Enough slagging of beloved popularizers– how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper to write up, becase Nature Physics are utter bastards,… Continue reading Entangled In the Past: “Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping”
Category: Physics
Dog Physics: Obsessive Update
A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because “it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex… Continue reading Dog Physics: Obsessive Update
Trickle Down Science
A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including… Continue reading Trickle Down Science
Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”
I’ve been busily working on something new, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I’m setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting the oil changed… Continue reading Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant,… Continue reading Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?
For something I’m working on, I’m trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I’m looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way,… Continue reading Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?
Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist?
Over in Twitter-land, there’s a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don’t know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all. I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we’ll settle for an informal poll to mark the… Continue reading Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist?
More Physics of Sprinting
Yesterday’s post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn’t match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular linked to a PDF… Continue reading More Physics of Sprinting
The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety
Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven’t had a decent kick returner since Dave… Continue reading The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety
My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog
My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn’t get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children’s book section: I am a ten year old who… Continue reading My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog