Yeah, There's an App for That

October 15, 2009

University of Washington physicist Dave Bacon, known to the blogosphere as The Quantum Pontiff (and often dubbed "His Holiness" as a result), has a bit of a fetish for random numbers. In fact, he's even created his own iPhone App, MakeRandom, giving the user access to "custom random lists, dice random numbers and random words." It's a cute app: as Bacon describes it, you simply set up your list of choice, shake your iPhone and voila! A random result ensues!

But gosh darn it if someone hasn't gone and done the Pontiff one better: now you can download a brand new App called Universe Splitter that takes random choices into the quantum realm, specifically, Many Worlds. Every time you're faced with your very own superposition of states, you can turn to your trusty iPhone (or iTouch) for help collapsing your wave function -- or perhaps just figuring out which branch of the wave function you want to be in. To wit:

Scientists say that every quantum event plays out simultaneously in every possible way, with each possibility becoming real in a separate universe. You can now harness this powerful and mysterious effect right from your iPhone or iPod Touch!

How? Whenever you're faced with a choice -- for example, whether to accept a job offer or to turn it down -- just type both of these actions into Universe Splitter©, and press the button.

Universe Splitter© will immediately contact a laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and connect to a Quantis brand quantum device, which releases single photons into a partially-silvered mirror. Each photon will simultaneously bounce off the mirror and pass through it -- but in separate universes.

Within seconds, Universe Splitter© will receive the experiment's result and tell you which of the two universes you're in, and therefore which action to take. Think of it -- two entire universes, complete with every last planet and galaxy, and in one, a version of you who took the new job, and in the other, a version of you who didn't!

Maybe there should be an App to help you decide whether to download MakeRandom or UniverseSplitter. The former is cheaper -- $0.99 on iTunes, compared to $1.99 -- but UniverseSplitter comes with full laboratory support in Geneva, plus a testimonial by surfer-physicist Garrett Lisi. If Many Worlds turns out to be true, we all downloaded both -- we just did so in separate universes.

Fun with Gravity

March 23, 2009

Most of us are accustomed to seeing gravity-defying feats in film and television -- and I'd wager that a high percentage of those reading this blog can relate to Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory when he ranted about the scientific inaccuracies in the first Superman movie. You know, the one where Lois Lane falls from a great height and Superman catches her right before she hits ground? Sheldon's take is that, under actual Earth-like gravitational conditions, poor Miss Lane would have been sliced into three segments by Superman's of arms of steel. His conclusion: "If he really loved her, he'd let her hit the ground. It would be a more merciful death."

Still, who wouldn't love to tweak gravity, just to see what happens? It's not something we can do for real, but video games have become sufficiently sophisticated that new rules of gravity can be applied. Via the Science Punk Blog, I learned (belatedly -- it's a 2007 game) about Gravity Pods, an online game that requires the player to get his/her green rocket to "the purple swirly thing" (there's really no better way to describe it).

It's easier said than done. There are all these "pods", you see, creating gravitational fields that must be carefully navigated, lest they pull your plucky little rocket off-course. Develop a bit of skill, and you can get all Newtonian with the game, using those same gravitational fields "to slingshot your craft to its destination." Best of all -- from a visual aesthetics standpoint -- is that the game creates a colorful "map" out of the trajectories of all your failed rockets. Groovy!

I have no idea what kind of algorithms were used to create those gravitational fields, or how gravity in Gravity Pods works in comparison to how it works in our real world. The study hasn't been done yet. But it has been done for Super Mario Brothers! A nifty Website called Hypertextbook has the analysis of acceleration due to gravity in Super Mario Brothers. (Warning: equations are involved; but don't let that hold you back!) Per the authors:

Gravity is the force which is responsible for keeping us on the ground. It is also the force that prohibits us from jumping 50 feet in the air. However, in Mario's world, gravity does not quite work that way. Mario is able to jump 5 times his height and fall with accelerations that would be deadly to humans.

How do they know this? They did the math, of course, gleaning their data by recording video clips of the little Mario figure falling from ledges as presented in successive iterations (versions) of the game.

Their conclusion? "[G]enerally speaking, the gravity in each Mario game, as game hardware has increased, is getting closer to the true value of gravity on earth." So that's all right.

It's probably bad news for Mario, though: those falls will just get harder and harder to take. He'll still fare better than Lois Lane in Sheldon's alternate Superman scenario.

Photo: Screen shot of Mario falling off a ledge. Source: Hypertextbook.com.

A Coupla Physicists Sittin' Around Talking

March 15, 2009

There's a lot to celebrate on March 14. For starters, it's Einstein's birthday. It's also International Pi Day, wherein folks around the world gather to honor their favorite irrational number -- hopefully with actual pie a la mode. But it's also Talk Like a Physicist Day!

I kid you not. Really, why not talk like a physicist? All the cool kids are doing it:

I have some personal stake in the celebration, because I inadvertently launched the idea for such a holiday back in 2006: there's a Talk Like a Pirate Day, after all, and I thought physicists deserved their own special day, too. Thanks to the efforts of Sunny Kalara and a few other notable bloggy physics types, there's now an actual Talk Like a Physicist blog (complete with FAQ).

How does one talk like a physicist? Tom at Swans on Tea has some suggestions, as does Sunny. Here's a sampling:

* Order of Magnitude: Use terms like “orders of magnitude” to describe significant differences of scale.

* Infinitesimal: If it is really really small, say it is infinitesimal.

* Non-trivial: For a physicist, nothing is ever hard or difficult - it is always “non-trivial”

* First-order approximation: That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee… “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order approximation.”

* Orthogonal: Use “orthogonal” to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can’t coincide. “We keep playing phone tag — I think our schedules must be orthogonal”

* Ground State: You’re not being lazy, you are in your ground state.

* Potential Well: Stuck in a meeting is “trapped in a potential well,” though you hope you can “tunnel out.”

* Black hole: If there is no escape, you are trapped by a black hole, from which there is no escape.

Of course, anyone who caught Friday night's new episode of Numb3rs saw Larry, the show's resident eccentric physicist, find a new use for "black hole": he used it to heckle the ref at the fictional CalSci's basketball game -- as in, something so dense no light of comprehension can escape.

Now go forth, and get your geek speak on (to your best approximation).

Through a Glass, Darkly

June 06, 2008

If you're in London or New York City this Saturday, at 7 PM and 2 PM respectively (local times for those two cities), you'll be in the perfect position to participate in the first ever International Telectroscopic Wave (h/t to the fine folks at Brass Goggles, who spearheaded the effort).

Just what is the Telectroscope, you may ask? It's a truly unique, interactive, outdoor art installation by UK artist Paul St. George linking London and New York City, running through June 15. The connection is ostensibly made via a trans-Atlantic underground tunnel connected by the world's longest telescope, with a giant "lens" at either end. Seriously, the brass-and wood period "instruments" look exactly like the sort of thing you'd find in a Jules Verne novel from Victorian England: what looks like a giant periscope pokes up through the ground, next to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, and next to Tower Bridge along the River Thames in London.

Passersby can look through either end and see London (or New York City), and whoever happens to gazing through on the other side. Folks have been known to hold up signs with messages written on them: soccer scores, for instance, and apparently one young British teenager named Ryan managed to catch a "kiss" blown his way from two sisters in New York.

Okay, technically the feat is an illusion: the two lenses aren't so much conventional telescopes as really big Webcams linked via a trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable -- broadband video conferencing looming large, so to speak.

St. George went to great lengths to give his installation a believable "backstory" (you can read it here) in the form of his fictional great-grandfather, Alexander Stanhope St. George, supposedly an eccentric Victorian engineer whose plans to bore a 3,471-mile tunnel from London to New York ended in failure (and insanity -- because no good Victorian melodrama is complete without a mad relative in the attic). The artist claims to have found his forebear's dusty old papers and resurrected the scheme. He even staged the completion of "drilling" back in May: a giant drill bit could be seen poking through the ground at both sites in London and Brooklyn for awhile, until the installation officially opened.

The folks laughing and waving to their counterparts across the pond could care less whether the Telectroscope is real or fake: it's a whimsical twist on a familiar technology, everyone's having fun, and for those who stop to think about it, perhaps it will restore a bit of our sense of wonder at what technology has helped us achieve.

As Arthur C. Clarke once observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Back in 1899, the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla broached the possibility of interplanetary communication via radio waves, and was roundly ridiculed by his peers. He was about 70 years too early. On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts made their historic walk on the moon, and received a call from then-president Richard Nixon back on Earth, congratulating them on the achievement. Today, we have broadband video conferencing across the Atlantic Ocean, and Phoenix beaming back live images from the surface of Mars. Who knows what tomorrow's technology will bring?

Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP.