Category: Science

Science21 Highlights: Peer to Patent and Government 2.0

(Over the course of this week, I’m going to post a handful of things about talks that struck me as particularly interesting at last week’s conference. The order will be chosen based on how much time I think I will have to write them up, given SteelyKid’s demands for attention…) On Thursday, the Science in… Continue reading Science21 Highlights: Peer to Patent and Government 2.0

We Are Science

If you listen to people talking about (or read people blogging about) new ways of doing things, you’ll frequently hear references to Science or Academia as if they were vast but monolithic entities existing in their own right. Statements like “The culture of Science does not reward open access…” or “Modern Academia does not reward… Continue reading We Are Science

Virtual Science Debate

As you might have guessed from yesterday’s tease, the folks at ScienceDebate 2008 have now managed to get answers from the McCain campaign (to go with Obama’s froma few weeks ago). Which means that while you may never see them answering science questions on a stage together, you can put them head-to-head on the Web,… Continue reading Virtual Science Debate

Talking to My Dog About Science: Weblogs and Public Outreach

I gave my talk this morning at the Science in the 21st Century conference. Video will eventually be available at the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive site, but if you’d like to get a sense of the talk, a few people were live-blogging it in the FriendFeed room for the meeting. You get a pretty… Continue reading Talking to My Dog About Science: Weblogs and Public Outreach

“Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”

This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it’s not the last xenon paper I’m an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process. My favorite story about this stuff was… Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”

Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions

This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it’s the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and… Continue reading Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions

Science in the 21st Century

One week from today, barring anything catastrophic, I will be speaking at the Science in the 21st Century workshop at the Perimeter Institute. Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice run-down of the program at Backreaction, and it sounds really interesting. I have my talk more or less ready– I started making slides a week or two… Continue reading Science in the 21st Century

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Obama on Science

As you have no doubt seen by now, if you read any of the other blogs on ScienceBlogs, the Science Debate 2008 group has gotten Barack Obama to answer their 14 questions on science issues. John McCain has apparently promised answers at some point in the future. The answers are, well, pretty much what you… Continue reading Obama on Science

Babies Are Quantized

As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous… Continue reading Babies Are Quantized