. . . to prove to Daddy I'm Not a Fool. . .

It's been nearly a month since my last post, Sailor Moon related or otherwise, so I felt the need to write something up, brief though it may be. Yesterday was the first day of what is, arguably, my first real grown-up job: physics instructor at UNBC.

Specifically, I'm serving as term instructor for UNBC's Physics 115 summer course. Physics 115 is pretty much the lowest level physics course you can take while still having to do math-- it's intended for "students without grade 12 physics" according to the course calendar. Based on my SI experience, I've chosen to interpret this as "students who might-- MIGHT-- know who Stephen Hawking is, but otherwise-- oh God! That one saw an equation! Call the nurse!"

I've been spending the last couple of months preparing notes for the course; the last month, in particular, was pretty busy. For that reason, I've not been posting new Sailor Moon material. Nonetheless, I have been scribbling notes and drafts of scenes for the script, and once I start to get into the groove of teaching, marking, and writing up new notes, I hope to start posting this new material.

Until then. . .

I Used to Do Something That Was Almost Like A Real Job. . .

Image of Jeremy taken shortly after his thesis defence.

So, it finally happened. My paper, "Quantum tunneling and reflection of a molecule with a single bound state," has been published in Physical Review A. I promised in a previous post that I would write a summary of paper. So, with reading week quickly evaporating away, about eighty physics assignments yet to be marked, and a Japanese midterm on Monday, I thought I should get on that.

The approach I decided to take was a basic parsing/elaboration of the abstract, since that's the only part of the paper available to read on the internet without having to pay a fee. The abstract, by definition, pretty much lays out the content of the paper anyway, so with a bit of explanation you should be able to get the jist of what we, i.e. myself, Danielle Kerbrat, and my supervising prof Dr. Mark Shegelski, discovered and published. I'm going to assume that anyone who reads this has about high-school level science education, which means I'll have a lot of explaining to do.

Abstract:

In this article, we present the results of studies on the quantum mechanical tunneling and reflection of a diatomic, homonuclear molecule with a single bound state incident upon a potential barrier.

Hoo-boy. Where to start?

The "diatmoic, homonuclear molecule" is basically a pair of identical particles that interact with and, loosely speaking, "attach" to one another by means of an attractive force. Usually, the particles in question are atoms. However, our formulation is general enough to be applied to any pair of "attached" particles, such as Cooper pairs and excitons. These examples appear later in the abstract, so I'll explain what they mean later on.

When the atoms are attached to each other, we say that the molecule is in "bound state." When they aren't, we say they're in an "unbound state." To be in a "bound state," the atoms in the molecule must have lower total energy than two free atoms. To understand what that means, imagine a you're in a region that's entirely flat except for a small, bowl-shaped valley. If you're in the valley, you have to expend energy in order to get out of the valley. If you don't have enough energy to climb out of the valley, you're stuck-- "bound" to the valley. Another way of thinking about this is that, if you're standing in the valley, you have less energy than if you're standing in the flat plain. When two atoms are "attached" to each other in a molecule, what's really happening is that the force they exert on one-another creates a sort of potential energy "valley," whereas two free atoms are in a potential energy state more akin to standing in the flat region outside of the valley.

So what does it mean for a molecule to have a "single bound state?" In order to understand the behaviour of small objects, like atoms, molecules, electrons, etc. we had to discover a whole new set of physicals laws, which we call quantum mechanics. The problem with quantum mechanics is, well, it's weird. One of the implications of quantum mechanics is that, if two atoms are bound in a molecule, then they can only occupy certain energy levels-- we say that the energy levels are "quantized," hence "quantum mechanics." Think back to the valley for a minute. You could stand at the very bottom of the valley, or half-way up the valley, or two-thirds of the way up, or one-quarter, or any other place you like. With any given height up the valley, there is a corresponding potential energy level. In other words, the laws of physics do not restrict you to one or another given energy level in the valley. However, if the valley were like a molecule, you could only occupy certain specific energy levels. You could, say, be at the very bottom, or half way up, or two-thirds of the way up, but you could not be at any other altitude. When you're standing at one of the permitted altitudes, you could be said to be in one of the given "bound states" of the valley. Likewise, the atoms in the molecule can only exist in certain bound states. What these states are depends on the kind of molecules we're considering. For our paper, we consider a molecule whose parameters are such that there is only one bound state. If we go back to the example of the valley, that would mean that we can only stand at the very bottom of the valley-- no other altitude is permitted. One more thing that I may as well mention now is that the title of the paper mentions that we're considering a "weakly bound" molecule. This is akin to a very shallow valley. The implications of weak binding will be made more clear later on, so I'll leave it for now.

The other important thing mentioned in the above excerpt is the idea of "quantum tunneling." Purge your mind of the valley, for now I'm going to ask you to imagine you're riding a bike toward a hill. I'm also going to ask you to imagine, for the sake of argument, that once you start climbing the hill you stop pedalling you bike. If you were going fast enough before you started climbing, then you'll have enough kinetic energy to coast over the top of the hill and reach the other side. If not, you'll come to a stop before the crest of the hill and begin rolling back down. This makes sense, so of course quantum mechanics has to find some way screw it up. The way it does this is through the phenomenon of quantum tunneling (since my paper was published in an American journal, I will continue to spell it as "tunneling," and not "tunnelling").

What I'm about to tell you is strange, but since I'll have to discuss it eventually, and since it does have bearing on the explanation of quantum tunneling, I figure I may as well get it out of the way now. Do you remember in science class when you were taught that light behaves as a wave? Do you also remember hearing somewhere or reading somewhere that light is composed of particles called photons? Did you ever step back and wonder why scientists just can't seem to make up their bloody minds on the issue? Is light a wave or a series of particles? It must be one or the other, it can't be both. Well, according to quantum mechanics, light is both a wave and a series of particles. . . and so is everything else! Electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, your computer, you yourself. . . all waves. "But waves of what?," you might ask. Probability. Basically, the wave part of a given object, be it a photon, electron, atom, or molecule, determines the probability of observing that object at a given place (it also gives the probability of the object having a given momentum, but that's a whole other story). I'm oversimplifying a bit, but at any position where there's a crest in the wave, the probability of observing a particle at that position is high; wherever there's a trough, the probability is low.

This complicates the study of physics at the microscopic level quite a bit. Since the days of Newton, physics has always used particles to understand the laws of motion, with the implicit assumption that we can always take a measurement or make an observation and determine where the particle is at any given time. Additionally, if we know exactly where a particle is, what its speed and direction of motion is, and all of the forces acting on it are, it was assumed that the laws of physics could be used to predict its position and velocity at any time, past, present, or future. It was assumed, in other words, that the laws of physics act in a deterministic way. Quantum mechanics, however, says that, if we think in terms of particles, the laws of physics must probabilistic. But this means that we cannot use physical laws to make any solid predictions about the behaviour of a given object, rendering those physical laws next to useless. However, it turns out that if we think instead in terms the probability waves mentioned earlier, we have a lot more luck. Unlike particles, probability waves do behave deterministically. Understanding just how these waves behave allows physicists to make some very interesting, very counter-intuitive predictions.

In the macroscopic world that we all live in, this doesn't really amount to much. Even though there is a probability wave associated with each of us, the probability of any of us being exactly where we are is 100%. At the microscopic level, however, this becomes much more pronounced. One example of how much more pronounced it is quantum tunneling. Recall the proverbial hill I discussed earlier. The microscopic equivalent to the hill is something called a "potential barrier." Imagine some microscopic particle approaching a potential barrier with some given kinetic energy. If it behaved the same way as the bike climbing the hill, then the particle would definitely pass if it had high enough kinetic energy, and would definitely not pass if it didn't. But, you'll recall, nothing is "definite" as far as particles are concerned, and in order to make predictions we have to think in terms of the wave, or "wave function" in physicist parlance, associated with the particle. It turns out that, no matter what the energy of the incoming particle, a chunk of the wave will always manage to travel past the barrier. What this means is that, no matter what the energy of the incoming particle, there is some probability that the particle will be observed on the other side of the barrier. This is like the bicycle appearing on the other side of the hill even though it was only going fast enough to make it half way up-- the only way this could happen is if the bicycle travelled through a tunnel in the hill. Hence, "quantum tunneling." Make no mistake, though, the particle didn't "dig" its way through the potential barrier. Rather, the laws of quantum mechanics allowed the particle to travel through the barrier as though it were not there at all.

If we're only considering a single particle incident upon a given barrier, then it's relatively easy to calculate the wave function and thus find the probability of tunneling. However, when we start to consider more complex objects like, say, a diatomic homonuclear molecule, things get very ugly. Instead of one particle, we now have to consider two, which means we have to consider the object as having size and being spread out in space. Moreover, these two particle are being affected not only by the potential barrier but by the force attracting them to each other. This attractive force creates a "potential well"-- the microscopic equivalent to the metaphorical valley-- which must be taken into account as well. Recall also that the molecule can exist in any one of a number of bound or unbound states. As a result the molecule can undergo changes of state upon interacting with the potential barrier. These factors complicate things so much that the tunneling of molecules wasn't seriously investigated until 1994. Quantum tunneling of single particles, on the other hand, has been investigated since the 1920's.

From the next part of the abstract:

In the first study, we investigate the tunneling of a molecule using a time-dependent formulation. The molecular wave function is modeled as a Gaussian wave packet, and its propagation is calculated numerically using Crank-Nicholson integration.

(Our paper is actually a combination of two different studies. We had initially intended to publish two papers, but due to various circumstances we decided to publish both studies in a single paper.)

In quantum mechanics, you can look at things in either a "time-independent" way or a "time-dependent" way. For the purposes of describing the results in the paper, the difference between the two formulations is as outlined as follows.

In studies of quantum tunneling, we're usually interested in calculating the probability that a given object will be observed ahead of the barrier-- "probability of tunneling"-- or behind the barrier-- "probability of reflection". The time-independent formulation is very useful for calculating these probabilities, but it's not useful for describing what happens to the molecule as it's tunneling through the barrier. In order to study this, the so-called "tunneling dynamics," you need to use a "time-dependent" formulation. The problem is that this is quite a bit harder to do than using a time-independent formulation. For that reason, every study (that we're aware of) in molecular tunneling that came before this paper used a time-independent formulation. In other words, to my and my co-authors' knowledge, this paper is the first to use a time-dependent formulation to investigate the tunneling of molecules, making me and my co-authors the world's foremost experts in time-dependent molecular tunneling!

What's that, Alexandre Bilodeau? You're the first Canadian to win gold at the Winter Olympics on home soil? Big whoop.

Anyway. With a time-dependent formulation, we basically created a computer simulation of the molecule's wave function and calculated how the wave function behaves as it interacts with a potential barrier. That, in a nutshell, is what all that talk about "Gaussian wave packets" and "Crank-Nicholson integration" is referring to. It was a very difficult calculation. Like all previous work done at UNBC on molecular tunneling, we had to use the university's supercomputer in order to run the simulations. So what do we have to show for it?

We found that the molecule could take one of multiple paths once it begins to interact with the barrier. For one, it could reflect. Basically, the molecule hits the barrier, temporarily breaks apart (i.e. transitions to an unbound state), recombines, and bounces back from the barrier. This isn't really a surprising result. But a couple of the other paths it could take are surprising.

From the abstract:

It is found that a molecule may transition between the bound state and an unbound state numerous times during the process of reflection from or transmission past the barrier.

This means that, if the molecule follows a path such that it does tunnel through the barrier, it will break apart and recombine some number of times before it passes the barrier. The reason we think this happens is summarized, in highly simplified fashion, as follows. We chose to use a very thin potential barrier called a delta barrier. In time-independent studies, this barrier provided results that captured many of the features of tunneling when more realistic barriers were used. We think that when the molecule hits the delta barrier, there's a chance that one of the molecules passes the barrier, but the other is reflected by it, and hence the molecule breaks up. However, there is still an attractive force drawing the molecules toward each other, so the atom that passed the barrier may be drawn back toward the atom that remained behind the barrier and eventually recombine with it.

This leads into another surprising result, one that is not considered in time-independent studies:

It is also found that, in addition to reflecting and transmitting, the molecule may also temporarily straddle the potential barrier in an unbound state.

In other words, the molecule, upon contacting the barrier, stays near the barrier for a relatively long time. This is what happens when the scenario described in the last paragraph occurs repeatedly, only without the molecule recombining and entering into a bound state. Straddling, as we called it, does not occur for a molecule in the bound state. In order for a molecule to break up, it needs energy. This energy comes from the initial kinetic energy of the molecule. Straddling occurs when the energy needed to break up the molecule is nearly the same as the kinetic energy of the molecule, so that when the molecule breaks up, the atoms don't have very much kinetic energy left. Again, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it captures the main physical features of what's going on.

In the second study, we consider the case of a molecule incident in the bound state upon a step potential with energy less than the step. We show that in the limit where the binding energy e0 approaches zero and the step potential V0 goes to infinity, the molecule cannot remain in a bound state if the center of mass gets closer to the step than an arbitrarily large distance x0 which increases as the magnitude of e0 decreases, as V0 increases, or both. We also show that, for e0→0- and V0→∞, if the molecule is incident in the bound state, it is reflected in the bound state with probability equal to unity, when the center of mass reaches the reflection distance x0. We verify that the unbound states exhibit the expected physical behavior. We discuss some surprising results.

The second study, unlike the first, was entirely analytical, i.e. pen and paper mathematics, with no computers needed. What we considered was the case of a molecule that was extremely weakly bound incident upon a "hard wall" potential barrier, that is a potential barrier that was very long and very high. The binding energy is the term e0 referred to above; the term V0 refers to the energy "height" of the potential barrier. We considered this case, initially, as a simple test of our calculations. It turned out that this "simple" case was actually very hard, and yielded very counter intuitive results, as I'll explain below.

Intuitively, what we expected to happen for the weakly bound molecule to come close to the barrier and break up, with the atoms reflected away from the wall. What we found instead is that there is a distance, x0, from the wall within which the molecule cannot remain in the bound state. The distance x0 grows larger the more weakly bound the molecule is. Furthermore, we found that the probability of the molecule being reflected in the bound state approaches 100% in the case of extremely weak binding and extremely large potential barrier height. Taken together, this means that a weakly bound molecule, coming towards the hard wall potential barrier from a very long ways away, comes to a within a distance x0 from the barrier, and is then reflected away from the wall in the bound state. To get a bit of an idea of how weird this is, imagine throwing a brittle champagne at a brick wall. You'd expect it to hit the wall and shatter, with shards of glass boucing back. If the glass behaved like a weakly bound molecule, what would happen instead is that the glass comes within 50 feet of the wall and bounces back, intact. A champagne glass is more than a little bit different from a diatomic, homonuclear molecule, I know, but you get the idea.

Connections between our results and investigations done in cold atoms, excitons, Cooper pairs, and Rydberg atoms are discussed.

Apart from the sheer difficulty of the calculations, another problem with the study of molecular tunneling is in connecting it to real world applications. Direct experimental applications don't yet exist. However, connections can be drawn to many real world systems. Rydberg atoms, for instance, can be modelled pair of weakly bound particles, i.e. a very high energy electon and an atomic nucleus + lower energy electons. Rydberg atoms can also combine to form very weakly bound molecules. Collisions of Rydberg atoms with the surfaces of certain materials has been investigated. This scenario is akin to a weakly bound molecule incident upon a hard wall.

The tunneling of other composite particle objects, like excitons and Cooper pairs, can also be studied and are a subject of research interest. Cooper pairs are basically bound pairs of electrons which exist inside superconductors, and are indeed what make supercondutivity possible. Excitons are weird things that form inside of semiconductors and other materials. Basically, when an electron in such a material becomes excited, i.e. gains energy (by means of a photon collision, for example), it leaves an "electron hole," or absence, in whatever state it used to be it. This "hole," weirdly enough, behaves like another particle, and what's more, it can become bound the excited electron, forming an electon-hole "molecule" known as an exciton.

So, there you have it. I've summarized my crowning acheivement as a physicist, and with that out of the way, I'll get back to work on what really matters-- Sailor Moon: The Movie!

If THIS doesn't convince Hollywood that I'm the man to write Sailor Moon. . .

Since August, I've been working on submitting a manuscript to the scientific journal Physical Review A. The work presented therein is an extension of my master's thesis work. This morning I received notification that the manuscript has been accepted for publication. There are still a few steps to go through, and I don't know yet when it'll be published. I'll keep you guys updated. Maybe in a future post, I can give the title, author list, abstract and a layman's summary of the results. Until then, it's time to celebrate.

CAP Congress, Part I

Greetings from Moncton, New Brunswick!

I've just finished presenting my thesis research at the 2009 CAP congress. Naomi and I left Prince George on June 1st (I handed in my thesis and Oral Defence/External Examiner Request forms the same day) and drove cross country, arriving in Moncton on the June 5th. My journey has taught me many intersting things, about Canada, physics, and life in general. I shall now impart my wisdon in no particular order:

-- Don't wear a suit to a physics conference. You'll look like a pretentious ass, and despite your delusions to the contrary, it won't make you a more eloquent speaker.

-- The Prairies aren't as boring as they're made out to be. Then again, it's hard for any place to be boring when it's rushing past you at 140 km/h. (I kid, Mom.)

-- If you are native, you can get away with naming your convinience store 'How' Convinient. Get it?!

-- Quebec is all in French. I know I should have known that already, but that fact only really dawned upon me when we approached Quebec city and saw billboards annoucing that we were entering "La capitale nationale." Seriously. If it weren't for the fact that we needed to fuel up in Quebec city, I probably would have passed though the whole province without stopping.

-- Despite the anxiety I felt passing through Quebec, though, there were some beautiful towns along the St. Lawrence River. We had to take a detour off of Highway 40 because of construction (I think-- again, it was all French) that took us through some of these towns. This, plus Miyuu Sawai, almost makes me want to try learning French again. Almost.

-- New Brunswick, unlike pretty much the rest of Canada as far as I can tell, actually is bilingual!

-- When giving a presentation, in physics or otherwise, be sure to point at the screen in front of the room and not at the computer screen in front of you. A professor was kind enough to inform me of that rule, and as a result I'll likely be brooding on the embarassment of that moment for months. Maybe I just won't come back home. North America's a big place, I'm sure they'll never find me.

-- There's a maritime garbage disposal company named "Fero." Only three people will understand why that is so bloody weird.

-- New Brunswick, while geographically rather dull, is otherwise quite awesome. Unless you want to find an open liquor store at 11:00 pm on a saturday night. If that's the case, New Brunswick is not for you.

-- You can order a whole lobster at a restaurant in Shediac, New Brunswick. Naomi did so, while I worked on my presentation back at the hotel. Fuck!

-- Despite what you tell yourself, you cannot present thrity-nine slides of text, equations, and graphs in twelve minutes.

-- Time zones change as you travel across the country. Yet another thing I hadn't considered when planning this trip. There's actually a North American time zone east of New York.

-- We're east of New York! And Boston!

-- The beauty of Canada is greatly exaggerated. Aside from B.C., Jasper, and Ontario near the Great Lakes, Canada is just trees and plains on flat earth.

-- Parliament Hill is right smack in the middle of downtown Ottawa. I thought there would be some separation from the city centre, but there it is.

-- Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is not as good as I imagined it would be.

Stay tuned for Part 2: America!

It's Like. . . Some Sort of . . . Star War. . .

If you could believe such a absurd thing!

Seriously, though. . . remember when the U.S. and China got into a pissing match over who was better at blowing up their own satellites with missiles? It seems like Russia has gotten into the act as well. Their approach, however, is a bit more direct. . .

From MSNBC:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Russian and U.S. experts say the first-ever collision between two satellites has created clouds of debris that could threaten other unmanned spacecraft.

...

The smashup occured over Siberia when a derelict Russian military communications satellite crossed paths with a U.S. Iridium satellite.

The two big communications satellites collided in the first-ever crash of two intact spacecraft in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds and posing a slight risk to the international space station.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) over Siberia on Tuesday.

Americans? Chinese? Pussies. Leave it to the Russians have the sheer frozen balls to destroy a foreign satellite. . . with their own decommissioned satellite!

But those ex-Bolshevist bastards aren't content with taking out just one satellite:

Other Russian and U.S. officials warn that satellites in nearby orbits could be damaged.

...

The U.S. Strategic Command's Space Surveillance Network detected the two debris clouds created by Tuesday's collision. Julie Ziegenhorn, a spokeswoman for the Strategic Command, told msnbc.com that the collision left behind an estimated 600 pieces of debris, but she emphasized that the Pentagon's orbital watchdog had to do "still more characterization" of the collision's potential effect.

NASA's [Mark] Matney said the count would likely be in the thousands if pieces of debris down to the scale of microns — about the size of a grain of sand — are included.

...

Nicholas Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Houston space center, said the risk of damage from Tuesday’s collision is [relatively high] for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit [than the International Space Station] and nearer the debris field.

The satellite-- the victim satellite-- was owned by telecommunications company Iridium Holdings LLC. According to the article, one of the company's biggest clients is the US Department of Defence.

Coincidence? What do you mean yes? Are you blind? As we speak, the Russians are already planning to allow satellites they decommissioned during the Cold War to follow their original orbits and eventually collide with satellites launched years later that they could never have anticipated! It's all part of the Soviet grand plan launched years ago: to destory the enemies the Soviet Union my means of the remnant's of the Soviet Union's own downfall! And to think, you people are still fooled by that little puppet show in Berlin.

Or. . . maybe Iridium just fucked up. Though the article never specifies whether he's talking about this particular collision or any collision of satellites, Mark Matney was quoted as saying “We knew this was going to happen eventually.”

UPDATE: Cool video. It freezes up for the first second or so, but if you click a couple of seconds ahead, it works fine.

Lab

I'm in my Phys 111 lab. It's 7:50 pm and I'm not leaving until around 9:30. It's hard going. I mangled my introduction to the lab because I was tired and didn't prepare and basically just didn't give a shit. As a result, I think a couple of students laughed at me, and frankly, I can't blame them. On top of that, I'm also marking labs for Christine, the senior lab instructor. She's telling me that I have to "get mean," which means, in part, that I'll have to be even more vigilant in identifying mistakes than I already am, which means even more work. Either that, or I'll just have to take off more points for the same mistakes, which is easier, but not neccessarily fair to the students.

Labs. My "fuck that guy" of the evening.

(This does not bode well for me if I'm selected by JET to teach English in Japan. Come to think of it, that would have been an interesting blog topic. Way better than bitching about the shitty commercials done by my make-believe Japanese girlfriend.)

There Will Be Blood. . . IN SPACE. . . .

. . . Space . . . Space . . . Space. . . space. . .!*



It's long been known that Saturn's moon Titan has a huge amount of organic (carbon-based) chemicals, both in its dense atmosphere (twice as dense as Earth's) and in its frozen lakes of methane(recently photographed by the Huygens probe). Scientists believe that Titan's hydrocarbon content is very similar to that of Earth before the beginning of life, and thus that the moon-- which has been effectively "frozen" for billions of years-- provides a snapshot of our own world from ages past.

Big whoop.

Fortunately, Cassini-Huygens researcher has found an actual good reason to care about Titan: TAITEN HAZ TEH OILZ!!!1!1

Saturn's moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from the Cassini spacecraft.

The bounty of fuels, however, is on an orange-coloured moon at least 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth, a trip that took the Cassini spacecraft seven years to make.

Researchers from the European Space Agency first reported their findings about the ringed planet's moon in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters on Jan. 28.

Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said the estimated fuel reserves are based on Cassini's surface maps of the moon, which show what appear to be lakes and seas. Researchers speculate the liquid is methane, one of the few known molecules to exist as a liquid in such extreme cold.

The scientists also believe dunes on the moon's surface are made of complex organic molecules called tholins.

"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material-it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz in a statement. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan."

Although only 20 per cent of the moon's surface has been mapped, the researchers have already found dozens of lakes that individually could house as much energy as the 117,000 million tonnes of proven reserves of oil and gas on Earth.

"[Our] global estimate is based mostly on views of the lakes in the northern polar regions. We have assumed the south might be similar, but we really don't yet know how much liquid is there," said Lorenz.

The dense haze of Titan's mostly nitrogen atmosphere had prevented earlier attempts to view the surface of the moon before the U.S. space probe Cassini first arrived in 2004. Radar is the only way to pierce the haze surrounding Titan, which has an atmosphere 10 times denser than Earth's.

The probe's next flyby of Titan is on Feb. 22, 2008, when it will observe the landing site of the ESA's Huygens probe, which landed on the moon's surface in 2004.

The combined Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. It first launched from Earth in 1997.

Titan's dense atmosphere and presence of carbon-based material have fascinated scientists who see it as a time vault of what Earth may have looked like billions of years ago, before life formed and introduced oxygen into the atmosphere.

As the article says, Titan is over a billion kilometers away(When? On closest approach? Furthest?) so there probably won't be any attempt to extract it. However, for the sake of balance-- actually, for the sake of my contract obligates me to climb my political soapbox at least once every three blogs-- let me just point out some of the stupid things that supposedly reasonable, advanced civilizations have done to get their hands on oil:

*As I wrote this, I found myself wondering if "Space" is really spelled like that.

Having been an astronomy and space travel nut my whole life, I now suddenly wondered why I had written a word that sounded like "Spa-kay" (Latinesque pronunciation). I actually had to look up the word "space" on Google to make sure it was spelled properly. Stupid foreign languages messing up my science!

Guess Where I'm Writing From!

Give up?

My Lab!

Yay!

Details.

I'm currently in room 8-229 of UNBC, and I'm teaching the second experiment out of eight in the Physics 101 lab curriculum. I began writing at approximately 12:30, and won't be out of here until just before 2:30.

What am I teaching? Standing waves in a tube. Basically, we just put a speaker at the end of a long tube, connect it to a function generator to control the frequency and amplitude, and run a microphone down the tube in order to determine (a) the resonance frequencies at which standing waves form, and (b) the nodes and anti-nodes of said waves. Measuring the speed of sound fits in there as well. None of this really matters. The important thing is that you can make cool videogame and old-timey radio sounds with the speaker/function generator apparatus.

Two students just came up to me to get their data tables signed. It's a new anti-plagiarism measure. I told them that they have to re-write their data in pen before I would sign it. They were not happy, and I don't blame them.

It's cool that Christine set up a computer right at the desk. If she didn't, this blog entry would never be. I also checked my UNBC email before writing this entry, which reminded me why I so so so so so so so hate to use UNBC email.

12:40.

If someone raised their hand right now I wouldn't even know it. That's a cool feeling.

More students came to get their forms signed. Here comes one now! Alright!

These labs really are exhausting. I only really "work" for half an hour during the actual period, in which I give the pre-lab lecture. This is actually the worst part of it. I've gotten a bit better at these lectures, in that I don't feel quite as horrible doing it as I used to, yet I still get the distinct impression that my students consider me a horrible horrible tool. And their right.

They're right.

Sorry.

A couple of students have left. Fine by me, as long as they got all their data. I figure if they really want to crap out and leave early, that's fine. If it turns out to be a mistake for them to leave, they'll pay for it in their marks. If not, why be a douche and make them stay?

12:45.

I missed a seminar being given today by Dr. Shegelski, my grad supervisor. He was talking about research in molecular tunneling in which I was involved. "Involved" meaning that I was standing in the same general place that awesome research by Jeff and Hal was being done and getting paid for it all the same.

I missed it because I had to come here and do stupid prep for the stupid lab. That's the other exhausting thing about these labs. I usually come into the lab room about an hour and a half in advance to make sure that I'm really truly prepped for the experiment at hand. And even then, my preparation is still often grossly incomplete.

They're really piling on to me now. I just signed four data tables, and two are on the way.

12:55. I'm glad I had deluxe breakfast at A&W. There are many reasons for this, one involving the drive in teller girl at McDonalds. Ask my mom about that sometime.

Two students seem to be absolutely captivated by a poster of spectra for various elements. Leni just left. She thought I didn't know her, just because I acted like I didn't know her. I get nervous in these labs! Sue me.

I'm just realizing how abstract my blog labels are becoming. For this post, I've already attached labels like "Just Another Fist," "No One Can Hear You Scream,"-- two more data tables signed-- and "There Can Be Only One." Maybe I'll make up another tag of two. I'll have to give it some thought though. There's abstract and then there's just dumb.

1:03. I have no labs next week. For that, I'll attach the "Circular Celebrations" label.

I came to the lab rooms earlier in the week. The rooms that I teach in are on the second floor of the Teaching Lab building, with big windows that face toward the east. The mountains are blocked by haze today, as they often are, but when I came earlier in the week, on one of those days when it turned to biting cold, the sky was so clear that I could see the Rockys fifty or a hundred kilometers away. There weren't any students when I came in that time. If there were, I would have begun the lecture by just showing them the view, letting them soak it in for a minute or two, because they would likely never see that kind of view again.

Created new label-- "The View From Where I Am."

I've got the stupid live action Sailor Moon theme stuck in my head. I thought it might be a good idea for one of the hosts of a late night show going without writers, like Conan O'Brien or Colbert, to digitally insert themselves into episodes of the series, reciting actual dialogue from the show in really pathetic Japanese. Just imagine Conan as Mamoru-- I don't care if you don't know what I'm talking about!-- in a really big ugly Beatles wig hair cut that seems to be all the rage in Japan. Hilarious. And the best part: it's all legit! (it's Writers Guild of AMERICA. Suck it, union lawyers!)

If I started playing an episode of Sailor Moon right now, would anyone in the lab watch? Probably not.

Added label "Miyuu Sawai."



And with that, I bid you adieu.

UPDATE: Added label "Wow".

One Step for Small Men. . .

. . . and I'm just gonna stop there.

Japan has launched a probe into lunar orbit. The probe, SELENE, is taking HDTV images of the Moon's surface even as I speak(so to speak). Below I've posted two time-compressed video streams sent back by the probe (the video below shows them both).

Who Makes the Rockin' World Go 'Round?

Brain May, a once promising young scientist, has just completed his PhD studies in astrophysics following an extended break performing in some band named Queen:



May's the one on the left, looking just plain awkward next to the pure distilled cool that is Freddie Mercury.

But seriously, May's return to academia was announced back in August on the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science (Yes, I know, it's another ScienceBlogger but, hell, they're good!). Commenter MartinC left the following money quote:

Mr May, the standard model posits that the Earth's spin is derived from a combination of its angular momentum and its distance from the Sun. You, on the other hand, state that its caused by 'Fat Bottomed Girls'. How do you explain this theoretical discrepancy?

For all the true Queen completists, here's a link to a paper co-authored by May and published in 1973.

As if Toxic Meteor Rocks Weren't Enough...

. . . here are two more examples of B-movie monsters come to life thanks to The Power Of Science™:

(1) Brain Eating Amoebae

I shit you not. Thanks to global warming, a heat loving species of amoeba is now able to survive in shallow, human infested waters. This does not bode well for said humans, since this particularly nasty amoeba likes to attach itself to the inside of the nose and burrow itself into the brain, with fatal results: Six young men from Arizona, Texas, and Florida have already died. Since it looks like the oceans, like the rest of the world, are going to keep warming up with time, it's certain that more cases will spring up over an incresingly wide area.

This link will take you to a webpage describing this and other dangerous species thriving as a result of global warming.

(2) Gamma-Ray-Eating Fungus

Maybe this is the reason Mario grows when he eats mushrooms. . .

Researchers in Chernobyl have discovered a species of fungus that uses the protein melanin to convert ionizing radiation-- the dangerous, DNA-breaking, cancer-inducing kind of radiation-- into bioenergy via a process analogous to photosynthesis. Apparently, the fungus was first discovered lining the walls of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

Research also seems to indicate that this ability is not the result of a mutation, nor is it unique to this particular species. In fact, it appears that any fungus containing melanin(whose function in fungi until now was a mystery) can undergo a similar "radiosyntheis" process.

Here's a similar story focusing on underground fungi that feed on uranium ore emissions.

Killer Fucking Meteorite

The sad thing about this true story, apart from the human suffering, is that there are enough idiot hacks in Hollywood who have glanced through War of the Worlds who actually could have made it up.

From The Guardian:

A meteorite has struck a remote part of Peru and carved a large crater that is emitting noxious odours and making villagers ill, according to local press reports.

A fireball streaked across the Andean sky late on Saturday night and crashed into a field near Carancas, a sparsely populated highland wilderness near Lake Titicaca on the border with Bolivia, witnesses said.

The orange streak and loud bang were initially thought to be a plane crashing.

When farmers went to investigate, however, they found a crater at least 10m wide and 5m deep, but no sign of wreckage.

The soil around the hole appeared to be scorched and there was a "strange odour", a local health department official, Jorge López, told Peru's RPP radio.

Later the farmers complained of headaches and vomiting. Police who went to investigate the crater were also stricken with nausea, prompting authorities to dispatch a medical team that reached the site on Wednesday.

"The odour is strong and it's affecting nearby communities. There are 500 families close by and they have had symptoms of nausea, vomiting, digestive problems and general sickness," said López.

At least 12 people were treated in addition to seven police officers who required oxygen masks and rehydration.

The farmers expressed fears that what appeared to be chunks of lead and silver around the site could contaminate the soil.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Modesto Montoya, told the state press agency that a fallen meteorite did not present any danger unless it hit some structure on impact.

"None of the meteorites that fall in Peru and make perforations of varied sizes are harmful for people, unless they fall on a house," he said. Another meteorite fell to Earth in Arequipa province in June.

Okay, so it's more of a noxious fucking meteorite. Actually, it may not even be a meteorite at all. From BBC:

They say the object left a deep crater after crashing down over the weekend near the town of Carancas in the Andes.

People who visited the scene have been complaining of headaches, vomiting and nausea after inhaling gases.

But some experts have questioned whether it was a meteorite or some other object that landed in Carancas.

"Increasingly we think that people witnessed a fireball, which are not uncommon, went off to investigate and found a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane rich organic matter," said Dr Caroline Smith, a meteorite expert at the London-based Natural History Museum.

"This has been mistaken for a crater."

A team of scientists is on its way to the site to collect samples and verify whether it was indeed a meteorite.

Okay, so the Killer and Meteorite are likely off. Still, its a hell of a title.

Quii

I've been taking a lot of useless internet quizzes in the last couple of months (How Logical Are You? What Kind of Pirate Are You? What Starship Crew Would You Be Part Of? etc.). Since some of these quizzes have cute little HTML decals for that person who just has to let the whole world know that they would indeed survive a zombie apocalypse, I decided to post a few of my prouder results.

If your blog were a movie, what would it be rated?



Why? Because my blog has three "fucks", two "asses" and a "hell." I shit you not.


Would you pass 8th grade science?

What's your bloated, useless corpse worth to science?

$5290.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth.

How much electrical power could your bloated, useless, still living corpse produce?

422 WATTS Body Battery Calculator - Find Out How Much Electricity Your Body is Producing - Dating

That's 69% more than the average person. I could power 4 lightbulbs, 106 ipods, 2 XBox 360's, and at least one DVD player runnning The Matrix.


Finally, a fairly comprehensive quiz on political orientation. This quiz actually puts me quite a bit further left, and way more small-'l' libertarian, than most US Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

I See a Red (Chinese) Moon a Risin'. . .

Hello, Both of My Readers. . .

This one's gonna be kind of a hodgepodge post-- a bit of world news, a bit of personal news, and a funny video. Because what's Kyle Took a Bullet For Me without a funny video?

Nothing.

Anyway. . . first, a bit of interesting news. It looks like China is planning to put an unmanned spacecraft in lunar orbit by the end of this year. The orbiter's purpose is to take three dimensional images of lunar surface. If successful, the Chinese hope to make an unmanned landing by 2012, with a manned landing to follow at some unspecified date.

I actually really like the idea of a Chinese moon mission. First off, I'm kind of a lapsing space junkie, so any plans to send human beings more than four hundred miles from Earth's surface will automatically peak my interest. Second, I would really love for the Chinese to one-up President Bush and his plans to re-establish a U.S. presence on the Moon. Third, well. . .



She's Sailor Moon! And she's Asian! That can't be a coincidence!

Okay, that was a little off. But what's Kyle Took a Bullet For Me without a blatant allusion to the live action Sailor Moon series?

Nothing.

Anyway. . . The second thing I wanted to mention was that the research paper I co-authored has finally been published. The paper is titled "Quantum Mechanical Versus Semiclassical Tunneling and Decay", and was researched and written by Dr. Mark R.A. Shegelski, Jeff Hynbida, and myself. As I mentioned in my last post, I hope to write a summary of the paper in a future post. For now, if you're actually interested enough to want to read the paper, it's in the June 2007 issue of the American Journal of Phyics, which by now you're likely to find in the UNBC library.

Finally, a video for probably the coolest song I've heard this week. Enjoy!

Three Simple Words. . .

Hallo alles.

I'm planning on writing a new entry on the research that I worked on last summer-- as some of you already know, I co-authored a paper scheduled to be published in the American Journal of Physics sometime between May and September.

But for now, I give you something completely random and occasionally hilarious, courtesy of Angelfirebabe at Youtube. Even though there are three videos, they're all very short-- the longest is under a minute and a half-- so it won't take up too much of your precious time. Enjoy!

Part I

Part II

Part III

Metal is Stronger Than Ice...

What's more, this slaughter of innocent (would-be) Americans, supposedly carried out by Ice-lamic terrorists, was used two years later as justification for one of the worst wars in American history (even though there was no connection between radical Ice-lamism and the German government!)!

I'll show myself out.

Happy Birthday, Pi!

It's March 14. . . 3/14. . . get it?!?!

Well, many of the bloggers at ScienceBlogs do, and have been wishing all their readers a "Happy 'Pi Day'". Cause they're cool like that.

ASS!

How on earth could I have missed this?

Incidentally, the Penning Trap is a device that uses a constant electric field and a constant magnetic field to store a charged particle. It's inventor, Hans Georg Dehmelt, snagged the Nobel prize for it in 1989.

Oh, and by way Nay, posting videos on blogs is so easy even Max Weinberg could do it. Prick.