If you’re in the UK, you may very well be thinking “You know, I love the idea of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but I find American idiom very intimidating. If only there were an edition just for people like me…” Well, hypothetical UK person, your prayers have been answered: This is the… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Now With More Quantum
Category: Science
What’s a Topological Insulator?
Yesterday’s post about how nobody cares about condensed matter physics produced a surprising number of comments of the form “I was really hoping you would post about topological insulators,” which surprised me a bit. Anyway, since people asked for it, I’ll give it a shot. The important caveats here are that 1) this isn’t my… Continue reading What’s a Topological Insulator?
How Do You Make People Care About Topological Insulators?
I had planned to spend some time this weekend trying to make sense of this new result on topological insulators, and maybe even write up the relevant paper for ResearchBlogging. Family life intervened, though, and I didn’t have the time. I get enough of it to understand the basics of what’s going on, but there’s… Continue reading How Do You Make People Care About Topological Insulators?
Launch Pad for Quantum Physics
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
Science v. Religion: Time to Try (Social) Science
There are lots of reasons why Josh Rosenau is one of the few writers blogging about science-and-religion issues that I still read. This morning’s post on what you ought to do to determine effective approaches is an outstanding example: Rather than looking at national polls, which are crude instruments and can miss shifts within small… Continue reading Science v. Religion: Time to Try (Social) Science
Two Cultures in Ducking Requirements
Back in one of the communications skills threads, Karen comments about science and humanities: It’s easy enough for a humanities major to avoid doing much science in school. The converse is not true. It strikes me that for those earlier scientists who attended univeristy, both their early education and university years were more suited to… Continue reading Two Cultures in Ducking Requirements
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?
I Write Like a Random Selection of Famous People
Via Crooked Timber, there’s a silly web site that lets you put in a chunk of text, and does some sort of statistical analysis of it to determine what famous writer’s prose it most closely resembles. It turns out, I’m kind of hard to categorize. For instance, when I’m writing about Holy Grails, I apparently… Continue reading I Write Like a Random Selection of Famous People
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
Presentation Style: Indoctrination or Selection?
we have a summer student seminar series, in which students who are doing summer research give 15-minute talks about their research. These are generally pretty good– our students are, by and large, very good public speakers. One thing that I always find interesting about this is how many of the students end up sounding just… Continue reading Presentation Style: Indoctrination or Selection?