Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mostly March Meeting

I was at the APS March Meeting last week, because I needed tp give a talk reporting on the Schrödinger Sessions. But as long as I was going to be there anyway, I figured I should check out the huge range of talks on areas of physics that aren’t my normal thing– in fact, I deliberately avoided going to DAMOP-sponsored sessions.

This also affected my blogging, so the last few weeks’ worth of posts at Forbes have mostly been on March Meeting-related areas:

— How Cold Atoms Might Help Physicists Understand Superconductors: A post about the connection between ultra-cold atomic physics and condensed matter, prompted by a visit to Illinois and the impending March Meeting.

— Why Physicists Want Their Best Theory To Fail: Another few-sigma result from the LHC got a bit of attention, prompting some thoughts on why everyone is so anxious for the Standard Model to break.

— Why Isn’t The Biggest Conference In Physics More Popular? Money. Dig down far enough, and the answer is always money.

— Soot And Diamonds: Progress And Perspective In The Practice Of Physics: A remark by Jim Kakalios at dinner spins off into some thoughts about the factors that drive the choice of systems to study in physics.

— Physics Will Never Be Over: Most of the stuff I went to at March Meeting was quantum, but the last day was all powered by classical physics, proving we’re not done with Newton’s Laws yet.

As always, traffic to the blog passeth all understanding. Of these five, the one I’m happiest with is “Soot And Diamonds,” which is last in terms of readership, by a factor of two. Go figure. But I’m not unhappy with any of these, even though two were written in airports and a third banged out over breakfast. If I were ever to bang together an ebook collection of physics blog posts, these last couple of weeks would be well represented…