I’ve seen several people link to the Scientific American piece on how to make your own “quantum eraser” experiment, which also includes a list of components and a detailed set of instructions, with pictures. There’s a great “living in the future” kick to an article which assumes that you just have a laser lying around… Continue reading Quantum Optics at Home
Category: Physics
Decision Season
It’s Decision Season in academia. Across the country, high-school students are losing sleep at night worrying about where to go to college next year. We’ve had our annual Accepted Students Open House days (the second was Monday, with the turnout significantly reduced by the bad weather), at which we meet with students who are considering… Continue reading Decision Season
Dorky Poll: Science In Your Lifetime
I’ve got another long lab this afternoon, so I’m stealing an idea for an audience-participation thread from James Nicoll: Name five things we didn’t know in the year that you were born that make the universe a richer place to think about. This is actually a really interesting exercise for showing how rapidly the world… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Science In Your Lifetime
The Unsinkable Standard Model
The big physics news of the week last week came while I was in transit on Wednesday: The MiniBooNE (the odd capitalization is because it’s sort of an acronym) neutrino experiment released their first results on the neutrino oscillation studies they’ve been doing, and found, well, nothing new. In contrast to a previous experiment that… Continue reading The Unsinkable Standard Model
Shtetl of the Times
I forgot to link to Sunday’s New York Times article about D-Wave and their controversial claim to have made a working quantum computer, which prominently features quotes from the world’s second funniest physics blogger: Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada, fired the… Continue reading Shtetl of the Times
Bad News for the LHC
As you undoubtedly already know, the Large Hadron Collider suffered a setback this week: The start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN could be delayed after three of the magnets used to focus and manipulate the accelerator’s proton beams failed preliminary tests at CERN earlier this week. The magnets were built at Fermilab… Continue reading Bad News for the LHC
Philosophia Naturalis
Just a quick note that everybody’s favorite physics-oriented blog carnival is now up: Philosophia Naturalis #8. Once again, I forgot to submit anything, but Sujit was kind enough to include one of the things I wrote anyway. There’s a lot of good stuff there, so go check it out.
Labs and Learning
Steve Gimbel at Philosopher’s Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:p> As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like — everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two… Continue reading Labs and Learning
Beyond the Standard (Cosmological) Model
There’s a meeting now underway in London on Outstanding Questions for the Standard Cosmological Model, which is the term for the current Big Bang/ Inflation/ Dark Matter/ Dark Energy/ Accelerating Universe view of the history of the universe. Tommaso Dorigo is attending, and reports on the talks on his blog (and also a description of… Continue reading Beyond the Standard (Cosmological) Model
Reading Science in College
Via Bookslut, there’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about whether reading is really important: Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I’d only half- or quarter-read.… Continue reading Reading Science in College