Digg-ing the Arxiv

Some news for those interested in open-source publishing and “Open Science”: Dave Bacon is announcing the debut of scirate.com, a sort of social-networking site for physics preprints: The idea came from the observation that while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that the volume of papers was high and, to… Continue reading Digg-ing the Arxiv

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Dorky Poll: Favorite Elision

I’m giving an exam this morning, and there’s yet another job talk at lunch, followed by an afternoon of trying to finish all the stuff that’s been pushed aside by candidate talks and interviews, so I’m a little too busy for detailed blogging. Sounds like time for a couple of audience participation entries… I’m running… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Favorite Elision

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Basic Concepts: Force

This is the first post I’m doing for the “Basic Concepts” series. When I asked for suggestions, I got a good long list of stuff, and it’s hard to know quite where to start. I’m going to start with “Force,” because physics as we know it more or less started with Isaac Newton, and Newton… Continue reading Basic Concepts: Force

Extraordinary Claims and Universality

“Thoreau,” guest-posting at Unqualified Offerings, has a nice post commenting on a Physics Today article about the use of language in science, by Helen Quinn. The article is pretty standard stuff for anyone following the “culture wars” debates here– use of the word “belief” to describe scientific conclusions causes confusion, and attempts to put science… Continue reading Extraordinary Claims and Universality

How the Other Half Researches

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has an idea for an Undergraduate [Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology] Theory Insitute, a six-week summer course that would cover a bunch of the basic tools and techniques of the field, and prepare students to do theoretical research in those fields. The proposed syllabus: Special relativity, index notation, vectors, tensors. Lagrangian… Continue reading How the Other Half Researches

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Extra Dimensions Get Smaller

One of my favorite experiments in physics has released a new set of results in Physical Review Letters, putting experimental limits on the size of any extra dimensions of the sort predicted by string theory: We conducted three torsion-balance experiments to test the gravitational inverse-square law at separations between 9.53 mm and 55 µm, probing… Continue reading Extra Dimensions Get Smaller

Basic Concepts

In a back-channel discussion among ScienceBloggers, John Wilkins suggested that it might be interesting to do occasional posts on really basic concepts in our fields– the sort of jargon terms that become so ingrained that we toss them around without realizing it, and end up confusing people. A lot of these terms often have a… Continue reading Basic Concepts

Hot New Trend: High-School Physics!

There’s been lots of news from the AAS meeting in Seattle this week, but the best from my perspective is that high school physics enrollments have neevr been higher: Presenting new data that encourage this outlook, [Michael] Neuschatz [senior research associate at AIP’s Statistical Research Center] will show that enrollment in high school physics classes… Continue reading Hot New Trend: High-School Physics!