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

The Philosophical Incoherence of “Too Many Worlds”

Phillip Ball has a long aggrieved essay about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which is, as Sean Carroll notes, pretty bad. Ball declares that Many-Worlds is “incoherent, both philosophically and logically,” but in fact, he’s got this exactly backwards: Many-Worlds is, in fact, a marvel of logical and philosophical coherence, while Ball’s objections are incoherent and illogical.… Continue reading The Philosophical Incoherence of “Too Many Worlds”

Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light

Time Bandits poster by Russell Dickerson, http://www.darkstormcreative.com/2013/01/new-movie-poster-art-time-bandits/

Rhett Allain has a list of 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light, to tie in with the International Year of Light, and it’s a good list with lots of .gifs. Of course, there are some gaps, so let me offer some additional things that everyone ought to know about light: — Light Is… Continue reading Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light

Particle-Wave Duality for Eight-Year-Olds

Experimental set-up for the double-slit experiment with classical particles (salt crystals).

Over at Scientific American’s Frontiers for Young Minds blog, they have a great post on what happens when you ask scientists to explain key elements of a different research field. It’s pretty funny, and rings very true, as SteelyKid asks me tons of science questions, very few of which have anything to do with atomic,… Continue reading Particle-Wave Duality for Eight-Year-Olds

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 19: Eucatastrophe

Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer. Davisson is holding a bit of vacuum apparatus, presumably from their famous experiment. Image from Wikimedia.

As I endlessly repeat, I’m an experimentalist by training an inclination, so I especially appreciate stories about experimental science. There’s something particularly wonderful about the moment when an experiment clicks together, usually after weeks or months of hard, frustrating work, when things just keep breaking. Of course, sometimes, breaking stuff can be a Good Thing.… Continue reading Advent Calendar of Science Stories 19: Eucatastrophe

High Precision, Not High Energy: Video

Back in August, I gave a talk in Stockholm at the Nordita workshop for science writers, about precision measurement searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. There’s now video of this online: The video quality isn’t great, but if you’d like a clearer look at the slides, I’ve posted them on SlideShare. The talk was… Continue reading High Precision, Not High Energy: Video

John Stewart Bell Prize: Nominations Wanted

In odd-numbered years (by the Gregorian calendar, anyway), the University of Toronto offers the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and Their Applications. This is not connected to the Jon Stewart of the Daily Show– he’s purely classical, as you can tell from the fact that there’s no “h”… Continue reading John Stewart Bell Prize: Nominations Wanted

Entangled States at TED-Ed

Screen shot from the TED-Ed video on entangled state.

The fourth video I wrote for TED-Ed is now live: Einstein’s Brilliant Mistake: Entangled States. The title is not just an Elvis Costello reference, but gets at the fact that while the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper was wrong in that the local hidden variable theories they favored are impossible, it turned out to be… Continue reading Entangled States at TED-Ed