Archive for the ‘Physics’ Category.

News and related stories

I’m getting behind these days because of chasing too many rabbits. One of those rabbits is hunting online lectures useful for everyone. Prof. Feynman’s lectures have great reputations but they have been hard to come by. I once listened to a pirate version of his lecture tape with horrible sound quality. Thanks to Bill Gates and Microsoft Research, although it is a belated news, I’m very delighted to say “Feynman lectures are online.” Continue reading ‘News and related stories’ »

[Book] The Physicists

I was reading Lehmann’s memoir on his friends and colleagues who influence a great deal on establishing his career. I’m happy to know that his meeting Landau, Courant, and Evans led him to be a statistician; otherwise, we, including astronomers, would have had very different textbooks and statistical thinking would have been different. On the other hand, I was surprised to know that he chose statistics over physics due to his experience from Cambridge (UK). I thought becoming a physicist is more preferred than becoming a statistician during the first half of the 20th century. At least I felt that way, probably it’s because more general science books in physics and physics related historic events were well exposed so that I became to think that physicists are more cooler than other type scientists. Continue reading ‘[Book] The Physicists’ »

systematic errors

Ah ha~ Once I questioned, “what is systematic error?” (see [Q] systematic error.) Thanks to L. Lyons’ work discussed in [ArXiv] Particle Physics, I found this paper, titled Systematic Errors describing the concept and statistical inference related to systematic errors in the field of particle physics. It, gladly, shares lots of similarity with high energy astrophysics. Continue reading ‘systematic errors’ »

[ArXiv] Particle Physics

[stat.AP:0811.1663]
Open Statistical Issues in Particle Physics by Louis Lyons

My recollection of meeting Prof. L. Lyons was that he is very kind and listening. I was delighted to see his introductory article about particle physics and its statistical challenges from an [arxiv:stat] email subscription. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Particle Physics’ »

Why Gaussianity?

Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics — Henri Poincare

Continue reading ‘Why Gaussianity?’ »

LHC First Beam

10:00am local time, Sept. 10th, 2008
As the first light from Fermi or GLAST, LHC First Beam is also a big moment for particle physicists. Find more from http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html. Continue reading ‘LHC First Beam’ »

A Confession from a former “keV” Junkie: 1. It’s a Plague.

(Inspired by vlk’s “keV vs keV”)

Beside the obvious benefit of confusing the public and colleagues in other fields, the apparent chaotic use of physical units like keV and Kevin has an addictive convenience beyond a simple matter of convention. Yes, I said “convenience”. Continue reading ‘A Confession from a former “keV” Junkie: 1. It’s a Plague.’ »

A lecture note of great utility

I didn’t realize this post was sitting for a month during which I almost neglected the slog. As if great books about probability and information theory for statisticians and engineers exist, I believe there are great statistical physics books for physicists. On the other hand, relatively less exist that introduce one subject to the other kind audience. In this regard, I thought the lecture note can be useful.

[arxiv:physics.data-an:0808.0012]
Lectures on Probability, Entropy, and Statistical Physics by Ariel Caticha
Abstract: Continue reading ‘A lecture note of great utility’ »

Blackbody Radiation [Eqn]

Like spherical cows, true blackbodies do not exist. Not because “black objects are dark, duh”, as I’ve heard many people mistakenly say — black here simply refers to the property of the object where no wavelength is preferentially absorbed or emitted, and all the energy input to it is converted into radiation. There are many famous astrophysical cases which are very good approximations to perfect blackbodies — the 2.73K microwave background radiation left over from the early Universe, for instance. Even the Sun is a good example. So it is often used to model the emission from various objects. Continue reading ‘Blackbody Radiation [Eqn]’ »

The Banff Challenge [Eqn]

With the LHC coming on line anon, it is appropriate to highlight the Banff Challenge, which was designed as a way to figure out how to place bounds on the mass of the Higgs boson. The equations that were to be solved are quite general, and are in fact the first attempt that I know of where calibration data are directly and explicitly included in the analysis. Continue reading ‘The Banff Challenge [Eqn]’ »

Line Emission [EotW]

Spectral lines are a ubiquitous feature of astronomical data. This week, we explore the special case of optically thin emission from low-density and high-temperature plasma, and consider the component factors that determine the line intensity. Continue reading ‘Line Emission [EotW]’ »

[ArXiv] 5th week, Apr. 2008

Since I learned Hubble’s tuning fork[1] for the first time, I wanted to do classification (semi-supervised learning seems more suitable) galaxies based on their features (colors and spectra), instead of labor intensive human eye classification. Ironically, at that time I didn’t know there is a field of computer science called machine learning nor statistics which do such studies. Upon switching to statistics with a hope of understanding statistical packages implemented in IRAF and IDL, and learning better the contents of Numerical Recipes and Bevington’s book, the ignorance was not the enemy, but the accessibility of data was. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 5th week, Apr. 2008’ »

  1. Wikipedia link: Hubble sequence[]

Kepler and the Art of Astrophysical Inference

I recently discovered iTunesU, and I have to confess, I find it utterly fascinating. By golly, it is everything that they promised us that the internet would be. Informative, entertaining, and educational. What are the odds?!? Anyway, while poking around the myriad lectures, courses, and talks that are now online, I came across a popular Physics lecture series at UMichigan which listed a talk by one of my favorite speakers, Owen Gingerich. He had spoken about The Four Myths of the Copernican Revolution last November. It was, how shall we say, riveting.

Owen talks in detail about how the Copernican model came to supplant the Ptolemaic model. In particular, he describes how Kepler went from Ptolemaic epicycles to elliptical orbits. Contrary to general impression, Kepler did not fit ellipses to Tycho Brahe’s observations of Mars. The ellipticity is far too small for it to be fittable! But rather, he used logical reasoning to first offset Earth’s epicyle away from the center in order to avoid the so-called Martian Catastrophe, and then used the phenomenological constraint of the law of equal areas to infer that the path must be an ellipse.

This process, along with Galileo’s advocacy for the heliocentric system, demonstrates a telling fact about how Astrophysics is done in practice. Hyunsook once lamented that astronomers seem to be rather trigger happy with correlations and regressions, and everyone knows they don’t constitute proof of anything, so why do they do it? Owen says about 39 1/2 minutes into the lecture:

Here we have the fourth of the myths, that Galileo’s telescopic observations finally proved the motion of the earth and thereby, at last, established the truth of the Copernican system.

What I want to assure you is that, in general, science does not operate by proofs. You hear that an awful lot, about science looking for propositions that can be falsified, that proof plays this big role.. uh-uh. It is coherence of explanation, understanding things that are well-knit together; the broader the framework of knitting the things together, the more we are able to believe it.

Exactly! We build models, often with little justification in terms of experimental proof, and muddle along trying to make it fit into a coherent narrative. This is why statistics is looked upon with suspicion among astronomers, and why for centuries our mantra has been “if it takes statistics to prove it, it isn’t real!”

[ArXiv] Random Matrix, July 13, 2007

From arxiv/astro-ph:0707.1982v1,
Nflation: observable predictions from the random matrix mass spectrum by Kim and Liddle

To my knowledge, random matrix received statisticians’ interests fairly recently and SAMSI (Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute) offered a semester long program on High Dimensional Inference and Random Matrices (tutorials and lecture notes can be found) during Fall 2006 . However, my knowledge is very limited to make a comment or critic on Kim and Liddle’s paper. Clearly, nonetheless, this paper is not about random matrix theory but about its straightforward application to the cosmological model viability.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Random Matrix, July 13, 2007’ »

[ArXiv] Classical confidence intervals, June 25, 2007

From arXiv:physics.data-an/0706.3622v1:
Comments on the unified approach to the construction of classical confidence intervals

This paper comments on classical confidence intervals and upper limits, as the so-called a flip-flopping problem, both of which are related asymptotically (when n is large enough) by the definition but cannot be converted from one to the another by preserving the same coverage due to the poisson nature of the data.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Classical confidence intervals, June 25, 2007’ »