Science Snapshot Eight: Infra-red

Science Week in Ireland concludes today. For more details of events taking place around the country, you can visit here.

Here on Communicate Science, for the duration of Science Week, along with our usual posts, we posted a 'Science Snapshot' every day. If you have a Science Snapshot you'd like to share, you can email here and we may feature it in the future.

Today's image also comes from the Elder Museum of Science & Technology in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

It simply features yours truly photographed on a infra-red camera.

Science Snapshot Seven: Physics in motion

Science Week is ongoing in Ireland and continues until the 14th. For more details of events taking place around the country, you can visit here.

Here on Communicate Science, for the duration of Science Week, along with our usual posts, we'll be posting a 'Science Snapshot' every day. If you have a Science Snapshot you'd like to share, you can email here and we'll post the best later in the week.

Today's image comes from the Elder Museum of Science & Technology in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

It features an amazing three metre high sculpture containing nine Betancourt devices and more than twenty mechanisms through which thirty balls continuously run.

Black Hole Radiation Simulated in Lab

For the first time, scientists have been able to simulate the type of radiation likely to be emitted from black holes.

A team of Italian scientists fired a laser beam into a chunk of glass to create an analogue (or simulation) of the Hawking radiation that many physicists expect is emitted by black holes.

A spokesperson for the research group said: "Although the laser experiment superficially bears little resemblance to ultra-dense black holes, the mathematical theories used to describe both are similar enough that confirmation of laser-induced Hawking radiation would bolster confidence that black holes also emit Hawking radiation."

The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking first predicted this sort of radiation in 1974 but it has proved elusive to detect, even in the lab. This research group was able to use a "bulk glass target" to isolate the apparent Hawking radiation from the other forms of light emitted during such experiments.

Black holes are region in space where nothing can escape, not even light. However, and despite their name, they are believed to emit weak forms of radiation (such as Hawking radiation). Physicists expect that this radiation may be so weak as to be undetectable.

The research appears in the current issue of Physical Review Letters (Free) and is also reviewed in Physics (Free).

The experimental setup for Hawking radiation detection

My Secret Life: A teacher affects eternity

My latest guest post for PBS NOVA's Secret Life of Scientists blog is now online. This week's episode features theoretical physicist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander talking about his love of music and how he was inspired to become a scientist.

You can read the post and watch the episode here.

Does gender bias affect physics teaching?

According to a recent US study, students think males are more knowledgeable than females when it comes to teaching physics.

Amy Bug, a (female) physicist at Swarthmore College, and her team trained four actors (two male and two female) to give a 10-minute, scripted physics lecture which was filmed. 126 real physics students were then shown a lecture by one of the four actors and their opinions surveyed.

On average, the male 'lecturers' received higher scores then the females. While female students gave slightly higher scores to female 'lecturers' male students rated male 'lecturers' vastly better.

When the students were asked if the 'lecturer' had a "solid grasp of the material", if they were knowledgeable, or good with equipment, there was a distinct gender bias with both male and female students rating the male 'lecturers' more highly.

However, when asked whether the 'lecturer' "teaches in a way that rally helps students learn", is well organised or interacts well with students, there was evidence of a distinct own-gender bias, with females rating female 'lecturers' most highly and males preferring male 'lecturers.

A note of caution is required here though: How do we know that the bias shown is not a result of the relative skills of the actors to play the part of a physics teacher?

You can view a report on the study here.

 Scientific American look at this study in their 60-Second Science podcast.

Trials and Tribulations of a Large Hadron Collider

After a 14 month wait, the boys and girls beneath the Swiss-French border are finally smashing protons together again.

As you'll recall, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was started up by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) just over a year ago to much excitement and some trepidation.

Amidst scares of blackholes and massive explosions, the scientists circulated the first beam of protons all around the 27km-long machine on 10th September 2008.

However, just nine days after start-up, the grand experiment ground to a halt due to a serious fault in two of the massive magnets that bends the beam of protons around the circular collider.

In order to allow repairs to be completed, the temperature in part of the LHC needed to be increased to allow access from its operating temperature of -271 degrees Celsius. Thats colder than deep space!

From the outset of these problems, the scientists at the LHC were pragmatic to say the least.

"If you keep an eye on the big picture, we've been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process," James Gillies, Cern's director of communications, told BBC News at the time.

"A year or two down the line, this moment will be a distant memory, and we'll be running smoothly."

Described as the largest machine in the world and the most powerful physics experiment ever built, the LHC is designed to recreate the unique conditions that existed in the universe a few moments after the infamous Big Bang.

As two beams of protons are accelerated in opposite directions around a circular loop, powerful magnets ensure that they come close to the speed of light and bend safely around the loop.

At a few points around the collider, the proton beams cross and smash into one another releasing massive amounts of energy. Mimicking the energy released at the Big Bang, the scientists hope to achieve new insights into the birth of the universe and the nature of all matter within it.

The repairs completed this week mean that CERN can safely pass low energy beams through the LHC without incident. It will be early 2010 before the energy of the beams have been increased to levels that will allow collisions to be restarted.

It was a close thing. As recently as this month, the restart was in some doubt when a wayward seagull dropped a piece of bread on to an external part of the accelerator causing significant overheating. Since the beam was not operational, no serious damage was done. If the beam had been travelling through the system, automatic failsafes would have kicked in to shut down the machine.

Careless birdlife wasn't the only thing that had the LHC in the news during its 14-month hiatus.

At the end of October, French and Swiss police began investigating a French physicist who worked at the site with suspected links to al-Qaida. The unidentified 32-year old was working at the LHC while teaching at the nearby Lausanne Institute of Technology.

Given that he is just one of more than 7,000 scientists working on the site and according to colleagues, hadn't been in work for most of the year, it's unclear as to what real treat he posed to the machinery.

As the terrorist storyline was being played out in Lausanne, scientists in Copenhagan and Kyoto were suggesting that a far more outlandish reasoning was behind the LHC's mishaps. Holger Bech Nielsen of the well-respected Niels Bohr Institute along with his Japanese colleague Masao Ninomiya proposed, in a series of papers, a theory that the illusive product of the LHC (the Higgs particle) was travelling back in time to prevent its own existence.

"You could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them," Bohr says. It's certainly an interesting theory which harks back to that old chestnut: the Grandfather Paradox.

This theory says that if I went back in time and killed my grandfather before he met my grandmother, my father and of course myself would never be born. This would mean that I could not possibly travel back in time and kill my grandfather and therefore I would be born, in which case I could travel back in time and kill....you get the picture. It's a classic paradox.

In terms of the LHC, the theory goes that this illusive Higgs particle has travelled back in time to prevent itself from existing. Of course if it is travelling through time, this must imply that its efforts to destroy itself has already failed.

My head gets sore just thinking about it! Of course, the LHC spokespeople have rejected the theory entirely. Presumably they insisted that a time travelling seagull was not to blame for the baguette in the works!