One of my former professors is collecting some awards: Professor William Wootters is to be honored for his outstanding achievements in physics, not once, but twice in the academic year, by The American Physical Society and by the International Organization for Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing. In recognition of his pioneering work in quantum theory,… Continue reading Congratulations to Bill Wootters
Category: Physics
That’s What a Science Gets for Putting Too Many Rules on a Ninja
David at the World’s Fair celebrates Ninja Day with an Ask a Ninja video about physics. Of course, what the ninja says is a lie– Physics did the dumping, and he was all, “Please take me back, I promise to only move along geodesic paths in curved space-time from now on,” but she was having… Continue reading That’s What a Science Gets for Putting Too Many Rules on a Ninja
Get Out the Vote: Results of the Year
Turnout has been disappointing in the Physics and Astronomy results of the year threads. Come on, I know there are some opinionated nerds out there reading this– nominate some stuff. Here, the AIP provides their own list, complete with links to Physics News Update stories. Are blog readers really going to let themselves be upstaged… Continue reading Get Out the Vote: Results of the Year
Call for Nominations: Physics Results of the Year
It’s more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling “Year’s Best” lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I’ll throw this open… Continue reading Call for Nominations: Physics Results of the Year
Relativity and Mathematica?
Next term, I’m teaching our sophomore-level “Modern Physics” class again. “Modern Physics,” in ecuation terms, really means “Early 20th Century Physics”– it’s a couple of weeks of Special Relativity, followed by several weeks of basic Quantum Mechanics, with a mad 2-3 week sprint at the end where I try to cover as much material as… Continue reading Relativity and Mathematica?
You Got General Relativity on My Protein Folding!
There’s a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. “Protein folding” is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible configurations. In nature, though, these proteins… Continue reading You Got General Relativity on My Protein Folding!
How Predictable
New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form: Exciting new developments in my own field of research will… Continue reading How Predictable
Broken Things
I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don’t have a link to a transcript on the site– in fact, they haven’t updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would… Continue reading Broken Things
A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools
Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I’m not certain if they’re plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it “the scourge of modern lecturing.” This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I’ve been using… Continue reading A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools
Gregariousness Is the Refuge of Mediocrity, and Bosons
In the previous installments, I talked about identical particles and symmetry, and what that means for fermions. Given that there’s only one other type of particle in the world, that sort of means that I need to explain what symmetry means in the case of bosons. When I explain this to the first-year seminar, I… Continue reading Gregariousness Is the Refuge of Mediocrity, and Bosons