Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Over at Eruptions!, Erik reminds us how many volcanoes Indonesia has: Sometimes it is hard to appreciate how many volcanoes lie within Indonesia. However, within the last few weeks, no less than four Indonesian volcanoes have been put on alert to eruption or shown increased signs of activity - Slamet, Kirinci, Anak Krakatau and now Mt. Rinjani (above).


• At bioephemera, Jessicas talks about anamophic artwork and the optics required to produce it - with all the pictures!: In the artistic technique called anamorphosis, an object is depicted in distorted perspective, so that the viewer has to take special action, like looking from a specific angle, to see the "correct" image.The most famous example of anamorphic painting is Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), a double portrait in which the illusion of highly detailed reality is fractured by a blurred grey streak superimposed across the painting's bottom third. If one stands at an acute angle, close to the painting, the blurred streak resolves itself into a skull, like a creepy Renaissance easter egg... The idea of combining a landscape with a portrait is actually quite old: a student of Durer made an anamorphic landscape-portrait around 1535. One of the oldest extant cylindrical anamorphic portrait paintings, St. Jerome, by a follower of Caravaggio, dates to 1635.


• At Cosmic Variance Sean gives us the video of John Oliver at the LHC and offers a few thoughts as well: The best thing about it is that, once again, Jon Stewart and company have taken an issue that completely flummoxed most major news media — in this case, the purported danger that the LHC will destroy the world — and actually get it right. In addition to visiting CERN itself, Oliver scored an interview with Walter Wagner (”graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics”), originator of much of the hysteria and lawsuits. You’ll get to hear Wagner explain that the probability the LHC will destroy the world is — wait for it — fifty percent. You know, because when you have two things that can possibly happen, obviously each has half the probability, right?


• At Skulls in the Stars the eponymous blogger is also talking about recurrent fears of scientists destroying the world: When the Large Hadron Collider was fired up for the first time back in September, it caused much wailing and rending of clothes by people who were convinced that the device would create miniature black holes which would destroy the Earth, even though the initial test wouldn’t come close to the energies hypothetically required for such an unlikely event. After the test, others were irrationally convinced that the LHC had spawned earthquakes around the globe; I did a rather thorough criticism of that idea here. It’s interesting to note that such fears have been cropping up since the dawn of atomic physics, sometimes seriously and sometimes as a joke. A physics professor I had as an undergraduate shared the story of his research on neutrinos in the 1960s, which took place in a shack outside the grounds of a nuclear reactor. He said that he and his classmates were tempted to leak a story to the press that they were working on a “neutrino bomb”, which was so effective because it could pass through anything. They realized, though, that the public wouldn’t realize that, if neutrinos pass through everything without any significant effect, that they couldn’t hurt you!


• And finally, at Backreaction, Stefan look at the attempts to link the kilogram to a reproducible standard: To measure means to count. We measure a length by counting marks on a ruler, and a time span by counting ticks of clock. We compare the quantity we want to measure to multiples of a standardised quantity, the unit of measurement, such as the metre, the inch, or the second. While in earlier times, the unit of length may have been set by the foot of the king, the French Revolution originated the metric system, with units of length, time, and mass rooted in the natural world, independent of the contingencies of human history. Nowadays, the second is defined by counting 9192631770 beats of the valence electron of an isolated cesium-133 atom flipping its spin in the magnetic field of the cesium nucleus, and the metre is the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. It's just the unit of mass, the kilogram, which is still defined in an old-fashioned, 19th century style, by a prototype meticulously kept in a vault of the Pavillon de Breteuil near Paris, France.

Enjoy!