I’ve been slacking a bit, lately, in terms of putting science-related content on the blog. Up until last week, most of my physics-explaining energy was going into working on the book, and on top of that, I’ve been a little preoccupied with planning for the arrival of FutureBaby. I’d like to push things back in… Continue reading Peer-Reviewed Egoboo: The Metastable Xenon Project
Category: Experiment
Nothing But Uncertainty
Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice post about uncertainty, in the technical sense, not the quantum sense. The context is news stories about science, which typically do a terrible job of handling the uncertainties and caveats that are an essential part of science. Properly dealing with uncertainty is one of the hardest parts of… Continue reading Nothing But Uncertainty
Reader Request: LHC
In the Reader Request Thread, Ian asks: I’d like to hear what you think we’ll learn (if anything!) when the LHC comes online next month. Well, that sort of depends on the time scale. I’m not a big accelerator guy, but my sense from reading the blogs of people who are is that we’re not… Continue reading Reader Request: LHC
Science Marches On (Magnetic Moments Edition)
I’m currently revising the book chapter based on the original “Bunnies Made of Cheese” post, which deals with virtual particles and Quantum Electro-Dynamics. The best proof of the power of QED is the measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, where experiment and theory agree to something like thirteen decimal places. In double-checking… Continue reading Science Marches On (Magnetic Moments Edition)
The Frankenstein Moment
Over at Swans on Tea, Tom has a great story of his Frankenstein Moment, that moment in science when the lightning flashes, and it’s immediately clear that everything just worked, and you have successfully reanimated your creation, or split the atom, or discovered high-temperature superconductivity, or whatever. As he says, these are rare. My own… Continue reading The Frankenstein Moment
What’s Wrong with “Atom Laser”
There’s a news piece in Physics World this week titled “Atom laser makes its first measurement” and you might think this would be right up my alley. Mostly, though, it serves to remind me that the term “atom laser” has always kind of pissed me off. This is somewhat ironic, as it’s a beautiful piece… Continue reading What’s Wrong with “Atom Laser”
Pimp Me Old Papers
As seen in a recent links dump, gg at Skulls in the Stars posted a fun challenge for science bloggers: My “challenge”, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II,… Continue reading Pimp Me Old Papers
A Stable Heavy Element?
Via Swans on Tea, a new article on the arxiv reports the possible discovery of a new stable element: What they did was fire one thorium nucleus after another through a mass spectrometer to see how heavy each was. Thorium has an atomic number of 90 and occurs mainly in two isotopes with atomic weights… Continue reading A Stable Heavy Element?
What Do You Need to Make a Quantum Computer?
(This is the second of two background posts for a peer-reviewed research blogging post that has now slipped to tomorrow. I started writing it, but realized that it needed some more background information, which became this post. And now I don’t have time to write the originally intended post…) Making a quantum computer is a… Continue reading What Do You Need to Make a Quantum Computer?
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
Having brought in a huge new audience at the end of last week– partly through the “framing”/”screechy monkeys” things, but mostly because my What Everyone Should Know About Science post hit the front page on Reddit– I figured I should take this opportunity to… Well, drive them all right the hell away again with a… Continue reading Nuclear Magnetic Resonance