If you’d like some, you know, physics from your physics blogs, here you go: Andrew Jaffe points out new results on neutrino oscillations from the MINOS group, providing new limits on the differences between the masses of different neutrino flavors. You can also read the Fermilab press release, which as a bonus contains some wonderful… Continue reading New Neutrino Masses
Category: Physics
Class Notes
I realize that I’ve been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent… Continue reading Class Notes
Quick Physics Notes
A couple of quick notes regarding physics stories that have caught my eye: 1) Like Doug Natelson, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion about the PRL claiming to have seen vacuum birefringence. The idea here is that a group in Italy passed light through a huge rotating magnetic field (5 Tesla, or about… Continue reading Quick Physics Notes
So You Want to Be a Grad Student?
Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you’re accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here. Below the fold,… Continue reading So You Want to Be a Grad Student?
Gravitomagnetic Noise
A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency: Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity… Continue reading Gravitomagnetic Noise
Taxons Wanted
I’m not taking as much heat as the other two amateur taxonomists on ScienceBlogs, but I’ll also throw the topic open for suggestions. So, if I left your favorite sub-field of physics out of my Geek Taxonomy, drop me a comment suggesting a field that I left out, and what I ought to say about… Continue reading Taxons Wanted
True Conference Stories
Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it’s all excellent. In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me… Continue reading True Conference Stories
Know Your Geeks
Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago– almost four years! That’s, like, a century in blog-time… I’ll reproduce the geek taxonomy after the cut, and clean… Continue reading Know Your Geeks
Good Experimentalists Never Grow Up
Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory: Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are… Continue reading Good Experimentalists Never Grow Up
Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!
I’m with Kevin on this one: this whole “Pi Day” thing is just too dorky for words (I’m looking at you, Clifford…) However, as noted by Arcane Gazebo, it’s also Einstein’s birthday, which is an occasion much more worth commemorating. So celebrate as the man himself would have: invent a new theory of the universe… Continue reading Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!