The LOLcat phenomenon has reached the world of physics, with this Schrödinger cat picture, which is pretty good. I’m also amused by Serge’s poem from Making Light: Roses are red, Violets are blue. Is Schrödinger’s Cat dead? That remains up to you. I may need to get out more.
Category: Physics
Theorists Messing With My Head
Just when I’m finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what’s going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with “Unparticle Physics”: I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field… Continue reading Theorists Messing With My Head
Irreverent Natural Philosophy
Philosophia Naturalis #10 is now up, providing all sorts of physics-bloggy goodness. I particualrly liked mollishka’s explanation of the Lyman-alpha forest and Scott Aaronson’s math-free explanation of Shor’s factoring algorithm is a classic, but there’s lots of good stuff there.
Physics News Backlog
Every day, a handful of physics news items pass through my RSS feeds, and every few days, one of them looks interesting enough that I check the little box to keep it unread, so I can comment on it later (I don’t blog from work if I can avoid it). Of course, most of the… Continue reading Physics News Backlog
Many Worlds, Many Treats
I’m sitting at the computer typing, when the dog bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she’s sniffing the floor around my feet intently. “What are you doing down there?” “I’m looking for steak!” she says, wagging her tail hopefully. “I’m pretty certain that there’s no steak down there,” I say. “I’ve never… Continue reading Many Worlds, Many Treats
Why Cesium?
The Zeitgeist for today highlights a little New York Times Q & A piece on atomic clocks, answering the question “Why is cesium used in atomic clocks?” The striking thing about this, to me, is that they don’t really answer the question. I mean, they talk about how atomic clocks work in very vague terms… Continue reading Why Cesium?
The Mystery of “Supersolid” Helium
One of the other ScienceBloggers is prone to complaining in the back-channel forums that we don’t have enough bloggers who work in some subfield of biology or another– we need more left-handed shrew ecologists, or some such. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. What we need is a physics blogger from the condensed matter world,… Continue reading The Mystery of “Supersolid” Helium
Why Physics?
We were talking about student recruitment the other day, as faculty are wont to do, and our chair suggested that we really ought to have a “Why You Should Major In Physics” page as part of the department web page. As I’m currently the web page coordinator, it will fall to me to write whatever… Continue reading Why Physics?
Undergraduate Research: Why It Works
I wrote yesterday’s post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It’s sparked some good discussion, though, and I’d like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means. Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if… Continue reading Undergraduate Research: Why It Works
Finite Supergravity?
The highlighted article in Friday’s Physical Review Letters is something Peter Woit has been going on about for months: “Cancellations Beyond Finiteness in N=8 Supergravity at Three Loops”. It’s been on the ArXiv for ages, but I’m old school, and don’t think of papers as real until they’re actually released in peer-reviewed journals. The thing… Continue reading Finite Supergravity?