My wife the other day came up with an absolute gem
Reality has no meaning for them, it is not where they live.
As I mentioned last week racist bigotry was apparent in the UK's "Celebrity Big Brother" TV show. But the watchers who were upset enough to complain to the TV station in record numbers have also spoken out against the perpatrator of the offense and voted her off in last week's elimination.
There is hope for them yet obviously.
While blogger itself may now be out of beta, this blog most certainly is not. There will be random changes to how things are on here (though mostly it will be small tinkering) as I find new things to add and better ways to present things and add the rest of the blogs that I try to read as often as I can
Only in England could some D-list celebrities (who could arguably be described as quintessential English "slappers") think that they are better than possibly the world's most famous movie star (she is a household name in India) purely because she is different to them.
Why is it that when the best opportunity of my life time to view a spectacular comet occurs it is cloudy?
It has been cloudy here all week and I am getting frustrated. Today has been horribly grey but even on the sunny days we have had this week there has been plenty of high cloud, well at least enough to prevent a decent attempt at viewing.
Oh well at least I saw last year's (OMG that makes it seem so long ago) transit of Mercury - and helped many others see it too.
Welcome to Friday’s physical law (FPL) - a weekly look at how physics governs everything, and as this is the first of this series I will be starting somewhere we hopefully can all understand with simple motion.
Everyday experience would seem to indicate that the natural state of motion of an object is a rest. An object in motion will slow down and stop unless a force is acting on it. This was the reasoning of Aristotle. Of course this is what we see here on Earth in the presence of what we now recognise as friction.
We can quite easily see the truth of what happens if we remove the force of friction, imagine if you will you are on the ISS and you push off one wall, you keep drifting until you hit the other wall, this is because now the friction that is acting on you in now minimal. We can see examples of reduced friction on Earth such as skating on ice, or ball bearings.
This leads us to the understanding that we now have, Newton’s first law: That an object remains in a state of steady linear motion unless a force acts on the object. This means that an object at rest remains at rest and an object moving in a straight line will continue at the same speed and direction of motion unless a force acts on it
And our experience of friction that slows down the object is recognised for what it is: a force on the object acting against its motion. It arises from the interaction of the object and the media (substance) through/on which the object is moving. We can tell definitively about the existence of friction by the heating of an object as it slows down, the friction dissipates the motion (kinetic energy) of the moving object turning it into heat.
The effect of friction itself depends of only two things:
As you can see the former is really a combination of a number of factors - the most important being those listed in the bracket. Obviously if changing what the object is moving through makes a difference then so will changing the object, the shape is important, the less contact there is the less friction there will be (think of a ball bearing), and the greater the mass the stronger the interaction between the object and the surface it is moving on (ok so to be completely honest the weight factor only applies to motion across a solid surface and not to motion through a fluid).
As an incentive to regular updates I am forcing myself to have a couple of little weekly series. And this how to guide will be one of them, it will be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at various issues that take my fancy, it will also be fairly brief.
In this first issue I will set up a list of rules for what to do if you want to challenge the mainstream - perhaps we could forward it to the DI (and maybe contrarians and denialists of all flavours). So any here we go...
1: Whatever you might think of the prevailing theory, you have to admit that it has become the mainstream position on its subject by virtue of explaining the data better than anything else.
2: Therefore your hypothesis should also be able to reproduce the existing data - and in most cases the existing theory will be a special (or limiting) case of your hypothesis.
3: If there should be some data (actual hard experimental data not just some objection you have) that seems to fall outside the existing theory then your hypothesis must explain this.
4: Your hypothesis must make predictions for the results of future experimental findings (preferably predictions that differ from those of the existing theory otherwise how will anyone be able to tell the difference between them).
5: After much testing by the scientific community at large if you hypothesis has accounted for all of the observed data especially that which cannot be accounted for by any other method - then and only then have you succeeded in your challenge.
NOTE: A very important thing to consider on this process is that if you have to resort to a public relations campaign to overcome your failings at any of the above steps you are automatically disqualified from the process.
I thought I would start off this new life of mine and I guess it would be appropriate to tell you a bit about myself and what I am thinking about doing with this blog.
I am a doctoral student in physics. In addition to my research I tutor and demonstrate first year physics, and do programming for various researchers about the university, which all keeps me very busy so I intend for posts here to be a bit sporadic but I will try to be regular-ish with a couple of posts a week – although I do intend to up this rate at some point the in the future.
I have an interest in science history and education, as well as the interaction of science and culture. And this is largely what I will be blogging about: a journey of the history and development of science throughout the ages as well as the implications of modern science (in particular Relativity – a little passion of mine although not my research area).
I am indebted to several of the scienceblogs crew particularly Orac and Ed as well as Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy for providing the inspiration to get me into this and for giving me ideas about what to write about and indirectly how to go about it. As a skeptic and a scientist a lot of what I might tackle here has already been done so well by others but I will endeavour to add something to the blogosphere.
So thank you for your time to come here and partake in my delusion (I will explain this at some later date) that what I have to say matters and that I can have an influence of the scientific literacy of the next generation.
