Category: Physics

Old Thesis Club: A Specific Effect of X-Rays on Bacteria, by Thomas J. Dietz, 1934

Photo of bacteria in the thesis discussed in the post.

Back in the fall, I did a bunch of write-ups of old Master’s theses that we found when clearing some space in a storage room. I got away from this because I was busy working on the book, but I have a few more that I pulled out to look at, and since all the… Continue reading Old Thesis Club: A Specific Effect of X-Rays on Bacteria, by Thomas J. Dietz, 1934

Sports Are Science

The cover of "The Physics of Football" by Prof. Timothy Gay of Nebraska.

Unless you’ve been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks– or, you know, foreign— you’re probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt… Continue reading Sports Are Science

On Persistence and the Counting of Things

Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly’s follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer– and they’re both very good at what they do. You should buy their books,… Continue reading On Persistence and the Counting of Things

Small College, Exotic Particles

Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of “Dirac Monopoles”. This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don’t fully understand, so writing it up isn’t a simple matter. The… Continue reading Small College, Exotic Particles

Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs

Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and… Continue reading Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs

Sticky Tape: The Final Chapter

Simulated results for charged tapes, using the toy model to simulate the force between a charged tape and an uncharged but polarizable one.

I realize people are getting sick of reading me talk about this charged-tape business, which has run to one, two, three, four posts at this point. Truth be told, I’m losing enthusiasm for it myself. So this will be the final post, at least for now… As I mentioned on Twitter, as I type this… Continue reading Sticky Tape: The Final Chapter

Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism

Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem– he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a… Continue reading Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism

Repeat After Me: Particle Physics Is Not All of Physics

The very last section of the book-in-progress (at least the draft that’s with my editor right now…) is titled “Science Is Never Over,” and talks about how there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in… Continue reading Repeat After Me: Particle Physics Is Not All of Physics