Have Yourself a Geeky Little Christmas..

I really need to put more effort into this blog...  But, life can be busy.  Between a huge stack of books I need to get around to reading, and quite a bit of effort going into learning some new skills, I have felt stretched a bit thin.  


But I wanted to take the time to ponder the holiday season.  In a couple of days, I will depart on a visit to see my daughter, her husband, and my three grandchildren.  


My oldest grand child is almost seven, and she is very smart.  My middle grandchild is three, and has been described by my daughter as "scary smart."  And the youngest is just over a year old.


I fact the question of what I will get them.  Sadly, they are all too young for anything really interesting.  I was about eight when I got my first chemistry set.  Of course, when I mixed up a bit of Prussian blue (a very simple thing to do) and left indelible stains in the bathroom sink, my mother began to question the wisdom of the purchase.


I am hoping to spark interest in things like science.  Who knows, maybe one of them will make some major breakthrough in theoretical physics.


Speaking of which, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have managed to create something that vibrates in ways that can only be described through quantum mechanics.  That is to say, it is going somewhere that is not in the classical realm.  This opens the door just a crack towards things like time travel and crossing over to other dimensions.


Now, a week or two ago, word came out of England that some researchers are closing in a creating a "sonic screwdriver."  Hmmm, time travel...a sonic screwdriver...throw in a blue police box, and well, I have dibs on being the Companion.


Now, THAT would be the perfect Christmas present...

A Very Geeky Saturday

Sorry to be so long between posts.  I have had a lot going on, and I keep putting off writing something.  I promise to try to be a bit better.


On Saturday I attended the open house at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, CA.  LBNL is one of 16 national labs operated by the Department of Energy.  It is a part of the University of California.


It was original referred to as the Radiation Lab at the University of California. It was part of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.


I first became familiar with LBNL when I read the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll. He was managing some computers at LBNL and was asked by his supervisor to figure out why there was a $0.75 accounting error in  the usage records.  This led Stoll to discover that a hacker has accessed the system.  


LBNL performs unclassified research primarily in the field of physics, though it has diversified into almost every area of scientific research.  


LBNL has a very distinguished history.  Eleven of its research have won Nobel Prizes, starting with Ernest Lawrence, and most recently George F. Smoot.  Smoot is one of my favorite scientists.  He not only won the Nobel Prize for the COsmic Background Explorer, is also the cousin of Oliver Smoot who is famous as the "Smoot" who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge by students at MIT.  The Smoot Marks are still visible, being traditionally restored each year.  Appropriately, Oliver Smoot went on to be the chairman of the American National Standards Institute(ANSI) and the president of International Organization for Standardization(ISO).  George Smoot has also made a cameo appearance as himself on "The Big Bang Theory" where he asked Dr. Sheldon Cooper if he was on crack, and was the second person to win a million dollars on "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader."


In order to get to LBNL we had to go to the University of California campus where we boarded a shuttle bus that took us up through the Berkeley Hills to the lab.  


When I arrived at the lab the first impression I had was "Eureka."  That is, I felt like I was visiting the fictional town of Eureka from the SyFy television show.  The whole event seemed sort of like "Fonder's Day" from the first episode of the current season of the show.  


I wondered around, checking out the various booths highlighting aspects of research conducted at the lab.  I then took a bus tour of the campus, which included a trip by the Bevatron building, which is, sadly, being torn down.  The Bevatron was the first particle accelerator to achieve billion electron volt(BeV) levels.  The Bevatron was where antiprotons were first observed, which confirmed the existence of antimatter.  It also allowed the discovery of many other particles leading to a new era in physics. While it will soon be gone, its legacy will live on at locations like the Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland.


The real highlight of the open house was visiting the Advanced Light Source(ALS).  Housed in a building original designed for a cyclotron, it is a synchrotron providing over 40 beamlines.  Both ultraviolet and soft x-ray beams are available for scientific research.  It is one of the brightest light sources of  ultraviolet light and soft x-rays, which allows research that had previously been impossible.


The ALS facility defies easy description.  During the tour we walked around the outer area surrounding the facility.  This allows access to the various experimental stations which can be used by approved researchers.  Each station has a specific purpose.  


Overall, the ALS is a maze of wires, pipes, computers, instruments, etc.  Much of the pipes are covered in a specialized form of aluminum foil that helps protect the vacuum that the beams travel through.


Another facility at LBNL,houses a pair of scanning tunneling microscopes, that are capable of a level of resolution to half the width of a hydrogen atom.  Unfortunately, that building was not open during the recent event.

One other highlight of the visit was seeing Ernest Lawrence's desk.  Among the items preserved there are a cigar box that was used to house the first plutonium ever produced, some of Lawrence's lab notes, and the first radiation warning sign.  The now familiar symbol was first created at LBNL.  The original version was magenta on a blue background.  Today, the official version is black on a yellow background.  The design was based on a pattern observed in a cloud chamber.

Visiting Lawrence Berkeley was the fulfillment of something I had desired since first reading "The Cuckoo's Egg."  It was also a chance to get an up close view at some of the cutting edge research going on while making a connection to scientific history.

A Mythical Encounter

I was out walking my dog, and I happened to pass a local restaurant when I saw someone familiar.  I was a bit surprised, since this appeared to be someone I knew from TV.  As I got close, I realized that it was who I thought it was, and that there was a another familiar face with him.

They were Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, stars of TV's Mythbusters, which is one of my favorite shows.

For those who don't know, Mythbusters takes on various "myths" which can include urban legends, rumors, adages, movie scenes, Internet videos, and the occasional bit of scientific error.

For example, they have shown that you can teach an old dog new tricks, that two cars hitting each other at 50 mph does not result in the same amount of damage as one car hitting a wall at 100 mph, and that a bullet fired from a gun does hit the ground at the same time as one dropped from the height of the barrel.  That last one proves a classic physics problem that has confounded many students as it seems wrong.  They are, perhaps, the first to ever actually test this.

Of course, I enjoy the show most when they are testing a scientific myth.  Sometimes, it seems, that they just wish to blow things up.  More than a few of their myths involve high explosives.

Of course, it is not at all surprising that I would see them in my neighborhood.  The show is filmed right here in San Francisco, and is headquartered at Hyneman's M5 Industries, a special effects firm that used to provide support to commercials, movies, and TV shows.  Now they primarily produce the show, and provide research and development for other companies.

Much of the show is show in, and around, San Francisco.  It is not unusual to see the cast shopping at places near where I live.  I have long figured that sooner or later I would probably see them in person.  

Actually, I had seen Adam Savage at this year's Macworld.  But it was fun to see the two of them together.  Of course, since they were obviously having a business lunch (it appeared that it was some sort of meeting) I did not interrupt them.  I would have loved to have had the chance to chat with them, but perhaps that opportunity will present itself in the future.

Granted, I fear that I would have either been afraid to speak, or would have quickly started asking for a job (it would be a Geek Girl's dream come true...) and it would have been embarrassing. 

History's Greatest Geeks, Part One

Geeks are not really all that new a thing.  We have been around for a very long time, though we were not always called "geeks."  In any case, history is full of those who fit would we would call "geekdom."  I thought it might be interesting to consider a few...

The problem is not finding ones to name, but instead is having an abundance of riches.  I know I will miss more than a few, so this list is by no means meant to be comprehensive, but instead to look at some of the great ones.

Archimedes

Archimedes is a good one to start with.  He was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.  His is credited with several discoveries, including his work in determining density, which arose from the request that he determine if a crown produced for the king was solid gold, or if the goldsmith had pilfered some, using silver to make up the difference.

He was taking a bath when he realized that his body was displacing an amount of water equivalent to his volume.  Based on that, he could determine the volume of the crown, and therefore determine its density, which would be less if silver had been substituted for gold.  He was so excited that he ran back home without remembering to dress, dashing through the streets yelling "eureka!"(literally, "I have found it!").

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.  He discovered the first four moons of Jupiter, he was the father of modern physics, and in perhaps one of his geekiest moments, he gave us Galileo's Paradox.  He observed that some numbers are perfect squares, that is, they are the square of an integer.  But not all integers, are perfect squares and in fact, most are not.  So, there must be more that are not perfect squares than that are.  But, all integers are the square roots of a perfect sq are.  Put in simple terms, there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares.  This seems a contradiction, and Galileo concluded that more, less, and equal do not apply to infinite sets.  But, in truth, as strange as it seems, some infinite sets are bigger than others.

He, along with Archimedes can thought of as the giants whose shoulders our next geek stood on...

Sir Isaac Newton

Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who was one of the most influential people in human history.  He gave us the basis for classical mechanics including the three laws of motion:

First Law: An object at rest tends to stay at rest, or if it is in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by a sum of physical forces.


Second Law: A body will accelerate with acceleration proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass.


Third Law: Every action has a reaction equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Another major contribution of Newton was the development of calculus.  He was the first to organize it into a specific field of mathematics, and also was responsible for some of the first applications.  He was not the only one to contribute to its development, which brings us to our next figure from history...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz was a German mathematician who a invented calculus independently of Newton.  In fact, they were involved in a bitter rivalry over which invented it first.  Today, Leibniz's notation is the one used in calculus, though both contributed ideas to the subject, and as noted above, Newton was the first to organize it into an independent subject.

Of equal importance to geeks everywhere is Leibniz's documentation of the binary number system which he associate with the I Ching.

Leibniz also made contributions to the field of topology.

Leonhard Euler

Euler was a contemporary of Leibniz and the man who gave us the exponential function and logarithms. He also contributed to the field of complex numbers and gave us Euler's Identity, which is one of the most profound statements in all of mathematics.

This combines five of the most important constants in mathematics.  The constant e is an interesting, number that shows up in many diverse places in mathematics and science.  It is an irrational number(i.e. it can not be expressed by m/n where m and n are integers.  Pi, the ratio of the diameter and circumfrunce of a circle, and is also irrational.  And i, is the imaginary number that is the square root of -1.  And of course, 1 and 0 are rather obvious in their importance.

Well, that is just a few of the numerous geeks from history.  In future articles we will look at others, both living and dead.  And both real, and fictional.