It’s the first week of May, which means we’re due to see flowers watered by all this damn rain soon, and also a recap of the various posts I wrote for Forbes during April:<\/p>\n
— Why Are There Too Many Papers In Theoretical Physics?<\/a>: A look at the origins of “ambulance chasing” in high-energy theory, where dozens of people jump on the slightest hint of a new effect.<\/p>\n — A Little Luck Is Essential For Success In Science<\/a>: Some historical examples of physicists who succeeded thanks to a lucky break of one sort or another.<\/p>\n — What Sorts Of Problems Are Quantum Computers Good For?<\/a> Prompted by news of a “quantum traveling salesman” algorithm, a look at the general shape of problems where quantum computing offers a big speed-up over the best classical approaches.<\/p>\n — Why Do We Teach ‘Physics For Poets’ But Not ‘Poetry For Physicists’?<\/a>: Some thoughts about why it is that we have students take courses in other disciplines, and how reform efforts that work too hard to appeal to non-majors might undermine the whole point of liberal education.<\/p>\n — What Does It Mean For ‘Science’ To Rise And Fall?<\/a>: Some thoughts about cycles in the history of science as applied to particular definitions of “Science.”<\/p>\n A decent mix of stuff this month; some long-running obsessions popping up again, some more topical stuff. Two of these are actually very long and well-disguised subtweets, in that they spun out of thinking about kerfuffles in social media that it wouldn’t be productive to write about directly.<\/p>\n You may have noticed a pattern to these recaps, in that there are always five posts; that’s because my contract with Forbes pays me more if I do at least five posts in a month, so I try to hit that. It also works reasonably well in terms of workflow, because that’s just over one post per week, and that’s a decent rate for me in terms of producing fairly consistent quality without cutting too much into my other activities. I may do a navel-gazing post later about how my blogging practices have evolved over time, though…<\/p>\n Anyway, another month, another chunk of blogging. There was a bit of a dry spell in there in terms of material I could usefully write about, and now in keeping with tradition I find myself with an oversupply of blog-worthy material and an undersupply of time in which to write about it. Such is the glamorous life, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s the first week of May, which means we’re due to see flowers watered by all this damn rain soon, and also a recap of the various posts I wrote for Forbes during April: — Why Are There Too Many Papers In Theoretical Physics?: A look at the origins of “ambulance chasing” in high-energy theory,… Continue reading Physics Blogging Round-Up: April<\/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":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-forbes-recap","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968","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=10968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}