No, not me. Not literally, anyway– I’m quite happy with my current family. Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called
Category: Science
A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I’m going to split the making-of… Continue reading A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
Scientific Pub Crawl: A Tour of the Great Discoveries
Over on LiveJournal, Johan Larson has a great discussion topic: Our hero, the time traveling engineer, starts out in 1901, with the goal of working on the coolest engineering projects of the twentieth century. Assuming he knows well the history of technical development during that time, but is not actually allowed to substantially alter history,… Continue reading Scientific Pub Crawl: A Tour of the Great Discoveries
Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller
Every time I mention the idea of teaching physics to a wider audience than just physics majors, somebody brings up Richard Muller’s course, “Physics for Future Presidents,” at Berkeley. So, I was pleased to find out that he has turned the course into a book, also titled Physics for Future Presidents, with the subtitle “The… Continue reading Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll has a good idea that I’m going to steal. Over at SF Signal, they asked a bunch of writers what they would change about SF. Ken Macleod (author and occasional blogger) wrote, in part: It’s just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in… Continue reading Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Science Outreach Through Fiction
Over at Tor.com, David Levine describes a really cool event he went to just before Worldcon: a crash course in modern astronomy for SF writers: The idea behind Launch Pad is Gernsbackian: getting good science into popular fiction as a form of public education and outreach for NASA. SF writer and University of Wyoming astronomy… Continue reading Science Outreach Through Fiction
Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
The experiment described in the previous post was published in early 1998, but the work was done in 1997. This was the year when things really turned around for me in grad school– the optical control paper was done in the summer 0f ’94, and ’95 and ’96 were just a carnival of pain. Everything… Continue reading Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
In Defense of Short Papers
The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title “Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen’s gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to… Continue reading In Defense of Short Papers
The Relevance of Relevance
Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools – How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart’s “Mathematician’s Lament” (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I’m fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart,… Continue reading The Relevance of Relevance
Journalists Doing Science Right
Via a comment to an earlier post, here’s an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR’s Sarah Varney looks at “cleansing” foot pads, and finds them wanting. She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition… Continue reading Journalists Doing Science Right