Session Q3: Physics for Everyone

Imaging in the Infrared

Many common pigments are partially transparent to near infrared (IR) light, making it possible to use IR-sensitive imaging sensors to capture information from surfaces covered by several tens of micrometers of such pigments. Because of this, ``IR reflectograms'' have been made of paintings since the late 1960s, revealing important aspects of many works of art that are not observable in the visible. However, although a number of paintings have been studied this way, the high cost and specialized nature of available IR cameras have limited such work to a small fraction of the two- and three-dimensional works of art that could be usefully studied in the IR. After a brief introduction to IR reflectography, I will describe the characteristics of a high resolution imaging system based on a modified Canon EOS digital camera that operates over the wavelength range 830--1100 nm [1]. This camera and autofocus Canon 20 mm f/2.8 lens make it possible to obtain IR reflectograms of works of art ``in situ'' with standard museum lighting, resolving features finer than 0.35 mm on a 1.0$\times $0.67 m painting. After describing its relevant imaging properties of sensitivity, resolution, noise and contrast, I will illustrate its capabilities with IR and visible images of various types of art in museums on three continents. IR reflectograms of one painting, in particular, have revealed important new information about the working practices of the 16th century artist Lorenzo Lotto who our previous work has shown used projected images as aids for producing some of the features in this painting [2]. \\[4pt] [1] Charles M. Falco, Rev. Sci. Instrum. \underline {80}, 071301 (2009). \\[0pt] [2] see, for example, David Hockney and Charles M. Falco, Proc. of the SPIE \underline {5666}, 326 (2005).   

The Schoen Affair

The Schoen Affair was a series of groundbreaking fraudulent claims in the fields of organic, plastic and molecular electronics. The Affair was exposed in 2002 and perpetrated by Jan Hendrik Schoen, a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In this talk, I draw on interviews with 125 scientists, emails by Schoen and colleagues, reviews of the fraudulent papers, and analyses of the fake data to illuminate Schoen's motive and modus operandi. I focus particularly on how Schoen first began to fake data as a graduate student, and how he progressed to make fraudulent claims that appeared plausible to managers at Bell Labs and other colleagues. I also describe how his claims were handled by the journals, mostly with respect to the actions of editors and reviewers at the journals Nature and Science.   

The Flight of a Baseball

The trajectory of a baseball moving through the air is very different from the one we teach in our introductory classes in which the only force is that due to gravity. In reality, the aerodynamic drag force (which retards the motion) and the Magnus force on a spinning baseball (which causes the ball to curve) play very important roles that are crucial to many of the subtleties of the game. These forces are governed by three phenomenological quantities: the coefficients of drag, lift, and moment, the latter determining the spin decay time constant. In past years, these quantities were studied mainly in wind tunnel experiments, whereby the forces on the baseball are measured directly. More recently, new tools have been developed that focus on measuring accurate baseball trajectories, from which the forces can be inferred. These tools include high-speed motion analysis, video tracking (the so-called PITCHf/x and HITf/x systems), and Doppler radar tracking via the TrackMan system. In this talk, I will discuss how these new tools work, what they are teaching us about baseball aerodynamics, and how they have the potential to revolutionize the analysis of the game itself.