e pur si muove

If your native language is not English, please consider enlisting the help of an English-speaking colleague in preparing the text. - Physical Review and Physical Review Letters: Tips for Authors 

A native speaker of English can not only provide assistance in spotting common grammatical errors, but can also provide invaluable insight into the appropriate phrasing of things.

A particularly unique example is provided by this article in the physics journal Physical Review Letters, detailing the work of Japanese and Russian scientists on the phase diagram of arsenic sulfides at high pressures:

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The winning design for the Greener Gadgets 2008 competition comes from one Clay Moulton, a Master’s student at Virginia Tech. Moulton’s winning design is the Gravia lamp, which works not off of electricity, but by gravity. To “charge up” the lamp, the user lifts a weight to the top of a column, whereby it slowly drifts to the bottom. A hydraulic mechanism allows the gravitational potential energy to be converted into light energy, thus providing “up to 4 hours” of lighting usage with light output equivalent to that from a 40 watt incandescent light bulb.

It sounds great on paper, and the competition judges certainly thought so too. The lamp itself looks really neat.

There’s only one problem - the design can’t possibly work.

The calculation is so simple, that even pre-’O’ level students should be able to convince themselves that this design is physically impossible. The two-line calculation to prove this is given below the fold:

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“According to Islam, traveling to space is encouraged.” - A Guide of Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station (ISS) [pdf]

Picture copyright by AP, 2007

As many readers probably will have heard by now, Malaysia can now proudly claim to have at least one of its citizens make it into orbit around earth. Malaysia’s first astronaut, Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, blasted from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday and is now in orbit around the world.

Malaysia’s first astronaut, Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, is also a devout Muslim. Which is not a problem per se, except when it comes to the execution of the rites of ibadah (loosely translated as prayer). How is the good doctor supposed to pray in space? What does it mean to face Mecca when orbiting in space above the Earth at the rate of 15 revolutions per day? Which time zone(s) should he use to determine prayer times? Does it matter if he cannot truly kneel in zero gravity? When does he get to break fast, considering that there are still a few more days to go in Ramadan?

All these questions, and more, were addressed in a report entitled “A Guide of Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station (ISS)” [pdf], the result of several years of Muslim scholarship performed at the request of the Malaysian space agency Angkasa.

With special regard to the issue of direction, the report is surprisingly terse:

3.3 Determining the Direction of Qibla
Qibla direction is based on what is possible, prioritizing as below:
i. The Ka’aba¹
ii. The projection of Ka’aba
iii. The Earth
iv. Wherever

What the report didn’t answer, surprisingly, was precise directions on how one was to determine the direction to face the Ka’aba. Is it sufficient to maintain a Euclidean straight-line orientation toward Mecca from a 3D plane-geometric perspective, as suggested in (i)? And in (ii), how exactly does one determine which projection to choose? (On a spherical surface, there are multiple ways to define “direction” and relative orientation between any two points.)

Wired magazine elaborates on this (as yet unresolved) point in considerable detail:

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Footnotes

1. The Ka’aba is the primary shrine of Islam.↩

In the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters, a E. V. Tsiper of the George Mason University in Fairfax, VA and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC managed to slip by what I consider to be the funniest citation that I’ve ever seen make it into a staid scientific journal.

In the opening paragraph, a citation is given for the following sentences:

Water is a very fundamental substance.

Oh, like what isn’t a statement of the bleeding obvious. Why, then is there a citation for this sentence, usually used to back up otherwise unsubstantiated statements with the work and authority of others?

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