Physics Blogging Round-Up: Football, Air, Relativity, Wrong Guesses, More Football, and Uncertainty

Another couple of weeks of science-y blogging at Forbes:

— Football Physics: Deflategate Illustrates Key Concepts: In which I use the ever-popular silly scandal over deflated footballs as an excuse to talk about three-body recombination.

— The Annoying Physics Of Air Resistance: Air resistance is an annoyance to be abstracted out in intro physics classes, but looking for its influence with video analysis is kind of fun.

— How NASA’s Viking Mars Probes Helped Prove Einstein Right: We think of missions to Mars as primarily about searching for life, but they have also helped test fundamental physics, specifically via a 1976 experiment to test general relativity.

— Predicting The Nobel Prize In Physics: I continue to suck at guessing who will be awarded a big pile of kroner.

— Football Physics: Why Throw A Spiral?: Like so many other things in physics, it’s really all about angular momentum.

— The Certainty of Uncertainty: Scientists Know Exactly How Well We Don’t Know Things: When physicists and other scientists talk about uncertainty in their results, they’re not admitting ignorance or covering for “human error.” They’re quantifying what’s left after all the “human errors” have been corrected, and expressing confidence in their result.

Far and away the most popular of these was the Nobel prediction post, which is no surprise. The uncertainty one kicked off a long discussion between a bunch of people I don’t know in my Twitter mentions, which was kind of odd. And the Mars thing just totally sank without a trace, which really surprised me. Oh, well, such is blogging.