I ended up posting a whole bunch of stuff at Forbes last month, and as a result it seems appropriate to collect those links here now, rather than waiting for a quarterly round-up at the end of the year. So, here’s what I wrote in October:
- Nobel Prize in Physics 2018: How to Make Ultra-Intense, Ultra-Short Laser Pulses: This year’s Nobel was really two half-prizes; this digs into the physics behind the half that went to Strickland and Mourou.
- Nobel Prize in Physics 2018: How to Manipulate Small Objects with Optical Tweezers: This is the second half of the Nobel, dealing with the physics behind Art Ashkin’s half-a-prize.
- Breakfast Cereal and Sinking Ships: The Billion-Dollar Physics of Granular Materials: A passing observation while making weekend breakfasts for the kids connected (in my mind) to an article about maritime disasters, so I wrote a quick post about it.
- What Is a Quantum Computer? The 30,000-Foot Overview: A blog version of a talk I gave at the National Association of Science Writers meeting in Washington, DC. This is a very general overview of what quantum computers are and why they’re more powerful than classical computers (for certain kinds of problems).
- How Does the “Shape” of an Electron Limit Particle Physics?: I would’ve been plenty happy with the preceding collection of posts, but the ACME collaboration went and released new results about their ongoing search for an electric dipole moment of the electron without checking that it fit my schedule, so I had to write about it in an already full month..
So, yeah, that’s quite a bit of stuff. As always, this was a mixed bag from the standpoint of readership: I was disappointed that the Nobel posts didn’t get more attention, but the media moment sort of got eaten by first the celebration of Donna Strickland being the first woman in decades to win, and second by a dumb argument about her faculty rank. That missed opportunity kind of annoys me.
I was pleased by the generally positive reception of the quantum computing and electron EDM posts, though. And, you know, that’s blogging for you…