This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as “placebo technoradicalism.” The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn’t actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the… Continue reading Richard Feynman, Placebo Technoradical
Category: Science
Eureka! Discovering Your Inner Scientist
I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn’t done yet. The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages… Continue reading Eureka! Discovering Your Inner Scientist
Journalism of the Gaps
I’ve seen a bunch of links to this interview with Peter Aldhous, mostly focusing on this quote: I think for most science journalists, their model of journalism is explanatory. It’s taking the arcane world of the high priests and priestesses of science and translating what they do into language the ordinary mortal can understand. And… Continue reading Journalism of the Gaps
Winter Break Physics Contest
While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It’s warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out… Continue reading Winter Break Physics Contest
How Fast Should I Drive?
We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate’s mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out… Continue reading How Fast Should I Drive?
Keeping BEC Cold
I know I said there weren’t going to be physics posts for a while, but yesterday our Communications office passed along a media request about this paper on feedback cooling of BEC, from some sort of communications-person mailing list. I’d seen it talked up elsewhere– here, for example, so I banged out an email to… Continue reading Keeping BEC Cold
Missing the Eureka Moment
Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on it to a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society. Well, actually, that’s not quite true– Mendeleev did… Continue reading Missing the Eureka Moment
The Extensive Banality of Evil
We had a very late colloquium talk on Monday– on the next-to-last day of our fall term exam period, so student turnout was a little disappointing– by the science historian Dieter Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who was in town visiting a colleague in our history department. He told… Continue reading The Extensive Banality of Evil
SteelyKid, Scientist
One of SteelyKid’s classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent “new kinds of water.” The “featured image” above shows her reinventing stock images… And doing a better job of it than this clown.… Continue reading SteelyKid, Scientist
“Up to Their Tricks Again”: My New Favorite Physicist Story
From The Fly in the Cathedral, Brian Cathcart’s history of the experiments that led up to the splitting of lithium nuclei by accelerated protons in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1932. One of the incidents along the way was the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick, also in 1932. In describing Chadwick, who was Ernest… Continue reading “Up to Their Tricks Again”: My New Favorite Physicist Story