There’s an interesting exchange over at the Reality-Based Community around the topic of “earmarks” for science, like the grizzly bear DNA study McCain keeps mocking. Michael O’Hare argues that science should not be funded by earmarks: Almost any piece of scientific research, especially in biology, that isn’t called “Cure cancer!” is liable to the kind… Continue reading Earmarks and the Ridicule of Science
Category: Physics
Earth Saved Until Next Year
So, the LHC has been shut down until next year, after a major helium leak in on section. This means it will be March or April of next year before collisions in the ATLAS detector create dragons that will eat us all. Now you know why I didn’t make a big deal of the “start-up”… Continue reading Earth Saved Until Next Year
Bandwidth and Community Expectations
Derek Lowe has posted an article about X-ray lasers in chemistry, which amused me because of the following bit: Enter the femtosecond X-ray laser. A laser will put out the cleanest X-ray beam that anyone’s ever seen, a completely coherent one at an exact (and short) wavelength which should give wonderful reflection data. This is… Continue reading Bandwidth and Community Expectations
Ambiguous Quantum Cubes
Speaking of quantum (as we were), I’ve been meaning to link to the recent Scientific American article by Chris Monroe and Dave Wineland on quantum computing with ions. This is a very good explanation of the science involved, but you’d expect nothing else, given that the authors are two of the very best in the… Continue reading Ambiguous Quantum Cubes
Fear the (Quantum) Turtle
The Pontiff beat me to it, but my Ph.D. alma mater has scored a $12.5 million grant from the NSF to fund the Joint Quantum Institute as a Physics Frontier Center for the development of quantum technology: The Physics Frontier Center (PFC) award, effective September 1, will fund 17 graduate students, seven postdoctoral scientists and… Continue reading Fear the (Quantum) Turtle
Science21: Supply and Demand, Booms and Busts
There’s an article in yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed about the supply of scientists and engineers, arguing that there is not, in fact, a shortage: Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at what he called five “mysteries” of the STEM work force issue. For example, why do employers claim a… Continue reading Science21: Supply and Demand, Booms and Busts
Spherical Cows
Two new recent posts take up the question of “spherical cows,” the old joke term for absurd-sounding approximations that physicists make to turn intractable problems into easy ones. First, The First Excited State explains when N=N+1: Everybody who’s taken any sort of math class knows that a statement like N+1 = N is simply ridiculous.… Continue reading Spherical Cows
Secret History of Quantum Physics
Kate and I were talking about Garrett Lisi’s utopian idea of a time-share netowrk for scientists (about which more later, maybe), and I mentioned the fine tradition of great discoveries being made while on vacation. It occurred to me, though, that there’s a secret history story begging to be written about one of these. Erwin… Continue reading Secret History of Quantum Physics
Quantum Physics for Dogs Preview
We’re out for a walk, when the dog spots a squirrel up ahead and takes off in pursuit. The squirrel flees into a yard and dodges around a small ornamental maple. Emmy doesn’t alter her course in the slightest, and just before she slams into the tree, I pull her up short. “What’d you do… Continue reading Quantum Physics for Dogs Preview
Talking to My Dog About Science: Weblogs and Public Outreach
I gave my talk this morning at the Science in the 21st Century conference. Video will eventually be available at the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive site, but if you’d like to get a sense of the talk, a few people were live-blogging it in the FriendFeed room for the meeting. You get a pretty… Continue reading Talking to My Dog About Science: Weblogs and Public Outreach