a blog entry by a guest writer for Cosmic Variance provides a pretty good description of what exactly is going on. Fascinating stuff, truly.

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Posted: April 14th, 2007 under Physics.
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The first book review here, appropriately, is J.J. Sakurai’s classic textbook, Modern Quantum Mechanics. Written in the late 1980s, prior to the author’s untimely death, the book was finished by the editor San Fu Tuan, along with others, and every physicist is lucky that they did this. Sakurai’s quantum mechanics textbook, unlike his field theory textbook Advanced Quantum Mechanics, has become a standard for any graduate level quantum mechanics course, and for good reason.

Chapters 1 through 3 of this book are by themselves worth the price tag, as they are a model for clarity in exposition on the subjects of linear algebra, time evolution, and the angular momentum algebra. From the beginning, Sakurai motivates his arguments physically, and while he uses the more abstract notions of Lie algebras and group theory to develop quantum mechanics, he does so in an accessible way, never sacrificing clarity for unnecessary rigor.

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Posted: April 14th, 2007 under Reviews.
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I don’t want to make a habit of posting non-physics related things in a physics blog, but this warrants a quick post. For those out of the loop, earlier today Kurt Vonnegut passed away from injuries sustained by a fall in his Manhattan home. He was 84 years old. So it goes.

Posted: April 12th, 2007 under Personal.
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To everyone stupid ambitious enough to take a shot at graduate school in anything, the most important thing isn’t rankings, or how well you mesh with the department. People will tell you to pick a department that “feels right”. Of course, it’s important to not feel like an indentured servant in your department for however long you’re stuck there, but there is something far more important than any of this. Funding.

You could attend the best department in the country, everything feels right, and you could be willing to give up your left arm to go there, but if they can’t pay you, you’re going to have problems. I’m going through this right now: I love the department, I’m talking to an advisor who does really interesting and good work, but I’m running into issues with finding money. I applied for Federal Work Study over the summer under the advice that it will pay for everything. It would pay for everything, if you were a cheap bastard who could live on $200 of spending money a month. I’m not. Read more »

Posted: April 11th, 2007 under Physics, Personal.
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    Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that I have come up with my first regular feature that may actually stick around for a while. Every week, I’m going to try to write a review on a book relating to physics or math. These are, of course, going to be references, not “pop science” books.

Here’s where all three of my readers kick in. I have signed up as a “vendor” for Amazon.com, so each book listed will be linked to through a special link. If someone is actually going to buy the book, and they buy it through that link, I get a small kickback. Pretty neat, huh? Of course, this won’t affect my reviews, but it would be a nice way to get paid a bit for running this website.

So starting this Friday, look out for my first review.

Posted: April 9th, 2007 under General.
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