Falling stars, cold feet and we might just have to throw out the textbooks...

Tonight a nasa satellite will renter the atmosphere, burning up and scattering debris over a large area. This happens quite often, in fact modern satellites are designed to fall down at the end of their useful lives to stop space getting too full of rubbish. The difference with this one is that it’s completely uncontrolled, so the risk of part of it it hitting someone is much larger than usual, about 1 in 3200. Don’t worry too much though, as the risk of it hitting you personally is more like one in a trillion.

There’s also another science story floating around, but I’ll get to that…

As science is in the news at the moment I will take the opportunity to talk about some of the science I'm doing here. Don’t worry, there won’t be any equations (except one, but you all know it already). I quite like taking about this, as it is what I do every day, so this is quite a long post.

One of my courses at the moment is advanced labs, where I’m getting the opportunity to work on some really involved experiments over a long period of time. At the moment I’m working on something called, rather enigmatically, second sound. This involves playing around with one of the best toys ever, liquid nitrogen.

We use the liquid nitrogen to cool our dewar (basically a big, complicated, very breakable glass tube), down to around -190°C, which is quite cold. I have already damaged a glove when it froze onto the container I was using to carry some nitrogen. Fortunately it’s quite safe as it forms a vapour layer over skin, stopping the really cold stuff from hitting you. Only the really cold stuff- the spill that led to the glove incident also went all over my foot, resulting in me spending the lecture afterwards squirming due to very cold toes.

Then, when the outer layer of the dewar is nice and cold, we poor liquid helium into a tube running through the middle. Liquid helium is even colder than the nitrogen at around about 4.2 degrees above absolute zero (or kelvin). And then we make it even colder by pumping it reducing the pressure and hence temperature. At this point it does something rather interesting.

When you wave you hand in air, or water, or soup (bad idea) you feel something, air or water resistance. However cool down liquid helium to 2.18 kelvin and suddenly all resistance goes. You could wave your hand and it would feel like there was nothing there. Of course you also would freeze your hand off, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Our aim in this experiment is to get to the lambda point, the exact point where the helium goes from normal to super fluid. We do this by measuring second sound. At this temperature sound changes. Normal sound is caused by waves of high and low pressure moving through the stuff (official scientific terminology). Second sound is caused by changes in the entropy, the level of disorder in the stuff. Very strange. It only happens in superfluids, so by slowly raising the temperature until the second sound disappears we will have found the lambda point. Simple. (To everyone who’s keeping up, the answer it that it’s a lot easier to work up from a low temperature than go down from above.)

This is only possible to do if you have a long period of time- we’ve so far spent eighteen out of twenty-four hours on the experiment. By the way, if you ever come to America make sure you learn how to pronounce twenty properly. They seem to like that. I’m enjoying this a lot more than the last labs I did, in my first year, where we only spent three hours on each experiment. It’s quite ironic though- Lancaster is a world leader in cold physics, but the first time I’ve done any is here!    

So why are we doing it? This experiment has been done before, so we’re not likely to find anything new. No, the point is to teach us to be good experimenters so that  when we do get round to discovering things for ourselves the results can be trusted. My first year labs concentrated on working out the uncertainties in our results. These labs, with much longer to spend on each experiment, have been to used to teach us to reduce those uncertainties as much as possible, so that our data is as good as possible.   

That’s all about what I’m doing here for now. I will talk about science I’m doing again particularly the astronomy I’m going to be doing ( where I will hopefully be finding out new stuff), but now on to that other news…

 The story all over the news and facebook at the moment is that scientists, working on the OPERA experiment at CERN, have detected neutrinos, very small sub-atomic particles that will fly through a planet made of lead like it wasn’t there, that seem to be travelling faster than the speed of light. This is in direct contradiction to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, one of the bedrocks of modern physics, which has at it’s core the assumption that nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum.  If this is wrong then we have to re-write, erm, pretty much everything.

Before we get all excited though…it’s only one result. History has shown that if one result goes against a huge body of evidence in favour of a theory then that result is probably wrong. This will need to be tested again and again, at different places around the world, making sure that every possible uncertainty or error is accounted for. If after years of testing the results still say that light speed isn’t the ultimate speed limit, then we have to start ripping text books up.

However, history also tells us that if the one small piece of evidence turns out to be correct then amazing things happen. The Sun centred solar system, quantum mechanics, the big bang theory, these all came from little bit of data that didn’t make sense.  

And just to make a point, the papers are saying that “this disproves Einstein’s famous E=mc² equation”. No it doesn’t. That equation has been proved over and over again. Nuclear power stations, particle colliders and atom bombs all show that that equation holds.  (It’s actually E=mɣc², where the ɣ factor accounts for the changes when particles move close to the speed of light. Sorry, two equations).

I would guess that further tests will show this result to be wrong, and that the speed of light in a vacuum is still the ultimate speed limit. But I really, really hope it’s right…

I spend too much time on google earth...

Just out of interest I made this picture comparing Lancaster University (all of it, bottom) with MSU main campus (top, just the built up bit; I'm not sure where the fields go on to). As you can see it's around ten times the size without the fields.
   Proper blog post on it's way soon(ish).

"So what year are you in?" "Um, how long have you got?"

Apparently I’m at university to study (it’s not all fun and games). I’ve just finished my first full week of lectures (or classes, as they’re called here), so I thought I’d talk a bit about my American education so far…

Perhaps my biggest anxiety about coming here was what the classes would be like compared with home. To explain that I will have to talk a bit about how the American University system works.

The first question I have to answer is, er, what year I’m in. You may have thought this was easy (just count how many years you’ve been at university..), but you’d be mistaken. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to the liberal arts system.

What this means that, unlike British universities where you apply for a specific subject, here you don’t have to decide that until you’re a way in to the course. Instead of concentrating on one subject to the exclusion of all others, students here will take a variety if courses form different areas. For example, if you want to major in physics there are a few physics courses you have to take in your first year, but you also have to take course in chemistry, maths and biology. To confuse things a bit more you can take second year subjects in your first year and vice versa, then do the same again with third and fourth year courses.

The end result of this is that it takes four years to get a degree here, as opposed to three years in the UK. This made picking what courses I should take somewhat tricky. I’m in my third year, which in the UK is the final year of the BSc, but here there is one year to go.

(Just to confuse things I’m on a four year course, but I’ll get an MPhys rather than a BSc, so it still doesn’t match the US system.)

To resolve this I took mostly final year courses, which leads to the cause of my anxiety- although I may have done as much (or more) physics as others on the course, I’m still behind a year at university. I was worried that the course would be too much of a jump in difficulty from what I’d done before.  

Well so far those fears have been rather unfounded. The courses aren’t too much of a jump, in fact I’d say that they’re hardly more advanced at all from what I did last year. The most advanced course, Atomic, Molecular and Condensed Matter Physics, is indeed tough, but nothing like the horror of quantum mechanics last year. I fully expect this to change, but at the moment I’ve become more worried about being behind when I get home!

The courses themselves are very different from British ones. They’re more structured internally, with set books and work to do between each lecture. However there’s far less of an overall pattern, with every professor organising the course how they want it. This contrasts Lancaster’s courses which all follow the same basic pattern. Which is better? Watch this space…

So those are my first impressions. The opinions expressed on the post are likely to be completely different in six months time.

A fair bit’s happened this week, so watch this space for more posts. If I have time and feel like writing, that is…     

Say something! And can you help me with my math?

Right, the promised writings about what I’ve done this week. As I’ve only had three days of lectures I’ll leave that until another post, so today I shall be talking about life in American student accommodation.

The biggest difference between British halls and American “dorms” (although, confusingly enough, the buildings are still officially called halls) is roommates. In all of the undergraduate accommodation you are sharing your room with someone. You also share your bathroom with the room next door (your suitemates, which I thought was a very nice thing to call someone).

The rooms come with very little, just two sets of beds, chairs and desk as well as some movable modular cupboards. For those of you at Lancaster, think better than Ash House (admittedly they achieved that when they built the roof), but nowhere near as good as South West.

This sparseness means that everyone brings stuff to customise their rooms, like carpets and futons, as well as a seemingly compulsory tv (welcome to America…) American tv doesn’t nearly compensate for the loss of i-player though.  I miss Dr Who.

My roommate is called Jeff. Jeff and I have rather, um, bucked the trend in that our room has yet to have a futon or carpet, making it pretty much the most avoided place on the floor. We are going to make the “man cave” nicer, I promise… It does, however, have a teapot, which is really the only thing that matters.

Having so many people sharing the same space means that all of the rooms are pretty much communal, especially in the evenings, with people wandering in and out as they please. Within the closest five or six rooms, someone will have everything, so one night we’ll be playing on the Wii in one room, the next night watching films on the massive tv next door.  

That’s enough about the rooms, what about the people. Well, my conversations with them are pretty much summed up by the title- they love the way I speak. Now I wouldn’t have said I have a particularly perfect English accent, but no one seems to care- when I went along the hall talking to people I just got: “can you talk?” “Just say something!” And once, somewhat disturbingly: “say something seductive!” Ok…

Next, when I say I study astrophysics, loads of people have said “can you help me with my math?” This is perhaps understandable- every student here has got to do some maths, regardless of subject and most of the people in my hall are first years (freshmen here), my maths training is quite, um, advanced compared to theirs. (I carefully us the word training, I wouldn’t say I was actually that good at maths as such!) It’s odd encountering the, um, reverence studying physics gets. I would guess it’s due to the fact that there’s a far lower percentage of physics students here than at Lancaster. Honestly people, it’s not that hard…

But people here are generally very nice, and I’m getting on everyone around me. Is the roommate system better here than in British accommodation? Well I’ll reserve judgement on that for now, but it certainly succeeds in building an instant community in the dorms.  That’s my experience anyway; feel free to comment if yours has been different.

Oh and dear America, maths has an “s” in it. Thank you.

American football is very boring. But I want to go to every game.

So when I left you my flatmate was about to arrive and my first week of studying was beginning. It’s been a busy week, and I will write about it very soon. But first, a diversion.

This evening (or just about yesterday evening as I write this), I went to see an game of American Football. I have some thoughts.

The game was at the huge, 77 thousand plus-seater stadium at MSU. The game was between the MSU Spartans and Youngstown State University (which is in Ohio)  and we won 28-6. Facts over, now for opinion…

I think American football could have been a good game. It’s quite distinctive and has interesting mechanics that are very different from other sports.  It’s repetitive, but it has a fair share of exciting moments. In all fairness, I quite enjoyed it when they were playing.

Unfortunately, that was only about 0.000000001% of the time. The game is a series of plays, each lasting roughly between five and ten seconds. Between each play they spend at least thirty seconds, and often much longer, reforming, swapping team members and talking amongst themselves.

This turns what should be a good game into hours of sitting around waiting for the brief moments when something is actually happening. In conclusion, the sport of American football is, in my not so humble opinion, very boring.

However…

If you ever spend any length of time in America, go to a football game. Because, much like the baseball game last week, the sport may be boring, the event was simply amazing.

It started with the marching bands, with the Youngstown State band coming out first and playing their “fight song” and some other stuff. It was quite big, maybe a hundred or so.

And then our band marched out. And then some more. And some more. The MSU marching band is huge. Ranked up they filled half the pitch. When they say marching, they mean marching. Seeing perhaps a three hundred strong band effortlessly move, whilst playing, into massive and prefect formations was quite impressive. They were to save their best trick until later- playing the drums upside-down, which has to be seen to be believed.

Along with the band came cheerleaders, dancers, flag-bearers and the MSU mascot, Sparty. I felt very sorry for Sparty, or the person inside him. It’s still very hot here, and he must have been melting in that suit.

The band played up whenever there was a break in play (i.e. most of the time), leading the crowd in chants and songs.  At other time the crowd simply did it themselves.

What is it with the Americans and sports? Their games are boring, but they really know how to put on a show. Maybe they’ve got it the right way round…

I did feel sorry for the opposing team. Out of nearly 77 thousand spectators, the number wearing Youngstown red instead of Spartan green and white was, oo, about two hundred. If that.