Over at Jeff Vandemeer’s blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web… Continue reading Launch Pad for Quantum Physics
Category: Physics
Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?
In the comments following the silly accelerator poll, onymous wrote: [T]he point of the LHC isn’t to discover the Higgs. No one in their right minds would build a 14 TeV pp collider if their only goal was to discover the Higgs. While it’s true that the ultimate goal of the LHC is to discover… Continue reading Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?
Holy Grails of Science
With the rumors of a Higgs Boson detected at Fermilab now getting the sort of official denial that in politics would mean the rumors were about to be confirmed in spectacular fashion, it’s looking like we’ll have to wait a little while longer before the next “Holy Grail” of physics gets discovered. Strictly speaking, the… Continue reading Holy Grails of Science
What People Think “Outreach” Is
Yesterday’s poll about “outreach” activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better version, using the “CHECK THIS BOX” count,… Continue reading What People Think “Outreach” Is
Dog Physics in Alabama?
It looks like I may well be getting together with some friends from college in Alabama on the first weekend in October, to go to a college football game. The logistics of getting to Tuscaloosa make this seem like an awfully long weekend, but I would feel guilty taking two days off just for football… Continue reading Dog Physics in Alabama?
Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can’t read because it doesn’t display properly in Firefox, but I’m sure is very interesting. Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Poll: What Is “Outreach”?
I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday’s visit to Pub Dog had… Continue reading Poll: What Is “Outreach”?
Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought
The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it’s a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving… Continue reading Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought
Academic Poll: See Longer Blog Post (Forthcoming) for Details
Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with: All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I searched to see what the authors… Continue reading Academic Poll: See Longer Blog Post (Forthcoming) for Details
Kids These Days: Is Our Learning Measure Valid?
Kevin Drum has done a couple of education-related posts recently, first noting a story claiming that college kids study less than they used to, and following that up with an anecdotal report on kids these days, from an email correspondent who teaches physics. Kevin’s emailer writes of his recent experiences with two different groups of… Continue reading Kids These Days: Is Our Learning Measure Valid?