I spent most of yesterday helping out with an on-campus workshop for high school teachers and students. Seven high school physics teachers and seventeen high school students spent the day doing a half-dozen experiments to measure various physical constants. I was in charge of having them measure Plack’s constant using the photoelectric effect. The actual… Continue reading Photoelectric Follies
Category: Physics
If Wishes Were Horses We’d All Be Eatin’ Steak
There’s a kind of tradition in theoretical physics of wacky “what if” papers. The whole “wormhole” thing is an example of this in action– somebody noticed that the structure of General Relativity would allow you to make tunnel-like structures between points in space, and then asked what you would need to make such a structure.… Continue reading If Wishes Were Horses We’d All Be Eatin’ Steak
Zeilinger on Physics
I got email last week from the Institute of Physics pointing me to a pair of video interviews with Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. Zeilinger has built an impressive career out of doing fundamental tests of quantum mechanics– he’s not only got the accent and the hair to be a brilliant physicist, he’s… Continue reading Zeilinger on Physics
Many-Worlds and Decoherence: There Are No Other Universes
I seem to have been sucked into a universe in which I’m talking about the Many-Worlds Interpretation all the time, and Neil B keeps dropping subtle hints, so let me return to the whole question of decoherence and Many-Worlds. The following explanation is a recap of the argument of Chapter 4 of the book-in-progress, which… Continue reading Many-Worlds and Decoherence: There Are No Other Universes
Parallel Universes and Morality
A little while back, when I complained about the treatment of the multiverse in Anathem, a number of people commented to say that it wasn’t all that bad. And, indeed, they were right. Compared to last night’s History Channel program on “Parallel Universes,” Stephenson’s book is a miracle of subtle nuance, teasing out the crucial… Continue reading Parallel Universes and Morality
Einstein on TV
The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn’t have time to post. The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his “miracle year” in 1905, to… Continue reading Einstein on TV
Nobody Cares About Superconductivity
Nobody reading blogs, anyway. Doug Natelson asked for comments on a recent workshop on iron arsenide superconductors yesterday, and the count of comments still stands at zero. The under-representation of condensed matter physicists among bloggers and blog readers, relative to their abundance in the general population, really is amazing.
Think Before You Plot
There’s a link in today’s links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There’s some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret. I would like to dissent mildly from one… Continue reading Think Before You Plot
Me On TV (On the Internet)
As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here: This was the first time I’ve done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
What’s the Matter With Photons?
Over at Dot Physics, Rhett has just completed a two-part post (Part I, Part II) on quantum physics arguing against the use of photons in teaching quantum physics. Part I gives a very nice introduction to quantum physics, which is why I linked it, but Part II goes a little off the rails. There’s not… Continue reading What’s the Matter With Photons?