There was a postdoc in my research group in grad school who had a sister in college. She called him once to ask for help with a math assignment dealing with series expansions. He checked a book to refresh his memory, and then told her how to generate the various series needed for her homework […]
Month: January 2006
Get Out the Vote
Today is the last day to vote in Cosmic Variance’s Greatest Physics Paper contest. If you haven’t voted yet, go over there and pick a paper. Locally, I’m still collecting nominees for the Greatest Physics Experiment. A quick scan through the comments gives the current list as: The Michelson-Morley experiment disproving the aether. Rutherford’s discovery […]
Physicist in Landscape
There’s a slightly snarky Review of Leonard Susskind’s book on string theory (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design) in the New York Times this week. Predictably, Peter Woit is all over it. The central issue of the book, and the review, and Woit’s whole blog is what’s referred to as […]
I Got Your Other Side Right Here
I’ll have something more serious to say on this subject tomorrow (I want to sleep on it, and take another look at the post in the morning), but I have one quick comment on the New York Times review of Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape: Susskind’s insider perspective also lends an air of smugness to […]
Needles in Haystacks Are Nothing
A while back, I talked about a colloquium where Steven Boughn of Haverford argued that it’s practically impossible to detect a single graviton. It was a very nice talk, relying mostly on simple dimensional analysis arguments, and very basic physics. Today, via Wolfgang Beirl (via Mixed States), I see that Boughn and Tony Rothman have […]
Libertopia Approaches?
The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that’s slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make […]
Weekend Links Dump
I may do some fiddling with the blog template over the weekend, but I’m unlikely to post anything substantive until Monday. Here are a handful of links that caught my eye in recent days to fill the gap: Via a mailing list: A weirdly cool hand-written web clock. Also via that mailing list, a group […]
Future Great Experiments
Looking at the ScienceBlogs front page, I suspect that I may be well out of my league, especially when it comes to posting frequency. There’s just no way I can post that many entries in one day, especially not a day like Thursday. In addition to my lab this morning (in which half the students […]
Thursday Night Dog-Blogging
In recognition of the fact that somebody else is now hosting my image files, here’s some pet-blogging, a day earlier than is traditional. Because dogs should always come before cats… What’s Emmy staring at so intently? Could it be the new ScienceBlogs home page? Well, no. She’s not that into science. It’s just the skunk […]
Greatest. Experiment. EVER.
Quite a while back, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance had a post seeking nominations for “The Greatest Physics Paper Ever.” Back after a long hiatus, he’s now holding a vote among five finalists: Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, Emmy Noether’s paper on symmetry and conservation laws, Dirac’s theory of the electron, and […]