Links for 2010-08-29

  • The third part of a series (with links to parts 1 and 2) on the making of an episode of Iron Chef America that will air Sunday night.
  • There is a reason why some reagents and some chemical reactions have not been reported yet. When it comes to some binary and trinary combinations of elements the path to the chemistry textbooks is very … Darwinian. And let’s face it boys and girls, the true measure of success in chemistry is not measured in prizes. True impact is when your research makes them change the content of the second year sub-discipline textbooks. If the teaching community believes that your research has to be mentioned to second year chemistry students then you have made an impact. Anything else just says that you have enough friends to throw a party.
  • “Today’s “Ask a Physicist” comes to us from David Sparks and is right to the point:

    Whatever happened to magnetic monopoles?
    David went straight to the point, so I will too. They might be out there, but if so, they’re the angry loners of the universe.”

1 comment

  1. I never did buy the idea of magnetic monopoles because while E and B are dual, that does not imply that they are on the same footing algebraically. The components of E generate complex quaternions, but the components of B are in a closed even subalgebra – the real quaternion subalgebra. So there is only an illusion that they are on an equal footing, if you ignore other aspects of the algebraic structure. You should not ! That is not to imply that I have a theory on how to disprove monopoles, but it ought to be a consideration.

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