The big development of the week is that I bought a new car, as seen in the featured image. This ate up most of Tuesday, but I still got some quality physics blogging in over at Forbes:
— The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors: A look at two quantum-mechanical phenomena and one quirk of biology that can be used to make people see colors.
— Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics: An update of an old post here, Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics. You can see from the titles that, in the intervening five-and-a-half years, I’ve managed to simplify quantum mechanics by almost 15%.
— The One Thing everybody Should Know About Relativity: Same idea, other great theory of modern physics. Talks about how the principle of relativity can be used to understand time dilation and length contraction, the origin of rest energy, and the bending of light by gravity.
The quantum post has drawn a huge amount of traffic– over 40,000 views, which isn’t quite “viral;” maybe “bacterial”?– but the comments are, shall we say, somewhat less on point than the comments to the 2010 post, which were really good. I miss useful comment traffic… also, get off my lawn, or I’ll run you over with my middle-aged dad car.
And with that, Kate and I are off to Readercon for the weekend. If you’re there, stop by and say “hi.” I’m on a “panel of experts” at noon Saturday, and talking about technology vs. magic at 10am Sunday.
Like it (the Forbes article) but perhaps you could’ve cut it down to 5 or 5½ things because QP is really only non-local for the psi-ontologists (and maybe the realist psi-epistemologists). (Neo-) Copenhagenists etc. see only unspooky correlations: http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/EPR.html where others see spooky non-localities.
You thought you wouldn’t get crackpot science comments on a blog article posted on a site linked to Forbes?
You’re getting awful click-baitey over at Forbes, Chad. Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics: #4 will make you call your mom and tell her you love her.
I will say that, as you’ve posted more there and less here, the comments here have fallen off.
On the Forbes article, there’s no content on the second page. It just says “undefined”.
(Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands, that is.)