2007-05-22 Dear Michael Shermer

2007-05-22 Blake Stacey Science After Sunclipse \Michael Shermer\Scientific American http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=104 Dear Michael Shermer: Physics Matters Dear Michael Shermer  First, you can’t fission a hydrogen atom. You can split one apart, sure — that means separating the electron from the proton, a process called ionization — but that requires an energy input, and it isn’t in the same category of processes as nuclear reactions. I wrote a bit of a primer on this here; the short version is that Shermer should have said "nuclear fusion." It’s not just a different word; it’s a different phenomenon, and anybody with a basic science education should know why. Perhaps it’s a small and silly gaffe, akin to writing "male" when one means to write "female," but somebody along the line should have caught it.

Second, merely two sentences later, Shermer confuses magnetic poles with electrical charges. The latter are denoted "positive" and "negative," but the former are termed "north" and "south." This difference in terminology reflects a very important difference in physics: isolated plus and minus charges can exist without trouble, but the Universe doesn’t appear to be stocked with individual north or south ends of magnets. Chop a magnet in half, and you get two little magnets, each with its own north and south poles. Again, this almost appears like a silly terminology error. Couldn’t we just call north poles "positive" and south poles "negative" (or the other way around)? We could, but the fact is, people generally don’t, and with good reason: poles and charges are different kinds of thing.

&ldquo;The rest of Shermer's article is pretty darn good. I just hope you’ll forgive me for getting riled over elementary physics mistakes in an article by a science advocate printed in Scientific American.&rdquo;   