There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom— Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble’s online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all… Continue reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo
Month: September 2009
Links for 2009-09-27
Fantastical Conceits and Turbulent Souls – The Barnes & Noble Review “[O]ne of the field’s premier independent publishers, NESFA Press, has just embarked on a six-volume set, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, consolidating all of Zelazny’s fiction shy of novel length, as well as all his poems and non-fiction, chronologically sorted. (Available now, Volume… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-27
Links for 2009-09-26
Zoom-Whirl Orbits in Black Hole Binaries Title of the week from PRL. (tags: science physics articles theory gravity) Phase-Slip Interferometry for Precision Force Measurements “We demonstrate a novel atom interferometric force sensor based on phase slips in the dynamic evolution of a squeezed-state array of degenerate 87Rb atoms confined in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-26
Historical Physicist Smackdown Explained: Electric Theory
So, who are the people in yesterday’s poll about theoretical physicists, and why should you know them?
Volume Packing of Breakfast Cereal
We’re working on moving SteelyKid from formula to milk (which isn’t going all that well– dairy seems to make her gassy). This has led me to switch over to cereal in the mornings, since we’re buying milk anyway, which frees up the time otherwise spent waiting for the toaster. Cereal-wise, I tend to alternate between… Continue reading Volume Packing of Breakfast Cereal
Links for 2009-09-25
The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted “One thing that frustrates me at times about “big history”, world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it’s turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-25
Thursday Baby Blogging 092409
SteelyKid says, “Daaaad! This is no time for Baby Blogging!” “Appa and I are reading Dinosaur vs. Bedtime. Come back and take a picture later!”
Historical Physicist Smackdown: Electric Theory
I’m nearly done with Graham Farmelo’s biography of Dirac (honest), which discusses the major attempts to understand the behavior of electrons in quantum mechanics. this calls for a dorky poll: Which theorist of the electron was the best?(poll) Try not to base your selection on which of these historical physicists has the best biography written… Continue reading Historical Physicist Smackdown: Electric Theory
Early Review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog
One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O’Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know… Continue reading Early Review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog
Links for 2009-09-24
$6/Kg to orbit — KarlSchroeder.com “The fact is, there is only one problem worth speaking about in space development, and that is the problem of cost-to-orbit. It currently costs around $10,000/kg to launch anything at all. That price will never come down as long as chemical rockets are the only technology we use. “ (tags:… Continue reading Links for 2009-09-24