A few months back, I got a call from a writer at a physics magazine, asking for comments on a controversy within AMO physics. I read a bunch of papers, and really didn’t quite understand the problem; not so much the issue at stake, but why it was so heated. When I spoke to the […]
Month: June 2013
Few-Body Systems: Cooler Than You Might Think
Hey, dude? Yeah, what’s up? I’m not normally the one who initiates this, but I was wondering: When you were at DAMOP last week, did you see any really neat physics? Oh, sure, tons of stuff. It was a little thinner than some past meetings– a lot of the Usual Suspects didn’t make the trip– […]
Affirmation Means Employment
I saw a bunch of people yesterday tweeting approval of John Hawks’s complaint about academic timidity when it comes to blogging: The bottom line is: People need to decide if they want to be heard, or if they want to be validated. I have long been an associate editor at PLoS ONE, and once I […]
The Quirks of Scientific Public Speaking
As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said “I bet this guy hasn’t given a lot of these before.” What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never […]
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down to the River to Pray
I’ve just emerged from a week in the Incredible College Simulator(*), first spending a week at DAMOP and then the weekend at my 20th college reunion at Williams, so while I have physics stuff I ought to write about, my brain has temporarily turned to goo. Also, I have a week’s worth of administrative crap […]
Experiment and Theory in the Popular Imagination
A little while back, I posted about the pro-theorist bias in popular physics, and Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a long and detailed response, which of course was posted on a day when I spent six hours driving to Quebec City for a conference. Sigh. Happily, ZapperZ and Tom at Swans On Tea offer more or less […]
Angry Birds, Furious Forces! by Rhett Allain
Rhett at Dot Physics departed ScienceBlogs before NAtional Geographic fully took over, but still managed to connect with their book division for a physics text. This is part of a series they’re doing tied in with the folks from Rovio, makers of the world’s most popular smart-phone time-waster, and, as the title suggests, it uses […]