The Ph-word                

Hi <<First Name>>. Thanks for reading the sixth issue of this newsletter!

If there's one thing I learned last month is that home is where the laptop is. (As opposed to netbook, notbook, tablet and phone.)
This realization came while at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, Netherlands, at the quite interesting Astro Hack Week. And what that was? A cross between a workshop (where physicists come together to work uninterruptedly), a summer school (a tradition in physics where students learn extra things while at resorts), an unconference (a self-organized series of lectures, in millennial newspeak I guess :p) and, most intriguing, a hackathon.
In hackathons it's usually programmers who gather for a few days to quickly put together projects they just heard about. In a similar fashion the Week participants worked on astrophysics ideas that some among them suggested, with emphasis on the red-hot computing trend of big data analysis. Some astro projects took form indeed, as expected some beers were consumed, but mainly there was a spectacular rate of knowledge exchange and progress from collaborating; I think the recipe of success was the self-structuring nature of the Week and the varied level of experience of the participants.
Personally I'd certainly want to spend some days every few months practising in such an environment for any field of activity that I'm interested in, cocktail making and bollywood dancing not excluded.

Meanwhile, regular readers of The Ph-word will certainly be sick of seeing my solar physics publication being mentioned. But guess what? This time it was published in the correct issue of the journal. (By mistake it had been published earlier; however this special issue is dedicated to predicting future solar activity.)

Last, our promotional giveaway is now over! Scroll down for the winner - and for more.

eleni@chapette.net

 

During a recent chat I realized that there's one topic suffering a huge gap in popularized physics. This is experimental discoveries which became very widely known, but which nobody told the public later that they were actually found to be wrong! Let's talk about the top two of the last years. I'll keep it really brief otherwise I could get switched on for hours.

Was it found that neutrinos can travel faster than light? Answer: No.

The OPERA experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, works with neutrinos sent out from CERN and traversing 750km of solid rock; neutrinos don't interact much with anything so they can indeed be sent through ground without needing a tunnel or anything of the kind. Anyway - in 2011 OPERA announced that some of the little foxy ones had arrival times which implied a speed faster than even light's.
I bet that not a single physicist anywhere was impressed, since the "speed limit" of light is the number one pillar of modern physics and it'd take a lot more to bring it down (even some of OPERA's members didn't put their names on the relevant publication). And they were right. A few months later the culprit was found to be the connection of an optical fiber which resulted in wrong measurements...

Did the BICEP experiment find strong proof for the theory of cosmological inflation? Answer: No.

This is a little more technical, but folks who follow the news in cosmology were bombarded with enthusiastic reports in 2014. BICEP, a telescope in Antarctica, had announced the detection of "B-modes polarization" in the cosmic microwave background.
The cosmic microwave background is the ancient light that bathes the sky, and whose mapping has revolutionized cosmology with its wealth of info about the structure and history of the universe. And cosmological inflation is a philosophically rather daring theory about what might have happened before the big bang (spoiler: the universe might have grown far too quickly, resulting in countless isolated areas; everything we see might be inside just one of them). Although promising, extreme theories need extreme proofs, and the predicted special pattern of polarization of the cosmic light would be one of them.
Eventually though, the polarized signal turned out to come from grains of dust scattered throughout the Milky Way. And the only overinflated thing in the story was the amount of positive publicity people at BICEP received.

For the sake of completeness, we can pass briefly from experimental to theoretical physics: Though stories are told, actually there haven't been any verifications so far for string theory, supersymmetry or the multiverse. Thought you might like to know.

Sun and moon

In space news, NASA launched a spacecraft that in about five years from now will approach our nearest star ... yeap, that's the sun :p
The Parker Solar Probe will find itself at a distance of only four solar diameters from the sun, floating happily through the corona and sending back info (while its thermal shield will be protecting it from the ambient temperatures of 2,500 degrees).

Lastly, after Mars it's now suddenly moon's turn in terms of water. After a decade of diving in data from the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission, NASA found our satellite to have ice patches on both its poles! From this to lunar bases it's just one small step in imagination ^^

...Till next month.
Eleni
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www.chapette.net

Monument to the lab mice who've lost their lives for science, RIKEN research centre, Tokyo
(from my photoblog Blossom City Hotel)