My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to… Continue reading How to Read a Scientific Paper
Category: Science
Shameless Innumeracy
On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes: In fact, there were… Continue reading Shameless Innumeracy
On the Helpfulness of Numbers
Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this… Continue reading On the Helpfulness of Numbers
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01
As mentioned a few times previously, the class I’m teaching this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I’m doing to the blog. Today was the first… Continue reading Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01
2011: The Year in Blog
I’m a little late to the Most Popular Posts of the Year list party, partly because I wanted to wait until the year was actually over, and partly because Google Analytics was being Difficult, and I had to switch back to the “old” version to get actual numbers out. Having sorted that out, though, here… Continue reading 2011: The Year in Blog
The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
My class this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” with the title “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” looking at the science and technology of timekeeping from prehistory through modern atomic clocks. This is nominally an introduction to “research methods,” though the class operates under a lot of constraints that fully justify the scare quotes, at… Continue reading The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
End of Year Self-Promotion
I will eventually do a “Year in Blog” post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I’m too busy prepping next term’s class to do all the link chasing. That doesn’t mean I can’t engage in a little self-promotion, though.… Continue reading End of Year Self-Promotion
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Eponym
As we started the last week of the advent calendar, I was trying to map out the final days, and was coming up one equation short. I was running through various possibilities– the Dirac equation, Feynman’s path integrals, the Standard Model Lagrangian, when I realized that the answer was staring me right in the face:… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Eponym
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Einstein’s Gravity
A week and a half ago, when the advent calendar reached Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, I said that it was the first equation we had seen that wasn’t completely correct. Having done our quick swing through quantum physics, the time has come to correct that equation: If you say “Einstein equation” to a random… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Einstein’s Gravity
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Schrödinger
Newton’s birthday (in the Julian calendar) is Sunday, so we’re in the final days of the advent calendar. Which means it’s time for the equations that are least like anything Newton did, such as today’s: This is the Schrödinger equation from non-relativistic quantum mechanics. If you want to determine the quantum state of an object… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Schrödinger