In the lecture hall yesterday, from left to right: A dewar of liquid nitrogen, a tube of racquetballs, a squeaky dog toy, a handful of yellow balloons, a vase of flowers, an inflated red balloon, an insulated glove, and a 4-liter jug of liquid nitrogen. The dewars, the vase, the glove, and the dog toy… Continue reading Still Life With Lecture Props
Category: Physics
New Physics Contest
Slow blogging this weekend, as yesterday was taken up with activities that will be blogged about later. Today promises to be a sticky and unpleasant day outside, so I’ll probably end up doing a lot of blogging in my nice, comfortable, air-conditioned home office. Of course, there’s not much point in posting lots of stuff… Continue reading New Physics Contest
Classic Edition: Stronger Than Old Hapless Gods
I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach, decline politely) that I… Continue reading Classic Edition: Stronger Than Old Hapless Gods
Across the Eighth Dimension
Over at Backreaction, Bee has posted a fairly readable introduction to extra dimensions, including a sort of taxonomy of different models. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, take a look. It almost makes up for the dreadful visual pun from a little while back. (There’s other good stuff there, including a list of… Continue reading Across the Eighth Dimension
String Theory, RHIC, and Furr’s Law
An off-hand comment in my RHIC post has provided a lot more traffic and entertainment than I would’ve thought possible, and has also accidentally re-confirmed what we used to call “Furr’s Law” back in my Usenet days– namely, that the fastest way to get information on the Internet is to say something wrong, and let… Continue reading String Theory, RHIC, and Furr’s Law
Extremely Dorky Poll
Rob Knop offers a nice discussion of the speed of light, in response to last night’s question. This post is not about that, though you should go read it. This post is about my odd reaction to Rob’s title: “‘Speed of Light’ : a bad name for a great fundamental constant?” The notion of a… Continue reading Extremely Dorky Poll
Why Do They Always Ask Tough Questions?
I was away at Readercon this weekend, which meant a fair amount of hanging out in a hotel bar socializing with writer types. One of whom was working on a novel that will have some hard-science elements to it, and had been looking for a physicist to ask questions of. Having just sat down, and… Continue reading Why Do They Always Ask Tough Questions?
The Chopped Liver Accelerator
I had errands to run this morning before work, which meant that I didn’t have time to queue up the usual handful of blog posts to appear during the day. I don’t want to have the site go dark, though, so I’ll throw up a post or two on my lunch hour, to note some… Continue reading The Chopped Liver Accelerator
Shop Days
The last couple of days at work have been Shop Days, with a fair bit of time spent in the department’s machine shop making holes in a metal box. This would, I’m sure, be the occasion of much hilarity among my old junior high shop teachers, as my ineptitude in both metal and wood shop… Continue reading Shop Days
Stop Thinking in Terms of High School Physics
p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics. For the past 6 years I’ve taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100’s years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single topic;… Continue reading Stop Thinking in Terms of High School Physics