A few months back I did a round-up of Forbes posts for the first three months of 2018. I said at the time that I’d try to do these more regularly, but clearly that hasn’t happened. So here’s a round-up from April through June:
(Technically, there’s a week-and-a-bit left in June as I write this, so there’s an outside chance I might blog again, but odds aren’t good, and I have time now to do this, so I’ll put up the post now and maybe edit it later)
- Why It Doesn’t Matter That The World Wide Web Was Invented At CERN: A new rant on a long-standing pet peeve about the way physicists argue for funding.
- Experimental Physicists Are A Lot Like Little Kids: Both groups just start playing with things straight out of the box, often without reading the instructions.
- Why Science Is Essential For Liberal Arts Education (And Vice Versa): Including my one-sentence summary of the essential nature of liberal-arts education: “Students should be able to analyze a situation, decide on a course of action, and advocate for their choice.”
- Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Is All About Observers: We think of them very differently, but both the Copenhagen and Many-Worlds interpretations have the observer playing a central role, in very different ways.
- When Is ‘Failure To Replicate’ A Problem, And For Who?: Some thoughts about the “replication crisis” and how it manifests differently in physics.
- What Counts As A Schrodinger Cat?: Classifying some approaches to thinking about the most infamous gedankenexperiment in history.
- Is This A Good Time To Start Looking For Dark Matter?: Looking for exotic matter was a hot topic at DAMOP, but would it be a good investment to launch a new experiment right now?
- Basketball Physics: Why Is That Ball Spinning?: Using video to answer the question of why basketball players are coached to put backspin on their shot.
- The Difference Between Particle Physics And Quantum Foundations: Expanding on my interview in Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math, and why I think the two subfields mentioned deal with philosophy in very different ways.
As always, a reasonably wide range of stuff, and responses to that stuff. I was really happy with the liberal arts and basketball physics posts, but neither got as much traffic as I would’ve liked. I was also a little surprised that the replication thing didn’t get more of a reaction, even if only from social scientists blasting me for being a smug and arrogant physicist.
Such is the blogging life, though…