Category: Physics

Impressive Physics Tricks for Little Kids?

We got an email from the people running SteelyKid’s summer camp asking for volunteers to speak at a career day sort of event early next week. I said “Sure, I can do that, and talk about the glamorous life of a physics professor and book author.” They said “Great, you’ll be talking to several groups,… Continue reading Impressive Physics Tricks for Little Kids?

Two Cultures of Incompressibility

Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there’s little numerical evidence of a real “crisis,” and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics… Continue reading Two Cultures of Incompressibility

What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach’s article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week… Continue reading What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

Son of Interstellar Laser Communications

I didn’t plan to do a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the optics of sending messages with lasers, but then I starting idly thinking about detection, prompted in part by a bunch of conversations with my summer students about single-photon detectors. which led to scribbling on the back of an envelope, which led to Googling,… Continue reading Son of Interstellar Laser Communications

Interstellar Laser Communications

Lunar laser ranging beams launched from telescopes at the Goddard Space Flight Center (image from NASA http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/lsso2.html )

In the comments to yesterday’s grumpy post about the Fermi paradox, makeinu raises the idea that advanced aliens would be using more targeted communications than we do: On the point about electromagnetic communications: even we are now using lasers to target communications with space, because it’s simply more efficient and reliable. It’s also basically impossible… Continue reading Interstellar Laser Communications

Fermi Fallacies

I’ve seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the “Fermi paradox,” (the question of why we haven’t seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can’t quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox… Continue reading Fermi Fallacies

The Mumbling Philosopher

Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in 1934. From Wikimedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heisenbergbohr.jpg

The physics vs. philosophy slow-motion blogfight continues, the latest major contribution being Sean Carroll’s “Physicists Should Stop Saying silly Things About Philosophy. I’ve been mostly trying to stay out of this, but when I read through the comments at Sean’s post to see if anybody offered any specific examples of problems that could’ve been avoided… Continue reading The Mumbling Philosopher

A Rock the Size of Jupiter?

Cassini-Huygens image of Jupiter, from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jupiter_by_Cassini-Huygens.jpg

For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find “A rock as big as the solar system.” We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system. “OK, how… Continue reading A Rock the Size of Jupiter?