It’s been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I’ve been doing at Forbes, so here’s the latest eclectic collection:<\/p>\n
— Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock<\/a>: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka<\/cite><\/a> that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific thinkers. Of course, the actual game tat night was horribly ugly, not a compelling display of anything in particular…<\/p>\n — How Can A Laser Make A Plane Turn Around?<\/a>: A quick post on the optics of lasers, spinning off a news of the weird story about a flight that had to return after a “laser strike.”<\/p>\n — How Gravitational Waves Connect To Quantum Optics<\/a>: The big news of the month is LIGO’s announcement that they detected gravitational waves; this talks about how LIGO helped inspire the field of cavity optomechanics.<\/p>\n — Four Important Things To Consider When Choosing A College<\/a>: Some unsolicited advice for high-school seniors who are entering the stressful college decision season.<\/p>\n — How To Make Movies Showing Nanoscale Molecules In Action<\/a>: The editors changed the title of this one (you can see the original in the URL); it’s about how a new microscopy technique is built out of previous results.<\/p>\n — Why Is Relativity True?<\/a>: A Twitter exchange with Kevin Drum about his foray into explaining General Relativity stumbled into the<\/em> really big and probably unresolvable question in the philosophy of physics.<\/p>\n As usual, the reception of these is a mix of about what I expect and “Huh?” I figured the college advice thing would do well (and I’m glad to see it being well received by admissions counselors on social media), but I thought the LIGO\/optomechanics post was too technical to get much traffic, and it turned into a smash hit. On the other hand, I thought the relativity post had a lot of potential, and it’s been nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds. Go figure.<\/p>\n I’ll also note that I’ve been getting some complaints via various channels about Forbes’s ad-blocker policy. And, yeah, I find it kind of annoying, too, but that decision is made above my pay grade and I can’t do anything about it. I will pass complaints on as I get them, but it’s not like they’re not aware that (some) people dislike the policy, so…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I’ve been doing at Forbes, so here’s the latest eclectic collection: — Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific… Continue reading Physics Blogging Round-Up: Jocks, Lasers, LIGO, Admissions, Nano-Movies, and Philosophy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,6,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-forbes-recap","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}