Over at Gene Expression, Razib spins an interesting question off my call for blog posts: why are there so many biology bloggers? As I said in comments over there, I think there are two main reasons why you find more bio-bloggers than physics bloggers. The first is that there are simply more biologists than physicists–… Continue reading Where Have All the Experimentalists Gone?
Category: Physics
What It Takes
In the ongoing string theory comment thread (which, by the way, I’m really happy to see), “Who” steps off first to ask an interesting question: One way to give operational meaning to a theory being predictive in the sense of being empirically testable is to ask What future experimental result would cause you to reject… Continue reading What It Takes
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Theorems
There was a postdoc in my research group in grad school who had a sister in college. She called him once to ask for help with a math assignment dealing with series expansions. He checked a book to refresh his memory, and then told her how to generate the various series needed for her homework… Continue reading We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Theorems
Get Out the Vote
Today is the last day to vote in Cosmic Variance’s Greatest Physics Paper contest. If you haven’t voted yet, go over there and pick a paper. Locally, I’m still collecting nominees for the Greatest Physics Experiment. A quick scan through the comments gives the current list as: The Michelson-Morley experiment disproving the aether. Rutherford’s discovery… Continue reading Get Out the Vote
Physicist in Landscape
There’s a slightly snarky Review of Leonard Susskind’s book on string theory (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design) in the New York Times this week. Predictably, Peter Woit is all over it. The central issue of the book, and the review, and Woit’s whole blog is what’s referred to as… Continue reading Physicist in Landscape
I Got Your Other Side Right Here
I’ll have something more serious to say on this subject tomorrow (I want to sleep on it, and take another look at the post in the morning), but I have one quick comment on the New York Times review of Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape: Susskind’s insider perspective also lends an air of smugness to… Continue reading I Got Your Other Side Right Here
Needles in Haystacks Are Nothing
A while back, I talked about a colloquium where Steven Boughn of Haverford argued that it’s practically impossible to detect a single graviton. It was a very nice talk, relying mostly on simple dimensional analysis arguments, and very basic physics. Today, via Wolfgang Beirl (via Mixed States), I see that Boughn and Tony Rothman have… Continue reading Needles in Haystacks Are Nothing
Libertopia Approaches?
The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that’s slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make… Continue reading Libertopia Approaches?
Future Great Experiments
Looking at the ScienceBlogs front page, I suspect that I may be well out of my league, especially when it comes to posting frequency. There’s just no way I can post that many entries in one day, especially not a day like Thursday. In addition to my lab this morning (in which half the students… Continue reading Future Great Experiments
Greatest. Experiment. EVER.
Quite a while back, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance had a post seeking nominations for “The Greatest Physics Paper Ever.” Back after a long hiatus, he’s now holding a vote among five finalists: Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, Emmy Noether’s paper on symmetry and conservation laws, Dirac’s theory of the electron, and… Continue reading Greatest. Experiment. EVER.