Monthly Archives: November 2012

Accelerometer: Part I

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This blog has made the terrible decision to ask me to do more regular posts.  Well, before trial and error catches up with me, let’s have some fun together…

As young single Caltech graduate students, we have become accustomed to making hearts race with our science.  We turn measurements and derivations into heart palpitations.  While this has been manifestly obvious for quite some time, we in the Oskar Painter group have recently been interested in quantitatively measuring this effect.  Because, as any good Caltech physics graduate student believes, anything (even sex appeal) is uninteresting unless fully quantified in a dataset.  We set out to make an accelerometer with enough resolution to sense the irregular and skipped heartbeats of our fawning admirers.

What follows is a multi-part treatise on the optomechanical accelerometers we developed.

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The X Windows Solution

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A Sun 3/60 Workstation in the late 1980s.

I recently did an interview for an educational video about quantum physics. The filmmaker, who needed some cutaway shots to stitch the interview segments together, suggested a shot of me walking through the server room in my building. I complied, gazing with interest and concern as I strolled past the machines. But I felt very uncomfortable about the phoniness of this scene, because I had never been in the server room before and had no idea what I was looking at.

The experience reminded me, though, of the one time in my life when I felt like I was near the cutting edge of the digital revolution, nearly 20 years ago, as the World Wide Web was just emerging as the Next Big Thing.

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The Future Of Education

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I’m a senior software engineer at Knewton, a company that aims to personalize education through adaptive learning technology. Also, in my free time I write stories and design games to teach kids about computer science as DrTechniko. My How To Train Your Robot game, for example, lets kids “program” their parents to do tasks for them. It’s intuitive and fun for kids because they get to “command” their parents. At the same time the parents get a good workout by the end of the class.

But, why do I care about kids and computer science education?

  • Computer science combines problem solving with practical outcomes for a society that is increasingly high-tech.
  • Creative problem solving needs to become the no.1 skill that schools teach today. Information is already available everywhere. Kids need to know how to put this together and solve real, challenging problems.
  • We need to feel comfortable with technology and control it. If we don’t teach this culture to our five-year-olds, then we can’t grow as a society and civilization. We have to “learn to drive a car and let go of the horse”. The lawyer of 2034 needs to know how to program. Everything around her will be programmable.

All of us working to revolutionize education have such goals in mind and we want to break the current educational stereotypes, because they won’t get us there. Instead, every kid becomes a “copy” coming out of a factory-like assembly line called the school. Only recently have we began to develop the tools that allow students to personalize the way they learn new things. The next step is to give kids the tools they need to learn how to learn the things they need in order to unleash their creative potential.

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Showtime for Sophomores

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Exciting a square Chladni plate with a violin bow.

One of the many unique features of Caltech is our core curriculum. All of our undergraduates are required to take five terms of physics and five terms of math (all three terms freshman year and the fall and winter terms sophomore year) — though this will change for the class entering in the fall of 2013.

Each fall, about 170 sophomores take Physics 2a, a course on vibrations, waves, and quantum mechanics, while the remaining 60 or so sophomores take Physics 12a, a souped up course covering similar material at a level more appropriate for physics concentrators.

This term I am teaching Physics 2a. While 170 students is a lot more than in most courses I teach at Caltech, the workload is manageable, in part because I share the lecturing duties with another professor, and in part because we have a staff of capable and hard working Teaching Assistants who handle recitation sections and grade the homework and quizzes.

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It’s been a tough week for hidden variable theories

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The RSS subscriptions which populate my Google Reader mainly fall into two categories: scientific and other. Sometimes patterns emerge when superimposing these disparate fields onto the same photo-detection plate (my brain.) Today, it became abundantly clear that it’s been a tough week for hidden variable theories.

Let me explain. Hidden variable theories were proposed by physicists in an attempt to explain the ‘indeterminism’ which seems to arise in quantum mechanics, and especially in the double-slit experiment. This probably means nothing to many of you, so let me explain further: the hidden variables in Tuesday’s election weren’t enough to trump Nate Silver’s incredibly accurate predictions based upon statistics and data (hidden variables in Tuesday’s election include: “momentum,” “the opinions of undecided voters,” and “pundit’s hunches.”) This isn’t to say that there weren’t hidden variables at play — clearly the statistical models used weren’t fully complete and will someday be improved upon — but hidden variables alone weren’t the dominant influence. Indeed, Barack Obama was re-elected for a second term. However, happy as I was to see statistics trump hunches, the point of this post is not to wax political, but rather to describe the recent failure of hidden variable theories in an arena more appropriate for this blog: quantum experiments.

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The TV Frontier

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Hello, my name is Tim Blasius and I am a physics graduate student at Caltech.  I recently appeared in a comedy bit on the TV show Conan, where I corrected Conan O’Brien’s physics.  I have been asked to share a few words describing this experience.

As with any story involving unbridled success, it begins as a tale of unnoticed, under-appreciated  and nearly unending hard work – I usually watch the show Conan during dinner with my fiancé.  Accordingly, I have seen many segments called “fan corrections” where Conan viewers submit YouTube videos explaining mistakes that they believe Conan has made on the show.  Some are nerdy and funny like the one where viewers pointed out that Conan used a red-tailed hawk call instead of a bald eagle call.  I was like a crocodile lurking in the water waiting for Conan to make a mistake in my expertise.  Then, like a woefully ignorant antelope sipping from the river Nile, Conan made a physics mistake when mocking Felix Baumgartner’s free fall, and I, being the bloodthirsty physics predator that I am, snapped the jaws of immutable truth around his naïve self.

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Quantum = Pink

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Need we say more?

What color do you imagine when you close your eyes and think “Quantum”? If you are to buy a case for your quantum computer, have you already picked your favorite color? (Okay, maybe it’s too early for that.)
Below I argue that the collective unconscious has already made the choice for you: it is going to be pink.

Excited?

Fear not. We will easily differentiate ourselves from warm and fluffy pink slippers. Our color is pink on black. Closer to purple, actually. We have good heritage: purple with white was the color of kings. But kings are no more, so let’s admit it: People think that “spooky” quantum phenomena have a purple glow around them. The disaster movie “Quantum Apocalypse” has a mysterious purple vortex approach Earth. Sci-fi now has “quantum cannons” shooting pink aura at the enemies, unleashing the chaos of uncertainty. You can’t fly your battlecruiser if you’re no longer certain you still have a battlecruiser.
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