Galileo's Assayer and Torricelli's barometer

A couple months ago, Science magazine had a retrospective by Alex Gomez-Marin on Galileo's The Assayer, which was published 400 years ago this year.  Part of a series of scientific disputes regarding the nature of comets, this particular piece lays out Galileo's methodological perspective on how science should be done.  I've only read selected excerpts in translation, but I do know that others (e.g., Flemish contemporary Simon Stevin) held similar views.

Meanwhile the December issue of Physics Today features a Backscatter item on Torricelli's barometer, by Karina Cooper.  Torricelli was Galileo's last "student", and his work with the barometer was an important step in the understanding of hydrostatic pressure.  Together with Torricelli's efflux law, this achievement ranks him as a major founder of 17th century fluid mechanics, along with Stevin and Galileo's older student, Benedetto Castelli.

My interest in these matters, and the history of classical physics more generaly, has grown noticeably in the last year or so, particularly in the arena of fluid mechanics, which is an interdisciplinary field involving physics, mathematics, and engineering.  Seeing these items in Science and Physics Today is a great way to wind down the year of 2023.  

 As a bonus I praise Physics Today for featuring a cover story in November on research in contemporary fluid mechanics, namely the piece by Detlef Lohse and Olga Shishkina on "Ultimate turbulent thermal convection".  However, the authors' insistence on the relevance of the reported work for real world situations, such as atmospheric and photospheric convection, seems to me insincere when they focus on results for "classical regime" aspect ratios between 0.5 and 1.0.  The atmospheric and photospheric examples involve large aspect ratios.

Nonetheless, the cover is worth reproducing here.  We don't get to see fluid mechanics featured on the front cover of Physics Today all that often!

If I don't write again this year, may you all have a wonderful holiday season and a blessed new year.  See you in 2024!

Scientist Biography Series, some notes

Almost two years ago, I had a post on some scientist biography series published by various university presses.  I'd like to provide a few miscellaneous notes on that post.  

First, the Cambridge University Press series, Cambridge Science Biographies, was originally published by Blackwell and called the Blackwell Science Biographies.  I recently acquired used copies of the volumes on Galileo and Newton, two of the three in the series devoted to physicists (I am missing the volume for Ampere).  My copy of the Galileo volume (by the late Father Michael Sharratt) is from the Blackwell era, while my copy of the Newton volume (by the late A. Rupert Hall) is from the Cambridge era.

Turning to their rival, Oxford University Press, I discovered a more general biography series of theirs called Lives and Legacies.  I see that there are ten volumes in the series, only two of which are dedicated to scientists.  One is Isaac Newton, and the other is Ben Franklin.  To the extent that Franklin was a scientist, he was a physicist, so it is notable that the only 2 scientists in the series are physicists.

The 2023 Nobel Prizes

Following the announcements of the Nobel Prizes this past week has been quite thrilling.  While I won't comment on the literature and economics prizes, one surprise (to me) is that this year's Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned, was a physics major in college, and onetime professional engineer.  She has previously been awarded the Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society.  Physics World notes that she is the third physicist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after Andrei Sakharov himself, and Joseph Rotblat.

The physiology or medicine prize to K. Kariko and D. Weissman for "nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19" was particularly delightful.  Reading of Kariko's professional struggles and marginalization, while managing to raise an Olympic Gold-Medalist daughter, provides yet another critique of conventional academic culture, groupthink, and incentive structures.  Both laureates labeled in the scientific wilderness for many, many years, before seeing one fruition of their work take on global significance, arguably changing the course of history.

The prize for physics to P. Agostini, F. Krausz, and A. L'Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" is for an accomplishment less familiar to me, and learning of its details has been very instructive.  As I started reading about this work, I immediately thought of 1999 Chemistry laureate Ahmed Zewail, who I found is indeed mentioned in the scientific information packet released by the Nobel Foundation.  It was interesting to see AMO (atomic, molecular, and optical) physics honored again after the 2018 prize; indeed both the 2018 and 2023 prizes have done much to address the historical imbalance against female laureates.  There are now three living female Nobel laureates in physics at the same time, something unprecedented.  (And if you include this year's Peace laureate, there are four living women physicist Nobel laureates!)

Finally I am always pleased when a chemistry prize is awarded (as in Zewail's case) for a physics-related achievement - in this year's case, quantum dots.  Like many, I'd heard of quantum dots without knowing the names of the scientists who pioneered them, including those honored this year:  M. G. Bawendi, L. E. Brus, and A. I. Ekimov.

This has been a good batch of laureates to honor industrial scientists, as Katalin Kariko was, for some time, primarily employed by BioNTech, while Alexei Ekimov was still affiliated with a company called Nanocrystals Technology, Inc., at the time of receiving the award. 

The Nobel Prizes are justly criticized in many quarters, and should not be the only mark of high prestige that scientists and the general public focus on.  Having said that, the Nobel Committee did a fine job with this year's selections, doing much to maintain credibility for their efforts.

Some good stuff in Quanta magazine

I'd like to highlight a couple of excellent physics articles that appeared in Quanta magazine last month.

First, Thomas Lewton profiles Jonathan Oppenheim's work on hybrid classical-quantum theories of quantum gravity.  The idea seems to be that instead of attempting to quantize the gravitational field, let it remain classical.  To reconcile quantum uncertainty with a classical spacetime, gravity must be stochastic; it must be noisy.  

Second, Katie McCormick discusses a topological insulator analogy that has been used to explain atmospheric motions such as Kelvin waves in the Earth's atmosphere.  Taruh Matsuno's successful prediction of equatorial Kelvin waves in the 1960s was, evidently, one of the only times theoretical work in geophysical fluid dynamics was predictive of phenomena later discovered in nature.  The article focuses on Brad Marston and collaborators' theoretical and observational work demonstrating that Matsuno's waves can be understood using a topological insulator analogy (think quantum Hall effect).  Once again, a theoretical prediction (Poincare gravity waves in the stratosphere) was subsequently confirmed observationally.  Finally the article discusses David Tong's quantum field theoretical framing of coastal Kelvin waves.

I had attended a talk by Marston at the APS March Meeting earlier this year (see my earlier post), but did not quite follow it.  I am grateful to Quanta magazine for distilling the story into a form that can be consumed by a wider public (including me).

A decade of DTLR

The Diffusion Tensor Literary Review celebrates ten years of operation this month.  DTLR's first post is dated July 21, 2013.  In the decade since, the world has changed considerably, as have science, engineering, and medicine.  When I started this blog, I did not foresee it continuing for as long as a decade.  

Looking over the record of previous posts, there were some lean years from 2017-2019, when output was less than ten posts per year. The most productive year was its first, 2013, technically barely a half-year, and the second most productive was, more recently, 2021, measured by number of posts.  It seems the most popular topics have included fluid mechanics, reproducible research, and scientific publishing.  There have also been book reviews, and salutes to departed scientists Jerry Gollub, Edward N. Lorenz, Steven Weinberg, and Gordon Moore.  Two of my favorite posts are memoirs of conferences, the Joint Mathematics Meeting (2017) in San Diego, and the American Physical Society March Meeting (2023) in Las Vegas.  There has been plenty of criticism and opinion on this blog.  All together, an eclectic mixture.  Let's see what our second decade will bring.

Prometheus' Great Minds series on physics

Continuing the theme of my last post, the publisher Prometheus (which is now owned by Roman & Littlefield) has perhaps a more extensive catalog of "classics" in physics and astronomy than the others mentioned in my previous post.  As far as I can tell, their Great Minds series includes:

• Moritz Schlick's Space and Time in Contemporary Physics:  An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity and Gravitation.
• Fred Holye's Of Men and Galaxies.
• James Clerk Maxwell's Matter and Motion.
• William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait's The Elements of Natural Philosophy.
• Marie Curie's Radioactive Substances.
• Michael Faraday's The Forces of Matter.
• Johannes Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World.  (Selections of both works are published together in a single volume.)
• Nicholaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres.
• Galileo Galilei's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences.
• Isaac Newton's Principia.
• Albert Einstein's Relativity.

Some of the above volumes consist only in selections, rather than the entire work.

This series is perhaps second only to Dover Publications in its effort to keep in print some of the classic works in the history of physics and astronomy.

Oxford World Classics volumes on physics

Continuing a theme from my post last year on the Norton Critical Editions in natural science, today I'd like to take a look at another series, the Oxford World Classics.  This is a series of classic works, mostly in literature, though other subjects are included, including natural science.  There are two volumes of Charles Darwin's works, two of Sigmund Freud's, and a few works in medicine and natural history.  I'm going to focus here on works in physics.  As far as I can tell, there are only three:

• Aristotle's Physics.
• Galileo's Selected Writings.
• Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems.

I see then that this series does not overlap with Norton's, whose only physics contribution I know of are selected works of Newton.  The other, and most famous, competing series is, of course, the Penguin Classics, of which there are well over a thousand volumes.  Theirs is a catalog so vast that I have not attempted to mine it to see what volumes of physics interest there may be.  However, according to Wikipedia, one is Albert Einstein's Relativity:  The Special and General Theory.  I see that separately, Penguin also publishes The Essential Einstein, edited by Stephen Hawking, a collection of selected works.

New images from the Inouye Solar Telescope

Evidently a couple weeks ago the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope released a set of new images of the solar photosphere.  The new telescope is still in its commissioning phase.  The images are quite impressive.

H/T:  Sabine Hossenfelder

Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science celebrates 50th anniversary

The Verlag von Julius Springer, now called Springer Nature, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science this year.  As I write this, there are over 13,800 volumes published in the series, though most of the earliest ones are long out of print.  The series also boasts two subseries, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics.  Most of the volumes in LNCS are actually meeting/conference proceedings.  Indeed, almost 20 years ago I co-authored a paper published in the refereed proceedings of a workshop that appeared in LNCS.  In the nearly 2 decades since, that paper has garnered well over 300 citations, according to Google Scholar.  Based on that n=1 case, I would say that the series successfully disseminated the research we reported in our contribution.

DTLR congratulates Springer on the 50th anniversary of LNCS.

The 2023 Abel Prize

Additional news this week includes the awarding of this year's Abel Prize in Mathematics to Luis A. Caffarelli, for his work in nonlinear partial differential equations.  Of interest to DTLR is his 1982 work, with Robert Kohn and 2015 Abel Laureate Louis Nirenberg, on singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations, work directly relevant to the topic of the (still unsolved) Clay Millenium Prize problem related to the Navier-Stokes equations.

The Abel Prize was begun a few years after I left graduate school, so I consider it a recent phenomenon.  It is intended to be considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.  In reading the list of past laureates, I realized that I've attended lectures by several.  I attended a lecture by 2015 laureate John Nash at New York University, likely in 2008 or 2009.  Unfortunately Dr. Nash and his wife were killed while traveling home from the Abel Prize ceremony.  Also around the same era (Dec. 2008), I attended the 100th Statistical Mechanics conference of Rutgers University.  There were many notable speakers there, and as I reread the speaker list, I am amazed.  The 2007 Abel laureate, Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan, and future 2014 Abel laureate Yakov G. Sinai, both spoke there.  I honestly can't recall watching their lectures, nor those of many other luminaries on the list (including names I did not come to fully appreciate until over a decade later).  I do recollect sitting next to Juan Maldacena at the conference dinner, where I couldn't resist bringing up Lee Smolin's argument against string theory (see Smolin's book, The Trouble with Physics).  Dr. Maldacena's response (I'm paraphrasing) was that many smart people work on string theory, and they wouldn't be doing that if it were as hopeless as Smolin seems to think.

I have only met one Abel laureate in person, and only briefly, Peter D. Lax (2005), during a visit to the Courant Institute in the mid-2000s. Similarly, while I have attended lectures by dozens of Nobel laureates (too many to attempt to list here), I only met one in person, and again only briefly:  the late Paul C. Lauterbur, 2003 laureate in physiology or medicine.  I met him at a book signing of his at the San Francisco IEEE EMBS annual meeting in 2004.

Gordon Moore (1929-2023)

DTLR joins the physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science communities in mourning Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who sadly passed on March 24, just a few days ago.  While I did not work in the areas that he did, his contributions to our civilization have affected all of mankind.

Physicists descend upon Las Vegas (March 2023)

For the first time since 1986, the American Physical Society (APS) held its annual March Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Yep, I was there!

The main lobby at Caesar's Forum, March 8, 2023.

I attended in-person, arriving Sunday afternoon, March 5, 2023, and staying through late morning Friday, March 20.  Most of the events took place in and around Caesar's Forum.  (The virtual sessions have been running this week, ending tomorrow March 22.)  I heard there were about 12,000 physicists registered for the event, but I don't know how that breaks down between the in-person and virtual attendees.

Exterior of Caesar's forum, Las Vegas, NV, 9 March 2023.

I'll just mention some of the highlights for me.  First, being such a large event post-COVID, I noticed that some attendees were wearing masks, but I would say the majority were not.  Lanyards were color coded based on the wearer's comfort level:

Lanyard comfort level guide, 6 March 2023.

This would have been difficult to enforce because of the venue.  The regular session rooms were often too small, resulting in packed rooms with standing room only at the back.  (Some of the larger rooms hosted sparsely attended sessions, in contrast.)  The hallways were packed during breaks between sessions, and lines were long and convoluted (with several merging lines) at the food/drink-serving events, like the Monday evening reception, and the Industry Day reception thursday night.  The catered food was not of great quality, and the food-for-purchase at the exhibit hall was exorbitantly priced.   Continuing with complaints about the venue, there were a number of audio/visual technical glitches throughout the week.  I had trouble using the APS Meetings app on my phone (I was able to use it before the meeting, but never got it to work while I was actually there).  Not the organizers' fault, but it was very cold the night of the Monday evening reception, which was an ourdoor event, and all the food I ate was mostly cold by the time I ate it there.

Nonetheless, I had a great time.  This was only the fourth March Meeting I've attended - the first scientific talk I ever gave was at the 1999 Centennial Meeting in Atlanta, and I also spoke at the 2002 Indianapolis March Meeting.  Both of those were during my graduate student days.  Much later, I attended the 2014 March Meeting in Denver at my own expense.  I did so again this year.  I remember taking some time to explore Atlanta and Denver (even spending part of a day at Boulder) during the 1999 and 2014 meetings, but Indianapolis and Las Vegas are cities I know fairly well (though I did do some off-meeting things in Vegas).

The view from my hotel room at the Flamingo, 5 March 2023.  The "High Roller" is an iconic part of the Las Vegas skyline, and I got to ride on it Monday night after the conference reception!

 

The highlight Sunday evening was the Kavli Foundation Symposium, "Frontier Physics from Atomic to Astronomical Scales".  The first speaker was Monika Aidelsburger (Ludwig-Maximilians University) on using optically trapped cold atoms to simulate other quantum systems.  I especially enjoyed learning about "twistronics" from the second speaker, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (MIT):  placing two or more graphene sheets on top of each other, but at an angle so that their crystal structures were out of alignment.  These types of systems are known as "moire quantum matter".  Next was Brad Marston (Brown University) who spoke about large scale waves in the Earth's atmosphere. The last speaker, Gabriela Gonzalez of Louisiana State University, is always worth going to hear (I've seen her speak elsewhere) talk about gravitational wave astronomy.  The session was followed by a unique, but very Nevada-ish, entertainment, a delightful performance by Le PeTiT CiRqUe (a children's cirque group actually based in the Los Angeles area), titled "Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps".  Hopefully the troupe can give a repeat performance for other physics events in the southern California/Nevada area in the future.

Monday's highlights include the session "Physics Outside the Lab:  Government, Policy, and Diplomacy, Outreach, Journalism and Entrepreneurship".  I missed the first talk as I was attending another session (a common occurrence throughout the week - there were so many interesting-looking talks that I missed due to conflicts). I enjoyed all of the remaining speakers though.  Joseph Niemela of ICTP spoke about supporting young physicists throughout the developing world.  Amy Flatten of APS outlined a very interesting career crossing over from government, tech companies, and now the APS itself.  The third speaker Surya Raghu, spoke about working in industry and Pasteur's quadrant (a concept introduced by David Stokes), while the last speaker, Matteo Rini, who had spent a year working at the European parliament, is now editor-in-chief of APS' Physics Magazine.

Monday afternoon featured a talk by Michelle Frank, a student at CUNY's Biography and Memoir program.  She spoke about the life of physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, particularly the early part of her career.  This was an incredibly good and informative talk.  The speaker incidentally has an article in the April issue of Scientific American, about Wu's involvement in quantum entanglement.  If Ms. Frank has more work on C.-S. Wu on the way, I will be eager to read it.

Another view of the Caesar's Forum, March 9.  The earlier Monday evening reception was held on this patio, but it was really cold that night!

Tuesday was the first day of the Exhibits, and I usually make sure to spend time at the exhibits whenever I attend a conference, usually shopping for books and occasionally speaking with software companies.  This time was no exception, and I ended up hauling back four books in my luggage, and purchasing 9 more after I got home, using the conference discounts. But I began the day attending a very interesting talk on maximum entropy-based statistical inference, a topic I've always wanted to learn more about.  The presentation by Ying-Jen Yang, a post-doc at Stony Brook, based on his graduate work at the U. of Washington under applied mathematician Hong Qian, was titled "Statistical Thermodynamics and Data Ad Infinitum".  There is an ArXiv preprint by the authors available as well.

Another highlight of the day was a talk by Rob Phillips of CalTech, an award-winning teacher.  He was assigned the title "More is Still Different", celebrating 50 (and a half) years since P. W. Anderson's famous and still influential essay, "More is Different".  As a fluid dynamicist, my absolute favorite slide of the whole meeting was this one of Phillips':

An exemplary slide from Rob Phillips' talk "More is Still Different", March 7, 2023.  The lower left corner is titled "Elasticity" and the lower right "Hydrodynamics".

The one time I was able to get food and drink in a reasonable manner was at the Meet the Physical Review Editors reception Tuesday late afternoon, which was also held outdoors.  I spoke with an editor of PRL and one for PRB, but I did not see the editors of Physical Review Fluids there.  I was able to be more social and talk to more new people there than at the actual reception the previous night.  However, DTLR readers should know that I questioned the editors I met about the efficacy of peer review.  I have come to be very sympathetic to the skeptical views of Adam Mastroianni on peer review.

Speaking of editors, throughout the week I popped in and out of the rolling session on Fluids, which began first thing Monday morning and continued until the end of the conference on Friday:

Placard in front of Room 210, where the Fluids sessions ran (March 8, 2023).

The editor of Physics of Fluids, Jeff Giacomin, was often sitting in the front row of the session.  I was able to speak with him very briefly, and noticed him chatting with the AIP Publishing representative at the exhibits at another point during the week.

On Wednesday I hurried to have a quick lunch (this was the one day I used the caterer at the exhibit hall) so that I could make it to the Art Meets Science session.  I was not disappointed.  I was able to attend the first three talks:

• James Kakalios (U. Minnesota) on "The Art and Science of Superheroes";
• Jessamyn Fairfield (U. Galway) on "Comedy as a Tool for Democratization of Knowledge";
• Julia Ruth (physicist turned cirque performer) on "Finding Center:  A Balancing Act Between Circus and Science".
  

I'm not sure I'll ever seen such a fascinating group of physicists in one place and time again.  All of these speakers gave riveting presentations, and ought to be in high demand on the speaking circuit in my opinion!

On thursday, one of the fluids sessions featured this enthralling talk on "Dancing Raisins" by Severio Spagnolie (U. Wisconsin-Madison).  All I can say is get a bottle of sparkling water, open it and pour into a glass, place some raisins in it, and watch what happens!  He said the first 20 minutes after opening the bottle were the best, but you could watch the raisins continuously aquire, then lose, buoyancy by bubble formation and destruction, for about 2 hours.  The roughness of the raisin surface and their rotational motion turn out to be keys to understanding the effect.

The afternoon featured a session on the history and philosophy of physics.  It began with a philosophical talk by Lena Zuchowski (U. Bristol) on the arrow of time, and ways to formulate a concept of entropy and a second law of thermodynamics in order to understand that arrow.  Astronomer Virgnia Trimble (UC Irvine) gave a general talk about physics anniversaries (the theme of the session).  Chad Orzel (Union College) then gave a phenomenal presentation about the 75th anniversary of quantum electrodynamics.  The session ended with Donnell Walton (Corning) who spoke about Willie Hobbs Moore, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics in the U.S.  A surprising aspect of her career is that after doing physics she moved into quality management at the Ford Motor Company.  Three people asked or commented about this aspect of her career during the Q&A.

The day ended with a special session featuring two of last year's three Nobel laureates in physics.  The session was introduced by David Haviland (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), a member of the Nobel committee, who explained the history of the Nobel Prizes.  We then heard from John F. Clauser, followed by Anton Zeilinger (U. Vienna) about their work on quantum entanglement.  These talks were outstanding, and very inspirational!!!   I took the opportunity to take a quick photo before I left the room.

Anton Zeilinger, John F. Clauser, and David Haviland, after the speical Nobel laureate session, 9 March 2023.

I started my Friday with a talk by the son and grandson of Nobel laureates, Tomas Bohr (Technical U. of Denmark), who spoke about "Sap Flow and Sugar Transport in a Pine Needle".  I've been influenced by his work since my undergraduate years, and was delighted to see him speak about a topic related to one I had a chance to think about (circa 2008) for reasons now lost to time.

Tomas Bohr's talk on plant physics, 10 March 2023.

Having pursued a career away from physics for over 20 years, it was soul-nourishing for me to be back in the company of physicsts, attending the world's largest physics conference.  I should try to come back to this conference more often in future years.

Take probability models seriously, but not literally

Last week's Science had a feature article about several nurses who were convicted of murder in Europe based on statistical arguments regarding the number of babies who died under their care.  Some of these arguments appear to have been decisively debunked by statisticians not originally involved in the cases.  There is a sidebar article by the same author (Cathleen O'Grady) on mothers who were tried for the murders of their own children, again based on questionable statistical arguments.

These episodes are striking, given that I am currently reading a book by physicist Erica Thompson, Escape from Model Land:  How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2022).  She argues that mathematical models always make simplifications and assumptions that divorce them from the real world; and while the modeling exercise may be of great instructive value, one must often be very careful not to claim that the model output represents reality.  In other words, once you step into "model land", and do your modeling exercise, you must not forget to step back out into the real world, and not mistake model land for reality.  The way I would put it is that models deserve to be taken seriously, but not literally.  In the case of the shoddy statistics that put innocent nurses and mothers in prison, those analyses should not be taken either seriously nor literally. 

Hamiltonian mechanics and Maxwell's relations in thermodynamics

This is my last post of 2022.  I just wanted to share that I recently stumbled upon a talk, from about a year ago, on youtube by Prof. John Baez, "Classical Mechanics versus Thermodynamics".  He seems to have discovered a connection/analogy between Hamilton's equations in analytical dynamics with Maxwell's relations in thermodynamics.  I had always thought of these topics as long settled parts of classical physics, but I am delighted that people can still find new sources of insight into them.  I found the talk riveting.  Apparently there are more details on his blog.

And with that, may all DTLR readers enjoy a wonderful 2023!