I’m teaching introductory E&M this term, so it’s kind of fun to play around with silly applications of Coulomb’s Law. For example, let’s imagine that gravity suddenly switched off, but we wanted to keep the Earth in its orbit. How much charge would we need to move from the Earth to the Sun for the… Continue reading Replacing Gravity
Category: Physics
Another New Term, Another Set of Teaching Experiments
Classes for the Winter term start today, and I’m totally prepared for this. Yep. Uh-huh. Losing a bunch of prep time to snow and ice last week hasn’t thrown anything into disarray. Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I’ve ended up departing from my plan to not do any new preps while I’m stuck being… Continue reading Another New Term, Another Set of Teaching Experiments
Physics with the Kids at 120 Frames a Second
I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there’s anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo! To break it in, I got the kids to help out by… Continue reading Physics with the Kids at 120 Frames a Second
Richard Feynman, Placebo Technoradical
This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as “placebo technoradicalism.” The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn’t actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the… Continue reading Richard Feynman, Placebo Technoradical
Eureka! Discovering Your Inner Scientist
I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn’t done yet. The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages… Continue reading Eureka! Discovering Your Inner Scientist
Journalism of the Gaps
I’ve seen a bunch of links to this interview with Peter Aldhous, mostly focusing on this quote: I think for most science journalists, their model of journalism is explanatory. It’s taking the arcane world of the high priests and priestesses of science and translating what they do into language the ordinary mortal can understand. And… Continue reading Journalism of the Gaps
Winter Break Physics Contest
While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It’s warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out… Continue reading Winter Break Physics Contest
How Fast Should I Drive?
We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate’s mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out… Continue reading How Fast Should I Drive?
Keeping BEC Cold
I know I said there weren’t going to be physics posts for a while, but yesterday our Communications office passed along a media request about this paper on feedback cooling of BEC, from some sort of communications-person mailing list. I’d seen it talked up elsewhere– here, for example, so I banged out an email to… Continue reading Keeping BEC Cold
The Extensive Banality of Evil
We had a very late colloquium talk on Monday– on the next-to-last day of our fall term exam period, so student turnout was a little disappointing– by the science historian Dieter Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who was in town visiting a colleague in our history department. He told… Continue reading The Extensive Banality of Evil