Gun Control Lunacy

I read an article in the New York Times this morning entitled: Saving Children From Guns. I'm no gun advocate, but neither am I a gun control advocate. Rather, I'm an advocate for data, and unsurprisingly, this article ignores data while attempting to use emotion to manipulate its readership. The article would have us assume accidental gun death represents the majority of accidental child death annually.

This statement is patently false. In 2007, of the 11,778 accidental child deaths in the nation, a mere 138 of them were due to accidental firearm discharge, and this is data for ages 0 to 19. Previous years give similar statistics. Perhaps, if the author wants limit accidental child mortality, he should focus on limiting child car accident deaths (6,638 in 2007) or maybe even accidental poisonings (972).

I surmise the author's real intention is to limit all gun violence, specifically homicide. but if the author really wants such a focus, he shouldn't use accidental child gun death as an emotional lead in for his argument. It's dishonest.

Scary election results

Dear conservative friends who live in my home of Utah county: I have nothing against republicans or conservatives in principle, but the result from your county scares me. 88.3% Romney, 9.8% Obama, 1.2% Gary Johnson. According to Wikipedia, here are the religious demographics of your county: 88.1% Mormon, 10.1% Non Religious 1.8% Other. Maybe you need to use something more than religious beliefs when you decide your political opinions.

Excepting a few other sparsely populated counties (also in Utah) for Romney, and DC for Obama, no other area voted so lopsidedly for a single candidate. Before you decide to say Washington is broken, I believe you need to look at your own county's politics. You might find something broken there, too.

Hiking...

Whenever I come home, and when I have the chance, I like to hike a trail about a quarter mile away from my home, and coming home on memorial day weekend seemed as good a time as ever to take the hike. When the air is clear, at the top of the hike you can see miles through and even all the way across Utah Lake to the lake mountain range on the other side.

But as they always say: a picture is worth a thousand words. With this in mind, here are some photos I took during my hike

The only thing I regret about entering physics is...

I see what things wouldn't work scientifically.

I just saw the Iron man II movie...and liked it, sort of. I mean, it's mindless entertainment...and what are movies for except to let us decompress from every day life for a few minutes. That being said, I can't help but see how ridiculous the physical ideas put forth in the movies are. I won't give anything about the movie away, but how in the world could a particle accelerator create a laser beam?

Oh, well. It'd be nice if it was possible...

My physics research blog

For anyone who follows this blog (mostly family, hehehe), I've created another blog for the majority of my physics research related information. Here is the Link, and I've got a link to it on the right side of the blog, as well.

Laws (of Physics) are meant to be broken?

Check this article out from Popular Science.

The skeptic in me doubts the findings, but I'm sure there were many physicists who thought the same way about the special theory of relativity when it was first published. I'd like to see if this result can be repeated...

Here is the original article from the New York Times. I'll post a link to the original paper as well if I can find it.

Non-Neutral Plasma Physics II

I didn't realize until today how long it had been since my last post...when you're busy, you're very busy, I suppose. For this post, I'll give a little more background on the non-neutral part of the plasmas.

Last post I mentioned my current research group at BYU, the plasma physics group, and explained a little about plasmas in general. Most plasmas I mentioned in the last posts are neutral plasmas - in other words, there is enough energy in the system to remove electrons from their atoms, then keep them removed (given the chance, a system, like a nucleus with electrons orbiting around it, will want to fall into the lowest possible energy state, and electrons bound to a nucleus in atom form have much lower energy than free floating electrons and nuclei). Temperatures required to keep a neutral plasma in its plasma form are  high - the average temperature for the plasma in the sun, for example, hovers around 10,000 degrees kelvin - hence there is little to no naturally occurring neutral plasma sources on the earth itself (at least that I know of).

To get around this problem, physicists will actually separate the free flowing electrons from their nuclei, creating groups of electrons and groups of ionized nuclei (nuclei with some or all of the orbiting electrons removed). With those electrons removed, the nuclei (and the electrons, as it turns out) will still have many of the properties of the neutral plasmas without the need to keep those plasmas at high temperatures, and thus the non-neutral plasmas can stay in their plasma state for far longer than the original, neutral plasmas.  In fact, the research group at BYU intends to keep those plasmas in their plasma state for weeks, even months if possible.

Now, one may wonder where the name "Non-neutral" came from, anyway. Well, with neutral plasmas, even though the nuclei and the electrons are no longer physically bound, the number of positively charged protons in the system will still equal the number of negatively charged electrons, a state which physicists consider "electrically neutral". After the electrons have been removed from the system, however, the remaining ionized nuclei will have a net positive charge and will no longer be neutral, hence the name "non-neutral plasmas".

That's all for today. I'll post more later on the specific research that we are doing at BYU (assuming that I'm allowed to, of course. :P)