Top physics programs

marite · January 23, 2007, 11:42am

H spent the Christmas vacation reading two critiques of string theory. It’s losing favor; S read Brian Greene in 6th grade and was excited to learn of a way to combine math and physics, his two great loves; he seems to be reconsidering his early attachment to string theory.

Tarhunt · January 23, 2007, 12:19pm

marite:

Is it just string theory that’s losing favor, or M or Brame theory, as well?

marite · January 23, 2007, 12:31pm

Hm… I don’t know what M or Brame theories are. S is not around to ask.

idad · January 23, 2007, 12:57pm

marite: “Hm… I don’t know what M or Brame theories are. S is not around to ask.”

LOL, boy do I resonate with that!

emeraldkity4 · January 23, 2007, 1:09pm

the physicist we know is real interested in few body physics although in the past he has also researched string theory but dont ask me to explain what they are
I have read Brian Greene though-
but I am impressed at anyone who reads him in 6th grade- thats pretty cool
( I wish I had the internet when I was in 6th grade- or even got taken to the library whine )

marite · January 23, 2007, 1:13pm

EK:

I can’t be sure he really understood Greene at that age. But whatever he got out of reading Greene got him excited. I think he saw a way of making pure math “relevant.” He’s now given up on relevance and just goes for pure math.

Tarhunt · January 23, 2007, 2:33pm

marite:

M/Brame theory is a bit like string theory, but postulates membrames instead of strings. My limited understanding is that string theory doesn’t work without an extra dimension, and M theory supplies that dimension.

Here’s a link:

<a href=“Index | Relativity and Gravitation Group”>Index | Relativity and Gravitation Group;

marite · January 23, 2007, 2:41pm

Tarhunt:

Okay, I get it (more or less). I believe that all versions of string theory are in decline. However, last summer, S approached Prof. Yau for suggestions about readings, so he may not have lost faith altogether; but that was before H bought the two anti-string theory books.

dmd77 · January 23, 2007, 5:44pm

Reed College is the only college in the country with a nuclear reactor run entirely by undergraduates. My daughter, the theater/lit major, even did an experiment in the reactor when she took chem 101/102 (a year of science is required of all students); she measured the half-life of irradiated nickels.

Reed and Haverford are both known for the excellence of their undergraduate science programs.

grayza1234 · January 23, 2007, 7:58pm

The original motivation for string theory was straight out of the lab actually. They found that the S-matrix which described the scattering of hadrons uniquely described a string. From there they found that these strings could only interact with other strings. Since we observe particles interacting then it is safe to say that every particle is string. Beyond that there are no experimental justifications only theoretical arguments and I do believe that the more steps you take apart from experiment the higher risk there is that you missed something or made a dodgy argument, only a small risk since there are many people checking your work a hundred times, but a risk nonetheless. Also new discoveries compile upon previous work ans so the risk escalates. Even the most intelligent people in the world make mistakes: Archimedes believed that everything could be discerned by pure thought and while he was a great thinker, he made the mistake of claiming that different masses fall at different rates which Galilleo later proved wrong. So yes while people can be confident that string theory is in some measure correct, whole sections of it could be complete balony. Therefore it is definately very necessary for string theory to produce something. Although there are some tentative attempts to test string theory (such as the proposal to look in the cmbr) but I’m skeptical of that particular test. What I am saying is don’t hold your breath, it is the toughest field ever encountered in theoretical physics and progress is slow so it could be some time before a real test of the theory is proposed. But this is not unheard of. Einstein showed via the EPR paradox that quantum mechanics violates local realism and proposed an (presumably) untestable theory called the hidden variable model. Roughly FORTY years later Bell proposed a way of testing it called the “bell inequality” and it has been only recently (nearly a century later) that Bell inequalities are being demonstrated experimentally (hence proving einstien wrong). So the lesson is that these things can take time but some genuis will always figure out ways of testing untestable theories. Having said that there is no doubt a string theorist takes a risk in that he could one day find that his section of string theory was balony, but thats what makes it exciting! I personally plan to also do some on the side research in Quantum information theory to keep me grounded.

grayza1234 · January 23, 2007, 8:02pm

M-theory is still called string theory so yes they are the same thing. String theory is the limit of M-theory. They aren’t losing favour they still attract the top physicists but those on the outside are getting grumpy ;). Briane Greene at 11? Wow I started with Hawking and Feynmann at 13 (my head was lost in Tolkien at 11 lol)

mini · January 23, 2007, 8:13pm

“Reed College is the only college in the country with a nuclear reactor run entirely by undergraduates.”

Oh, big deal. My high school, in the mid-60s, had one entirely BUILT by high school students. Once they’d run it a bit, the government stepped in, and permanently cordoned off the basement which housed it. It was actually pretty funny, with the city police at the principal’s office every other week because of a “bomb scare” (meaning a drug bust - the school was at the edge of the East Village), and the feds running around worried about 14-year-old nuclear scientists.

pateta00 · January 23, 2007, 8:18pm

<a href=“http://www.aip.org/pnu/1995/split/pnu241-2.htm[/url]”>http://www.aip.org/pnu/1995/split/pnu241-2.htm</a>

emeraldkity4 · January 23, 2007, 9:11pm

*“Reed College is the only college in the country with a nuclear reactor run entirely by undergraduates.”

Oh, big deal.*

Well we know that you dont care for Reed but it is interesting that someone whose daughter is attending a school where you aren’t even required to take science/math credits to graduate is interested in what colleges teach physics ( but thats what makes you such a surprising and mysterious person mini! )

idad · January 23, 2007, 10:58pm

Running a nuclear reactor is great, building a breeder reactor that produces weapons grade plutonium in a couple of days is also cool. I love it when undergrad students do the “impossible.” (I know it is obviously not impossible, but ya’ll know what I mean.)

“I give Mathews House a tremendous amount of
credit for the breeder reactor. This fell
into the category of exceeding my
expectations-- that was definitely one of the
highlights for me,” Howe said.

<pre><code> Using the naturally radioactive element
Thorium, fourth year students in the College
Fred Neill and Justin Kasper contructed the
device with scraps of discarded aluminum and
carbon sheets.

       "We used Thorium... and turned it into
       weapons grade uranium and plutonium. We used
       the powder from vacuum tubes, and just
       scraped the Thorium powder off the insides.
       As for materials for the reactor, we used
       aluminum and carbon sheets which came out of
       the garbage. We did a little polishing and
       black magic, and turned it into a reactor,"
       Neill said.

       While the actual construction of the reactor
       took four hours, Neill said that the most
       challenging aspect of the assignment was
       proving that the device operated correctly.

       "If someone looks at a pile of aluminum and
       carbon, they'll say you're full of it. You
       have to actually prove it... So we did some
       fairly intensive research on the nuclear
       disintegration that goes on inside the
       reaction -- it gives off a specific energy of
       photon that's released which proves that
       we've created weapons grade uranium. But
       they're very hard to detect, so we borrowed a
       proportional counter, which is like a Geiger
       counter, except much more sensitive, from the
       Physics department," Neill said.

       To verify the authenticity of the breeder
       reactor, Scavenger Hunt judges brought in a
       nuclear physicist to examine the device and
       determine whether the students had accurately
       constructed the reactor.

       "When the judges found out that there was a
       group that actually built one, they really
       flipped out... So we're sitting there making
       the reactor by my bed and a judge calls and
       says they're going to check this out and
       bring a nuclear physicist to verify it. I
       don't think he [the nuclear physicist]
       understood that we were serious until we
       started walking him through it and talking
       about decay change -- his eyes just bugged
       out. He was really speechless," Kasper said.
       "He endorsed it for the judges. It was funny
       because the judges were there taking notes
       just in case they needed to be able to judge
       another reactor."

       Although some judges and fellow Mathews
       teammates were concerned over the safety of
       the reactor, Kasper said that he and Neill
       took serious precautions during its
       construction.

       "It was all very well-controlled. We packed
       the materials..., built a shed, and assembled
       it there... We've stopped the reaction. We
       only detected about several thousand atoms of
       Uranium, so it's not like the source is
       radioactive by any means anymore. We might
       keep the reactor as a souvenir -- as long as
       the components are far apart, it should be
       okay," he said.

       Although the equipment that the pair borrowed
       to detect the Uranium was worth thousands of
       dollars, the materials used to make the
       reactor cost the team nothing, making the
       device an ideal Scavenger Hunt item because
       it relied on ingenuity rather than money,
       according to Kasper.

       "I think it was a really great item because
       it didn't cost anything, which is important.
       I mean, the Manhattan project cost one
       billion WWII dollars, and we were able to do
       this successfully without spending too much,"
       Kasper said.

</code></pre>

For a picture:<a href=“University of Chicago News”>University of Chicago News;

mini · January 23, 2007, 11:18pm

“Well we know that you dont care for Reed but it is interesting that someone whose daughter is attending a school where you aren’t even required to take science/math credits to graduate is interested in what colleges teach physics ( but thats what makes you such a surprising and mysterious person mini! )”

For me, Reed would have been PERFECT (or at least a heck of lot better than my alma mater.) Different strokes for different folks.

But the nuclear reactor thing just isn’t all that interesting when I knew 14-year-olds in the 1960s who built one.

dmd77 · January 23, 2007, 11:38pm

If you’re interested in physics, you might just want to have a chance to run a nuclear reactor. No, not that hard to build. And John Phillips designed an atomic bomb as an undergraduate at Princeton. No, not that hard, and yet…

But: when all the other student-accessible reactors are NOT accessible to undergraduates, perhaps it means something when one is.

dmd77 · January 23, 2007, 11:39pm

pateta: did you happen to notice that study you cited is from 1987-88? Just a touch out of date.

idad · January 23, 2007, 11:45pm

When visiting Reed a couple of years ago a student guide at the reactor described a project with the art department where they were using the reactor to “see” paintings that had been painted over with other scenes. The student operator was not a physics major, but was a licensed operator. It was fascinating and I remember thinking how fortunate the students were to be involved in this project without having to be a physics major.

pateta00 · January 24, 2007, 12:57am

“pateta: did you happen to notice that study you cited is from 1987-88? Just a touch out of date.” it does not matter…those schools are still among the top.

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