I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.<\/p>\n
Of course, there’s been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections<\/a>, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.<\/p>\n First, via His Holiness<\/a>, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal<\/a> from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics<\/a>. It’s not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it’s well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works on. This is some of the coolest work going on in physics, and Zoller is both scary smart and a really nice guy to talk to.<\/p>\n In older news, well, the universe is bigger than we thought<\/a>, as some new observations may require a revision of the distance to some nearby galaxies. This, in turn, would require a revision of the Hubble Constant, which describes the rate at which distant galaxies appear to be receding from us, due to the expansion of the universe. And if the Hubble Constant changes, that means the universe is older than expected, by about fifteen percent, or two billion years.<\/p>\n “How could we have missed two billion years?,” you ask. Well, these measurements are really, really difficult, and Rob Knop explains why<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that. Of course, there’s been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The important news all has to do with… Continue reading Physics News<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,33,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","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=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}