A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways. So, what do we learn from this? […]
Month: January 2010
Laser Smackdown: The Most Amazing Use of a Laser?
Way back in the early days of ScienceBlogs, I ran a competition of sorts to determine the greatest physics experiment in history. I collected a bunch of nominations, wrote up a post about each of the top 11 entries, and then asked people to vote for their favorite. In honor of the 50th anniversary of […]
When Oldsmobiles Turn Into Cadillacs
Kevin Drum checks in with the latest from the class wars: In the middle of a rant about healthcare reform and the compromise over the Cadillac tax, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers says this: The idea that public employees make less than those in the private sector is a myth that needs to die. Most […]
Links for 2010-01-26
Physics Buzz: A Star Class is Born “Scientists have proposed that there is a new, exotic type of star living in our universe that we haven’t seen yet. The so-called “electroweak stars”, if they exist, will be difficult to detect because they mostly emit neutrino’s – subatomic particles which, for the most part, don’t interact […]
Perfect for Readers Who Already Have Eaten Cheese in Physics
The great thing about using Google to vanity search for articles about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, or at least one of the great things about it, is that it’s world-wide. Thus, this Dutch roundup of new books, which includes mine. This is what they have to say: Een erg geestig boek is […]
Single-Photon Cooling: Making Maxwell’s Demon
As mentioned previously, I’ve been reading Sean Carroll’s Wheel arrow of time book, which necessarily includes a good bit of discussion of “Maxwell’s Demon,” a thought experiment famously proposed by James Clerk Maxwell as something that would allow you to cool a gas without obviously increasing entropy. The “demon” mans a trapdoor between a sample […]
Trapping Ions With Light
There was a flurry of stories last week about an arxiv preprint on optical trapping of an ion. Somewhat surprisingly for an arxiv-only paper, it got a write-up in Physics World. While I generally like Physics World, I have to take issue with their description of why this is interesting: In the past, the trapping […]
Fifty Years of Solutions Finding Problems
2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. To mark the occasion, the American Physical society has launched LaserFest, which will involve a large number of public events over the next year. The website includes a bunch of cool things explaining the physics of lasers, and a timeline of laser history with […]
Links for 2010-01-25
The American Spectator : Osama bin Elvis “Seven years after Osama bin Laden’s last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence for Elvis’s presence among us than for his. Hence there is reason to ask whether the paradigm of Osama bin Laden as terrorism’s deus ex machina and of al Qaeda as the […]
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: All the News That’s Fit to Keep Off the Web Page
A few weeks back, I spoke on the phone with a freelance writer who was doing a piece for the Albany Times Union. She was putting together a joint article on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and the Atomville book put together by Jill Linz and Cindy Schwarz (at Skidmore and Vassar, respectively). […]