Over at Built om Facts, Matt is working toward a Tope Ten list of physicists. He says the top three are obvious, but he’s soliciting nominations for the rest. Back in the early days of this blog, I ran a poll for the greatest experiment in physics, and there are worse places to start. Newton… Continue reading The Greatest Physicists
Author: Chad Orzel
links for 2008-08-30
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Shade by Steven Gould Teleporteurs sans frontieres. (tags: SF stories) Search Magazine – On God P.J. O’Rourke does his best Gregg Easterbrook impression. (tags: science religion stupid) Built on Facts : Falling from Heaven " If my opinion is worth anything though, I think classic literature… Continue reading links for 2008-08-30
Convention Blogging, Physics Style
Well, OK, there aren’t any graphs, so it’s not real Physics Style, but Physics Today has been blogging the Democratic National Convention, talking in detail about the science content. Start with this post, and move forward in time. They apparently have somebody lined up to file reports from the Republican convention next week, as well.… Continue reading Convention Blogging, Physics Style
Babies Are Quantized
As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous… Continue reading Babies Are Quantized
Adopt a Physicist
No, not me. Not literally, anyway– I’m quite happy with my current family. Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called
Speech
I departed from my policy of getting convention news only via Daily Show reruns last night, and watched Obama’s big acceptance speech. You can find substantive commentary elsewhere, and endless reams of wankery about whether he did what he “needed” to do, blah, blah, blah. My main thought watching it was “Boy, it would sure… Continue reading Speech
links for 2008-08-29
Shtetl-Optimized û Blog Archive û Can we? "IâÂÂd like propose the following question: what non-obvious things can nerds who are so inclined do to help the Democrats win in November? " (tags: politics US society culture computing internet) I Watched This On Purpose: Bio-Dome | The A.V. Club "Bio-Dome doesn’t exist to please critics or… Continue reading links for 2008-08-29
Best. Referee Report. EVER.: The Making of “Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 2)
I said in the previous post that the time-resolved collision paper was one of my favorite experiences in grad school, even the paper-writing process. It’s not so much that the paper-writing process was all that exceptionally good– it was the usual “paper torture,” arguing over every single word in an effort to fit everything into… Continue reading Best. Referee Report. EVER.: The Making of “Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 2)
A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I’m going to split the making-of… Continue reading A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
This paper is the third of the articles I wrote when I was a grad student, and the first one where I was the lead author. It’s also probably my favorite of the lot, not just because of the role it played in my career, but because it packs a lot of science into four… Continue reading Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions