Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao’s Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the “Geek Stuff”… Continue reading The Physicist Trap
Category: Physics
Loose Lips Sink Research Grants
A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your… Continue reading Loose Lips Sink Research Grants
A Day in the Life
Woke up, got out of bed Ran a comb across my head…
New Physics Blogs
Well, OK, they’re mostly not new, just new to me. I’m vaguely ashamed at having to rely on Sean Carroll to point out new blogs to me, especially since one of the authors comments here moderately regularly, but my defense is that unlike faculty at semester schools, who are winding things down, I’m right in… Continue reading New Physics Blogs
Lecture Notes Dump
Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff… Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement. Lecture 12: EPR “paradox,” introduction to Local Hidden Variables. Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell’s Theorem/ Bell’s Inequalities. Lecture 14: Bell’s Inequality experiments. Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump
Uncertain Pop Quiz Results
We had 45 responses to yesterday’s poll/quiz question— thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count: How do you report your answer in a lab report? 0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s 3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s 18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s 21… Continue reading Uncertain Pop Quiz Results
Physics Funding Fundamentalism
The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics: The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be… Continue reading Physics Funding Fundamentalism
Uncertain Pop Quiz
Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825… Continue reading Uncertain Pop Quiz
Why Are You Asking Me?
I’ve found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I’ve never met. I still don’t really feel qualified to offer… Continue reading Why Are You Asking Me?
Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response
Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who’s the most overlooked scientist: Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways: Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is? Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most… Continue reading Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response