The preliminary Boskone program has been posted, and I’ll soon be adding another tag with a “Participant” ribbon to my Wall of Name. (I have a big collection of nametags from various meetings hanging on a wall in my office.) Excerpts of the schedule will appear below the fold, with scattered commentary, for those who […]
Month: February 2006
Top Eleven: Edwin Hubble
The next experiment in the Top Eleven is a set of observations, not an experiment. Who: Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), an American astronomer, and the guy the Hubble Space Telescope is named after. When: He was nominated for two related but different discoveries which were announced in 1924 and 1929. What: Hubble’s most famous work concerns […]
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us
In a comment to the AP post, “hogeb” asks an excellent question about pedagogy: I’d like to enlist your advise and the advise of any readers who can provide it. I teach physical science to pre-service elementary school teachers. I try to elucidate the somewhat subtle differences between the application of a force and the […]
Advanced Placement: Threat or Menace?
Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics: It is the very apotheosis of “a mile wide and an inch deep.” They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen not only […]
Bring Back Amateur Night
I’m a bad basketball fan. Duke played North Carolina last night, and I didn’t watch. The Blue Devils are the #2 ranked team in the nation, the Tar Heels are the defending national champions, it was a back-and-forth game that went down to the wire, and I didn’t watch any of it, other than a […]
Top Eleven: Ernest Rutherford
The eighth of the Top Eleven is an experiment by the man who set the gold standard for arrogance in physics. Who: Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a New Zealand-born physicist who famously declared “In science, there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting.” He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. When: […]
Physics Blog Notes
There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn’t mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things. In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after […]
Top Eleven: Heinrich Hertz
The seventh entry in the Top Eleven is an experiment that leads directly to all forms of wireless communications. Who: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894), a German physicist. When: 1886 What: Hertz studied electromagnetism, and in particular, the prediction from Maxwell’s Equations that it ought to be possible for electromagnetic waves to travel through free space. […]
Super Bowl Recap
The Steelers won the super Bowl last night, in a game that didn’t hold any rooting interest for me. As a result, I spent most of it doing other things– making gourmet fried stuff (about which more later), marking a big stack of homework assignments, and writing today’s lecture (solutions of the time-independent Schroedinger equation! […]
Metablashphemy! It is Sacriligious and Pretentious!
I feel like I ought to say something about the whole Danish cartoon mess, but really– and this isn’t something you’ll hear me say often about issues touching on religion– PZ has it about right. The paper in question has every right to print them, but when you get down to it, the cartoons themselves […]