There’s a news squib from the Institutes of Physics this morning touting new results on a theory of modified gravity that the authors say can explain the structure of the universe without needing to invoke dark matter. This is a significant problem in cosmology, as the article explains: [O]ur theory of gravitation – Einstein’s theory… Continue reading Modified Gravity Eliminates Dark Matter?
Category: Physics
You Can’t Cook a Cow: The Problem with Raw Data
Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of “open science,” and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I’m a little dubious about it… Continue reading You Can’t Cook a Cow: The Problem with Raw Data
The Band Is On the Field!
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they’re being honored. These frequently involve props… Continue reading The Band Is On the Field!
Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.
The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post). There’s a… Continue reading Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Scots
There’s a very nice article in the new Physics World in praise of James Clerk Maxwell of “Maxwell’s Equations.” Incredibly, Maxwell is probably somewhat underappreciated, what with wrapping up all of classical electromagnetism in one neat and Lorentz-invariant package, making pioneering contributions to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and taking the first color photograph, using basically… Continue reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Scots
Imagine a Rocket in a Football Stadium Full of Jello…
That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the New York Times, aided and abetted by Boing Boing. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as this one. It doesn’t help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the airplane stading still relative to the ground. The… Continue reading Imagine a Rocket in a Football Stadium Full of Jello…
The Academic Scene
A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration: Dave Winer’s got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: “Where is the Bronx Science for adults?” He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school “was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my… Continue reading The Academic Scene
Deism’s Just Alright With Me
Over at Bora’s House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this: U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though… Continue reading Deism’s Just Alright With Me
String Theory Is a Bunch of Crap
At least, that’s the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the fact that not one string theory result has been nominated for either the Physics Result of 2006 or the Astronomy Result of 2006…
Axions and the Problem of EurekAlert
I have a couple of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS reader, because they sometimes turn up interesting things– I got the Bill Wootters item there, for example, and they had a piece on strontium clocks that I keep meaning to say something about. Of course, there’s also some total garbage, such as the kookery from… Continue reading Axions and the Problem of EurekAlert