{"id":5236,"date":"2010-11-30T12:17:19","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T12:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/30\/physics-is-no-longer-exciting\/"},"modified":"2010-11-30T12:17:19","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T12:17:19","slug":"physics-is-no-longer-exciting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/30\/physics-is-no-longer-exciting\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics Is No Longer Exciting"},"content":{"rendered":"

At least, that’s the obvious conclusion from the Royal Society’s Science Sees Further<\/a> page. The introduction touts it as “a series of articles on some of the most exciting areas of science today,” but what’s striking to me is that none of the twelve topic listed (Ageing Process, Biological Diversity, Cognition and Computation, Cultural Evolution, Extra-Terrestrial Life, Geoengineering, Global Sustainability, Greenhouse Gases, New Vaccines, Stem Cell Biology, Uncertainty in Science, and Web Science) includes any of the most obvious exciting developments in physics. Many of them have some physics component, but none of them are reallyabout<\/em> physics.<\/p>\n

This is kind of a shame, because there’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in physics right now. You’d need to be living in a cave not to know about the Large Hadron Collider, which has the hearts of particle physicists all a-flutter, but there are also great and exciting developments in fields like quantum information and quantum foundations, condensed matter physics (including new-ish materials like graphene, which was the subject of this year’s Nobel winning research, topological insulators, and whole new groups of superconducting materials), and there are plenty of non-accelerator based searches for dark matter and the like just getting underway.<\/p>\n

Now, it’s hard to argue that any of these are as materially important to the world as environmental issues (which account for four of the twelve essays), but you might think the LHC at least would’ve snuck in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At least, that’s the obvious conclusion from the Royal Society’s Science Sees Further page. The introduction touts it as “a series of articles on some of the most exciting areas of science today,” but what’s striking to me is that none of the twelve topic listed (Ageing Process, Biological Diversity, Cognition and Computation, Cultural Evolution,… Continue reading Physics Is No Longer Exciting<\/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":[265,7,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_media","category-physics","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5236","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=5236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}