Philosophia Naturalis #7 is all about the tabloid physics.
Category: Physics
Max, You Know Nothing About Quantum Physics
Over at metadatta, Sujit has video of Jim Carrey and Conan O’Brien talking about experimental physics. (There are a bunch of more serious things that I really ought to be posting– I owe Dave an answer to his questions about X-Ray lasers, for example– but there’s an ice storm, I have a class to teach… Continue reading Max, You Know Nothing About Quantum Physics
Desert Island Research Groups
This is probably too arcane to be an official Dorky Poll, but I thought of it yesterday, and sort of like the idea. In pop-culture circles, it’s very common to find people making list of “Desert Island Books” or CD’s or DVD’s, or whatever. The idea being to list those pop culture items that are… Continue reading Desert Island Research Groups
RateMyPreprints.com
Back when I first mentioned the idea, people were kind of down on the idea of SciRate.com, Dave Bacon’s project to make a collaborative filter for the arxiv.org prerprint server. Not one to be easily discouraged, Dave has continued to work on it, and it now features papers from all the different arxiv categories, instead… Continue reading RateMyPreprints.com
Unitary Evolution in Tight Shorts
Terence Tao explains quantum theory as a game of Tomb Raider: Imagine first that Lara is about to navigate a tricky rolling boulder puzzle, when she hears a distant rumbling sound – the sound of her player saving her game to disk. From the perspective of the player, what happens next is the following: Lara… Continue reading Unitary Evolution in Tight Shorts
Journal of Easily Amused Physicists
Check out the DeMille group rigid rotor photo. Truly, a remarkable display. (One of my students stumbled across this while researching grad schools, and showed it to me today.)
The Cult of Theory
Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne (not JoAnne, as I originally typed) has a very nice post about the cult of genius in physics, and its relationship to research on the problems caused by excessive praise. Doug Natelson also has some comments. There’s some fascinating stuff in the articles about praise, with some likely relevance to… Continue reading The Cult of Theory
Inscrutable Science Update
It’s a good day for people posting about science I don’t understand… Peter Woit points to the Non-Commutative Geometry blog, at which Alain Connes, the godfather of non-commutative geometry, is posting. It’s not the most polished blog, but if you can understand what they’re talking about, it’s probably interesting. Scott Aaronson is excited about new… Continue reading Inscrutable Science Update
Spooky Action at a Distance
This is an approximate transcription of my physics talk from Boskone, titled “Spooky Action at a Distance,” in which I attempted to give a reasonable explanation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (“EPR” hereafter) paper and Bell’s Theorem. This was sort of a follow-on from last year’s “Weird Quantum Phenomena,” meant to highlight a specific class of weird… Continue reading Spooky Action at a Distance
Alexander Pope Was Right
I was busy yesterday at work, so I managed to avoid looking at the “Conservapedia” until James Nicoll, the bastard, drew my attention to the entry on Relativity: Unlike most advances in physics, the theory of relativity was proposed based on mathematical theory rather than observation. The theory rests on two postulates that are difficult… Continue reading Alexander Pope Was Right