We’ll be accepting applications for The Schrödinger Sessions workshop at JQI through tomorrow. We already have 80-plus applicants for fewer than 20 planned spots, including a couple of authors I really, really like and some folks who have won awards, etc., so we’re going to have our work cut out for us picking the attendees…… Continue reading Favorite Quantum Physics in Fiction?
Category: Pop Culture
Terry Pratchett, RIP
Sir Terry Pratchett, author of some mind-boggling number of books, mostly the comic-fantasy Discworld series, died yesterday. He had been diagnosed with a kind of early-onset Alzheimer’s back in 2007, a particularly cruel fate for a writer, but faced it with an impressive degree of grace, and kept writing almost to the end. And, indeed,… Continue reading Terry Pratchett, RIP
Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, Now in a Different Voice
Kate’s a big consumer of audio books, but I’ve never been able to listen to them. About five minutes in, I doze right off, every time. However, I know there are a lot of folks like Kate who love audio books and listen to them while commuting, so I’m very happy to announce that Audible… Continue reading Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, Now in a Different Voice
Both Roads Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And caused me no small amount of panic For traveling both of them would be good But there simply was no way I could Until I remembered quantum mechanics. So half my wavefunction I sent left And rightward steered the other half Both pieces of me with equal… Continue reading Both Roads Taken
The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications
I’ve updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don’t follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect… Continue reading The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications
SteelyKid, Space-Babies, and Transformative Music
As previously mentioned, SteelyKid has started to get into pop music. In addition to the songs in that post, she’s very fond of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” like every other pre-teen girl in the country, and also this Taylor Swift song: I’ve seen a bunch of people rave about this, but honestly, I found it pretty… Continue reading SteelyKid, Space-Babies, and Transformative Music
Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction
A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton’s Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said “somebody should do this for quantum physics.” At the time, I wasn’t in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants… Continue reading Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction
Celebrities and Attention Police
While I’m running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder’s thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss’s defense of same) and Megan Garber’s piece on “attention policing”, spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet… Continue reading Celebrities and Attention Police
Ownership of the Means of Adjudication
Back on Thursday when I was waiting to be annoyed by a speech, one of the ways I passed time was reading stuff on my phone, which included This Grantland piece about Charles Barkley and “advanced stats”. In it, Bryan Curtis makes the argument that while Barkley’s recent comments disparaging statistical tools seem at first… Continue reading Ownership of the Means of Adjudication
This Is Not What I Want As a Defense of “The Humanities”
Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it’s just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that… Continue reading This Is Not What I Want As a Defense of “The Humanities”