Physics World has released its list of the top ten breakthroughs in physics for the year, and it doesn’t include either fast neutrinos or the Higgs boson: The two physics stories that dominated the news in 2011 were questions rather than solid scientific results, namely “Do neutrinos travel faster than light?” and “Has the Higgs […]
Month: December 2011
Links for 2011-12-16
Mellowmas | Popdose Your go-to guys for Christmas songs that DO suck… The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists : Monkey See : NPR 7. The Self-Punisher. “I always hate your tastes, so I knew this would be a miserable and useless list before I decided to click on […]
Thursday Family Blogging 121511
We got a good group photo this week, showing everybody, with Appa for scale, even: Here, SteelyKid is opening a bag of small presents that Aunt Norma and Uncle Dan sent, while the Pip engages in the traditional five-week-old-infant pursuit of sleeping a whole lot. When she’s not opening early Christmas gifts, SteelyKid too engages […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Faraday
Moving along through our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we have an equation that combines two other titans of British science: This is the third of Maxwell’s equations (named after the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell), but it originates with Michael Faraday, one of the greatest experimentalists of the day. Faraday was a fascinating guy, […]
Links for 2011-12-15
A Muscular Empathy – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings — to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us […]
Christmas Songs That Don’t Suck, 2011
A predictably stupid discussion of this xkcd cartoon in a place I can’t link to reminded me that I haven’t posted the list of Christmas songs that don’t suck yet this year. This has expanded somewhat since last year, thanks to some recommendations from readers, so it’s worth posting again to see if there’s anything […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Monopole!
As we march on toward Newton’s birthday, we come to the second of Maxwell’s famous equations, which is Gauss’s Law applied to magnetic fields: For once, this is pretty much as simple as it looks. The divergence of the magnetic field is zero, full stop. As I said yesterday (albeit using the wrong terminology), the […]
Simple Answers to Stupid Rhetorical Devices
Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain’t Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize: A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer–let’s call him […]
Links for 2011-12-14
How to Rescue Education Reform – NYTimes.com We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and […]
Mandatory Higgs Boson Post
I was planning to let today’s Higgs press conference pass with only a few oblique mentions in posts about other things, but apparently, I would lose my license to blog about physics if I did that. You’d think that, being married to a lawyer, and all, I’d know to read the fine print in these […]