As of 1:45 Monday, 217 people have cast votes in the Laser Smackdown poll. That’s not bad, but it’s currently being handily beaten by the 271 people who have voted for a favorite system of units. The nice thing about using actual poll services for this sort of thing, though, is that I can re-post… Continue reading Reminder: Vote for the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time
Category: In the News
Amazing Laser Application 9: Fusion!
What’s the application? The goal of laser ignition fusion experiments is to heat and compress a target to the point where the nuclei of the atoms making up the sample fuse together to form a new, heavier nucleus, releasing energy in the process. Nuclear fusion is, of course, what powers stars, and creating fusion in… Continue reading Amazing Laser Application 9: Fusion!
Entanglement Happens
There have been a bunch of stories recently talking about quantum effects at room temperature– one, about coherent transport in photosynthesis , even escaped the science blogosphere. They’ve mostly said similar things, but Thursday’s ArxivBlog entry had a particular description of a paper about entanglement effects that is worth unpacking: Entanglement is a strange and… Continue reading Entanglement Happens
Theoretical Particle Physics Is Always in Crisis
Dennis Overbye is a terrific writer, but I have to say, I hate the way that he falls into the lazy shorthand of using “physics” to mean “theoretical particle physics” in this article about a recent conference built around debates about the state of particle physics. He’s got lots of great quotes from Lisa Randall… Continue reading Theoretical Particle Physics Is Always in Crisis
Trapping Ions With Light
There was a flurry of stories last week about an arxiv preprint on optical trapping of an ion. Somewhat surprisingly for an arxiv-only paper, it got a write-up in Physics World. While I generally like Physics World, I have to take issue with their description of why this is interesting: In the past, the trapping… Continue reading Trapping Ions With Light
Fifty Years of Solutions Finding Problems
2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. To mark the occasion, the American Physical society has launched LaserFest, which will involve a large number of public events over the next year. The website includes a bunch of cool things explaining the physics of lasers, and a timeline of laser history with… Continue reading Fifty Years of Solutions Finding Problems
Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t
The NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators report came out not too long ago, and the bulk of it is, as usual, spent on quasi-quantitative measures of scientific productivity– numbers of degrees granted, numbers of patent applications for various countries, etc. I find all of those things pretty deeply flawed, so I tend to skip past… Continue reading Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t
A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing
I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than… Continue reading A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing
Climate, Weather, and Public Opinion
There’s a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of “If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?” It’s a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that’s making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant. This reminded me of something I’ve wondered… Continue reading Climate, Weather, and Public Opinion
Zitterbewegung!
One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don’t get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII era of European dominance faded away,… Continue reading Zitterbewegung!