Over in yesterday’s communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities: I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers – people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel approaches to old problems, and who have the intuition needed for… Continue reading Are Communications Skills Holding Science Back?
Category: Physics
Communication Skills for Scientists
As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won’t solve the problem, but it’ll give me something to point to the next time… Continue reading Communication Skills for Scientists
Scientist-Approved Beach Reading
Summer is here, which means vacations for lots of people, which means “beach reading”– trying to read a book or two while kicking back somewhere. The ideal beach read is something that isn’t so heavy as to bring you down or demand too much attention, but is also serious enough that it’s not embarrassing to… Continue reading Scientist-Approved Beach Reading
Bad and Good Presentation Graphs
I gave a short introduction to how to give a presentation today to the students who will be presenting their research in our twice-weekly Summer Student Seminar Series. This included examples of a data slide that is bad in the ways that students’ first attempts at data slides tend to be bad, and the same… Continue reading Bad and Good Presentation Graphs
Big News in Tiny Physics
A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics: There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations seem to proceed at different rates for neutrinos and antineutrinos. This is a really surprising… Continue reading Big News in Tiny Physics
Photons: Still Bosons
Last week, Dmitry Budker’s group at Berkeley published a paper in Physical Review Letters (also free on the arxiv) with the somewhat drab title “Spectroscopic Test of Bose-Einsten Statistics for Photons.” Honestly, I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed it, even though this is the sort of precision AMO test of physics that I love, had it not… Continue reading Photons: Still Bosons
Crowd-Sourcing Physics Questions
There is a proposal for a Physics Q&A site along the lines of Stack Overflow for computer stuff. Like many such projects, this largely conflates “physics” and “theoretical particle physics,” so I’m not sure how much of a contribution I can really make. I’ve got plenty of theorist readers, though, so if this seems like… Continue reading Crowd-Sourcing Physics Questions
Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?
Next in line of questions from readers, we have tbell with: Since science is a self-correcting process (maybe only at a statistical level, not necessarily an individual level), it would be cool if you would relate the last time you were seriously wrong about some aspect of science or research, and how you altered your… Continue reading Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?
Relatively Comfortable Question: Physics First?
Starting at the beginning of the uncomfortable questions left by readers, we have Tex asking: If physics is the basic science that underlies almost every other science, why do American high schools usually teach it in the 3rd or 4th year, after biology and chemistry? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Physics first, then… Continue reading Relatively Comfortable Question: Physics First?
The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku
I don’t remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them. DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now? MK: In principle. What we’re talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the… Continue reading The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku