The big physics story of the week is undoubtedly the new limit on the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron from Ed Hinds’s group at Imperial College in the UK. As this is something I wrote a long article on for Physics World, I’m pretty psyched to see this getting lots of media attention,… Continue reading What Goes Around Is Really Round: “Improved measurement of the shape of the electron”
Category: Physics
The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m schedule to teach a class on “A Brief History of Timekeeping” next winter term as part of the Scholars Research Seminar program. Even though I have a hundred other things to do, I continue to think about this a lot. One of the goals of the course is to introduce… Continue reading The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch
Dog Physics On TV: Set Your DVR
I learned today that the National Georgraphic Channel video I mentioned last week has actually already aired on the network. It was last week’s episode of the series “Naked Science,” titled Living in a Parallel Universe. I haven’t seen it, obviously, but it’s running again, tomorrow (the 26th), at 4pm (Eastern (US) time). Set your… Continue reading Dog Physics On TV: Set Your DVR
You Will Never Die
If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson’s Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a… Continue reading You Will Never Die
Lessons in Applied Data Archaeology
I’m teaching our upper-level lab course this term, where I do a two-part experiment on laser spectroscopy. The first part is to calibrate the free spectral range of a homemade Fabry-Perot interferometer, and the second part is to use that Fabry-Perot as a frequency marker to calibrate a diode laser scan across the rubidium hyperfine… Continue reading Lessons in Applied Data Archaeology
Filtering Isn’t the Problem
Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating “social media” alternatives for academic publishing, citing “disastrous consequences” of the “filter-then-publish” model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I’m not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is: The… Continue reading Filtering Isn’t the Problem
Idle Historical Question: Why p?
Today’s lecture topic was position-space and momentum-space representations of state vectors in quantum mechanics, which once again brought up one of the eternal questions in physics: Why do we use the symbol p to represent momentum? I did Google this, but none of the answers looked all that authoritative. And, anyway, I’m sure that the… Continue reading Idle Historical Question: Why p?
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog On TV
Well, on video over the web, anyway… If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below: You’ll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I’m pretty psyched, though I’m… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog On TV
“Supersolids”: The Saga Continues
Several years ago, now, a group at Penn State announced a weird finding in helium at extremely low temperatures and high pressures (which is what you need to make helium solidify): when they made a pendulum out of a cylindrical container with a thin shell of solid He toward the outside edge, twisting about its… Continue reading “Supersolids”: The Saga Continues
Active Engagement Works: “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class”
Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper appeared in Science, which is unusual enough… Continue reading Active Engagement Works: “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class”