Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
Last week’s talks were using sci-fi space travel as a hook to talk about relativity, and my original idea for the talk was to explain how faster-than-light travel ultimately ends up violating causality. Some observers will see effects happening before the events that cause them, and that’s just weird. In How to Teach Relativity to […]
I have a couple of things in the mental queue for this week, but I’m still playing catch-up from my trip to Texas, so instead you get a really quick comment on last night’s Cosmos. This one was all about the history of the Earth– continents moving, climate changing, mass extinctions– stuff that I know […]
Below you’ll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they’re probably not all that comprehensible on their own. The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use space travel and extrasolar planets as […]
My Thursday presentation here in Houston went well, though it was a pretty small crowd. I’ll be doing it again today before running to the airport to get home. I didn’t really have an opportunity to do shameless self-promotion regarding the new book, but I did get a copy of the official cover for it, […]
One of the pop-physics books I’ve read recently was Amanda Gefter’s much-discussed Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. I was going to post a review of it back in March, but literally the day I was planning to write it, I got email from an editor at Physics Today asking if I had any books I’d like […]