What the World Is Made Of
I know you’re all following the Minute Physics videos (that we talked about here), but just in case my knowledge is somehow fallible you really should start following them. After taking care of why stones are round, and why there is no pink light, Henry Reich is now explaining the fundamental nature of our everyday […]
Friday Piano Solo
Keith Emerson has been doing some interesting work on wave mechanics, Fourier transforms, and temporal structure. Here are some of his findings.
Not exactly what you see at the Grammy’s these days. (Not that it was back in 1974, either.)
Everything is Connected
They do things differently over in Britain. For one thing, their idea of a fun and entertaining night out includes going to listen to a lecture/demonstration on quantum mechanics and the laws of physics. Of course, it helps when the lecture is given by someone as charismatic as Brian Cox, and the front row seats […]
Neutrinos and Cables
I’m a little torn about this: the Twitter machine and other social mediums have blown up about this story at Science Express, which claims that the faster-than-light neutrino result from the OPERA collaboration has been explained as a simple glitch: According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from […]
Books Made From Electrons!
[Updated to provide a better link for DtU overlord Carl Zimmer.] The conventional presentation of a book — words and images printed on sheets, bound together in a folio — is a perfected technology. It hasn’t changed much in centuries, and likely will be with us for centuries to come. But that doesn’t mean that […]
Money vs. Science
Everyone who has been paying attention knows that there is a strong anti-science movement in this country — driven partly by populist anti-intellectualism, but increasingly by corporate interests that just don’t like what science has to say. It’s an old problem — tobacco companies succeeded for years in sowing doubt about the health effects of […]
Darwinism of the Inanimate
Via Laura Hollis at the Twitter machine, here’s an interesting paper by chemist Addy Pross. The author tries to extend the idea of Darwinian natural selection to the realm of inanimate objects. Toward a general theory of evolution: Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate matter Addy Pross Though Darwinian theory dramatically revolutionized biological understanding, its strictly […]
Metaphysics Matters
Chattering classes here in the U.S. have recently been absorbed in discussions that dance around, but never quite address, a question that cuts to the heart of how we think about the basic architecture of reality: are human beings purely material, or something more? The first skirmish broke out when a major breast-cancer charity, Susan […]
How To Think About Quantum Field Theory
I continue to believe that “quantum field theory” is a concept that we physicists don’t do nearly enough to explain to a wider audience. And I’m not going to do it here! But I will link to other people thinking about how to think about quantum field theory. Over on the Google+, I linked to […]
A 3.8-Sigma Anomaly
Every professional football game begins with the flip of a coin, to determine who gets the ball first. In the case of the Super Bowl, the teams represent the National Football Conference (NFC) or American Football Conference (AFC). Interestingly, the last 14 coin flips have been won by the NFC. Working out the numbers, the […]
Boycott Elsevier
While I have the blog open, let me throw in a quick two cents to support the Boycott Elsevier movement. As most working scientists know, Elsevier is a publishing company that controls many important journals, and uses their position to charge amazingly exorbitant prices to university libraries — and then makes the published papers very […]
Mind = Blown
Apologies that real work (to the extent that what I do can be called “work”) has gotten in the way of substantive blogging. But I cannot resist sharing the amazing things I learned this weekend — amazing to me, anyway, although it’s possible I’m the only one here who wasn’t clued in. Thing the first […]
Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation
The annual Edge Question Center has now gone live. This year’s question: “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” Find the answers here. I was invited to contribute, but wasn’t feeling very imaginative, so I moved quickly and picked one of the most obvious elegant explanations of all time: Einstein’s explanation for the […]
Good News/Bad News: Nobel Edition
The good news about winning the Nobel Prize: you get better parking on campus. The bad news: Sheldon Cooper makes fun of you on national TV. Of course you don’t need to watch the ceremonies to learn what all the scientists are wearing this year. I am reliably informed that a regular tuxedo is not […]
Do I Not Live?
Can we define “life” in just three words? Carl Zimmer of Loom fame has written a piece for Txchnologist in which he reports on an interesting attempt: biologist Edward Trifonov looked at other people’s definitions, rather than thinking about life itself. Sifting through over a hundred suggested definitions, Trifonov looked for what they had in […]
Noisy Systems and Wandering Canines
There are three types of scientific explanations: those involving cats, those involving dogs, and those that aren’t very interesting. Via Andrew Revkin, here’s a well-done animation that uses a dog to explain the difference between a long-term trend and a short-term variation. Show this to your local climate denialist when they get confused about the […]
Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking
Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can. Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, […]
Predictions for 2012
So you don’t enter the new year completely unprepared, here are my most secure predictions for 2012. Unlike other prognostication websites, these predictions are based on Science! 1. Freely-falling objects will accelerate toward the ground at an approximately constant rate, up to corrections due to air resistance. 2. Of all the Radium-226 nuclei on the […]
A Year Well Blogged
‘Tis the season when bloggers, playing out the string between Xmas and New Year’s, fill the void with greatest-hits lists from the year just passed. But a question inevitably arises: how does one decide which posts to include? There are many different criteria, and preferring one to another might lead to very different lists. This […]