### Selling Science with Glossy Pictures and FTL Travel Baby!!!

The Washington Post published pictures of NASA's concept of what a Alcubierre drive spaceship might look like.  A few pundits immediately pointed out that perhaps hyping what amounts to a set of mathematical equations with a spacecraft design might not have been the classiest move on NASA's part.  NASA collaborator Mark Rademaker[1] maintains it was done with the intent of convincing people that STEM is cool, you know, 'for the kids'.  Here's Mark's big, glossy, futuristic design

It's cool and soooo pretty!

Discussion of how STEM should be sold aside, there are now conversations circulating the internet regarding whether or not the ship would violate causality by flying faster than the speed of light.  The answer is, that this might be an issue if the ship actually violated the speed of light by traveling 4.3 light years in 14 days.  As it is though, it doesn't.  Read on:

Travelling Faster than the Speed of Light Without Really Trying, (but not really)
The description in the Washington post article triggers a pretty common misconception:

"If an object reaches a distance x light years away in under x years, then it must be travelling faster than the speed of light."

What the article failed to mention is that the 14 days quoted is in the reference frame of the ship.  The equation for the distance travelled with respect to time in the frame of the ship, (known as proper time), is

$distance = \dfrac{c^2}{a}cosh\left(\dfrac{at}{c}\right)-\dfrac{c^2}{a}$,

where $a$ is the acceleration of the ship and $c$ is the speed of light.

Using this formula, it can be shown that at an acceleration of 188g, (188 times the acceleration due to gravity), the ship could reach alpha centauri in 14 days of ship time.  You might point out that 188 g's would surely smush everyone against the back wall of the ship, but the beauty of the theoretical drive described is that you carry your own gravity well along with you and therefore, you're always in freefall and don't feel the acceleration.

Here's the problem though.  The time that will have elapsed here on Earth will be much, much greater than the 14 days that elapsed on the ship.  The expression for the time elapsed on Earth is

$Earth\ time\ elapsed = \dfrac{c}{a}cosh\left(\dfrac{at}{c}\right)$,

which can be used to show that when the ship reaches alpha centauri, 817 years will have passed here on Earth.

The calculations shown here are nothing new, by the way.  Rindler applied them to the problem of relativistic space travel for the first time in 1960 in a Physical Review article titled "Hyperbolic Motion in Curved Space Time""[2].

References

2.  Rindler, W., "Hyperbolic Motion in Curved Space Time", Phys. Rev. 119 2082-2089 (1960).

### Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems, there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes!

What do we actually want?

To convert the Cartesian nabla

to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates.

What we’ll need:

1. The Cartesian Nabla:

2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates:

3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system:

How to do it:

Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables.

The chain rule can be used to convert a differential operator in terms of one variable into a series of differential operators in terms of othe…

### Lost Phone

We were incredibly lucky to have both been in university settings when our kids were born.  When No. 1 arrived, we were both still grad students.  Not long after No. 2 arrived, (about 10 days to be exact), mom-person defended her dissertation and gained the appellation prependage Dr.

While there are lots of perks attendant to grad school, not the least of them phenomenal health insurance, that’s not the one that’s come to mind for me just now.  The one I’m most grateful for at the moment with respect to our kids was the opportunities for sheer independence.  Most days, we’d meet for lunch on the quad of whatever university we were hanging out at at the time, (physics research requires a bit of travel), to eat lunch.  During those lunches, the kids could crawl, toddle, or jog off into the distance.  There were no roads, and therefore no cars.  And, I realize now with a certain wistful bliss I had no knowledge of at the time, there were also very few people at hand that new what a baby…

### Lab Book 2014_07_10 More NaI Characterization

Summary: Much more plunking around with the NaI detector and sources today.  A Pb shield was built to eliminate cosmic ray muons as well as potassium 40 radiation from the concreted building.  The spectra are much cleaner, but still don't have the count rates or distinctive peaks that are expected.
New to the experiment?  Scroll to the bottom to see background and get caught up.
Lab Book Threshold for the QVT is currently set at -1.49 volts.  Remember to divide this by 100 to get the actual threshold voltage. A new spectrum recording the lines of all three sources, Cs 137, Co 60, and Sr 90, was started at approximately 10:55. Took data for about an hour.
Started the Cs 137 only spectrum at about 11:55 AM

Here’s the no-source background from yesterday
In comparison, here’s the 3 source spectrum from this morning.

The three source spectrum shows peak structure not exhibited by the background alone. I forgot to take scope pictures of the Cs137 run. I do however, have the printout, and…