A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport: As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I’m not sure what this says about London call girls, but I’m… Continue reading Dog Physics: More Popular Than London Call Girls
Category: Science
Most Difficult Course?
Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics: You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what is the most difficult course at your university? Or even more broadly, how would one… Continue reading Most Difficult Course?
An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory
As I’ve said a bazillion times already this term, I’m teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up… Continue reading An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Photoshop Contest Results
So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we’ve come up with a solution. But first, the entries:
How to Teach Physics to Your Polish Dog
I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link.… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Polish Dog
Reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Photoshop Contest
A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you’d like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics.… Continue reading Reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Photoshop Contest
The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes
Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new… Continue reading The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 03
It’s been a little while since I wrote up what I’ve been doing in my “Brief History of Timekeeping” class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has already appeared here, though, so I can hopefully catch up a lot of stuff in… Continue reading Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 03
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Photoshop Contest
It’s now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off– the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I’ve got a copy already: If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take… Continue reading How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Photoshop Contest
Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial
As I keep saying in various posts, I’m teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett… Continue reading Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial