There’s a lot of stuff in the news lately about asteroids, what with the Dawn mission orbiting Vesta, and the talk of a manned asteroid mission as a possible future step for NASA. Prompted by this, I’m going to dip into the territory usually occupied by Matt and Rhett, and ask a somewhat silly question:… Continue reading Throwing Something Into Orbit
Category: Physics
Launch Pad
For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he’s on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy… Continue reading Launch Pad
The Physics of Frustration: “Quantum Simulation of Frustrated Classical Magnetism in Triangular Optical Lattices”
One of the benefits of having joined AAAS in order to get a reduced registration fee at their meeting is that I now have online access to Science at home. Including the Science Express advance online papers, which I don’t usually get on campus. Which means that I get the chance to talk about the… Continue reading The Physics of Frustration: “Quantum Simulation of Frustrated Classical Magnetism in Triangular Optical Lattices”
Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to “unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text.” Like Bee, I couldn’t resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I… Continue reading Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Daddy’s Little Physicist
I’ve got a ton of stuff to do this morning that will keep me from more substantive blogging, so here’s a cute toddler picture: This is SteelyKid playing with the giant magnet in the MRI exhibit at the Schenectady Museum, trying to see how big a tower she could make out of steel washers and… Continue reading Daddy’s Little Physicist
Beat the Heat with SCIENCE!
It’s really frickin’ hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren’t anywhere near being able to cope with this, so I’m working from… Continue reading Beat the Heat with SCIENCE!
An Incomplete List of Pop-Culture References in How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog
I’ve been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references– quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I’m sure I’ve missed a few– many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes tend to slide right over as I read… Continue reading An Incomplete List of Pop-Culture References in How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog
Quantitative Comparisons Between Disciplines
As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer: This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing… Continue reading Quantitative Comparisons Between Disciplines
Roller Slide Physics Simulated
I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph: This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I’ll reproduce… Continue reading Roller Slide Physics Simulated
Roller Slide Physics Explained
On Monday, I posted a short video and asked about the underlying physics. Here’s the clip again, showing SteelyKid and then me going down a slide made up of a whole bunch of rollers at a local playground: The notable thing about this is that SteelyKid takes a much, much longer time to get down… Continue reading Roller Slide Physics Explained