If you want to know how stressed and busy I’ve been lately, you don’t have to look any farther than the fact that I’ve totally fallen down on the shameless self-promotion front: I was on a radio show, and forgot to post about it here. I know, bad blogger, no pageviews… Anyway, I talked about… Continue reading Shameless (if Belated) Self-Promotion: Me on the Radio
Category: Theory
Take A Moment to Remember
A few people last week were linking to this press release from Fermilab, which probably says more about the state of American particle physics than anything else: it’s about an experiment that they expect to be approved in 2012, to break ground in 2013, and start running in 2016. I guess with the Tevatron shutting… Continue reading Take A Moment to Remember
Roller Slide Physics Simulated
I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph: This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I’ll reproduce… Continue reading Roller Slide Physics Simulated
It’s Magnetic Moment Season: Measuring Various g-Factors
Among the articles highlighted in this week’s Physics is one about a new test of QED through a measurement of the g-factor of the electron in silicon ions. This comes on the heels of a measurement of proton spin flips (this includes a free PDF) a couple of weeks ago, and those, in turn, build… Continue reading It’s Magnetic Moment Season: Measuring Various g-Factors
Playground Physics: Roller Slide Mystery
We took SteelyKid to the playground at one of the local elementary schools on Sunday morning. this one includes an odd sort of slide, made of dozens of rollers that are 1-2 inches in diameter (they’re all the same size– the range is just because I didn’t measure them carefully). They’re on really good bearings,… Continue reading Playground Physics: Roller Slide Mystery
What’s So Interesting About Quantum Phenomena?
Third of the five research categories within DAMOP that I talked about is Quantum Phenomena. This is a little bit of a catch-all, as there are a few different things going on in this area. They are all unified, though, by the fact that they end up making quantum mechanical effects manifest in some way,… Continue reading What’s So Interesting About Quantum Phenomena?
What’s So Interesting About Ultracold Matter?
The first of the five categories of active research at DAMOP that I described in yesterday’s post is “Ultracold Matter.” The starting point for this category of research is laser cooling to get a gas of atoms down to microkelvin temperatures (that is, a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Evaporative cooling can… Continue reading What’s So Interesting About Ultracold Matter?
What’s So Interesting About AMO Physics?
That’s the title of my slightly insane talk at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) conference a couple of weeks ago, summarizing current topics of interest in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. I’ll re-embed the slides at the end of this post, for anyone who missed my… Continue reading What’s So Interesting About AMO Physics?
The Statistics of the Highly Improbable
This is the alst week of the academic term here, so I’ve been crazy busy, which is my excuse for letting things slip. I did want to get back to something raised in the comments to the comments to the Born rule post. It’s kind of gotten buried in a bunch of other stuff, so… Continue reading The Statistics of the Highly Improbable
The Born Equivocation
Last week’s post about the Many-Worlds variant in “Divided by Infinity” prompted the usual vigorous discussion about the merits of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. This included the common objection that we don’t know how to obtain the probability of measurement outcomes in the Many-Worlds Interpretation. This is one of those Deep Questions that lots of people… Continue reading The Born Equivocation