The Corporate Masters have launched a “featured blogger” program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today. The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling… Continue reading Macroscopic Quantum Behavior in SeedMagazine.com
Category: In the News
Man Walks on F*&%ing Moon
The Internet has been all abuzz today over the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Tor has the best one-stop collection of reminiscences, but there are plenty of others. They’re roughly equally split between “Wasn’t that the coolest thing ever?” and “Isn’t it a shame we stopped going. I was a bit over -2 when… Continue reading Man Walks on F*&%ing Moon
Unscientific America: The Pluto Thing
I’ve been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it’s not hard to find more). For those who haven’t read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the… Continue reading Unscientific America: The Pluto Thing
What People Think About Scientists
Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there’s a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there’s something in here to bolster every opinion. The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the… Continue reading What People Think About Scientists
…For Some Definition of Physical Reality
There’s a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined “Physical reality of string theory demonstrated,” in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit’s head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in… Continue reading …For Some Definition of Physical Reality
Journalists Unclear on the Concept
No, this isn’t another “How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic” post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong’s discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what “science journalism” actually means: Certainly,… Continue reading Journalists Unclear on the Concept
Making Materials Cool
Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction. The first is last week’s NOVA ScienceNOW segment on… Continue reading Making Materials Cool
Plagiarism, Garbling, and Superluminal Motion
I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled “Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light “— somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish: Scientist John Singleton insists… Continue reading Plagiarism, Garbling, and Superluminal Motion
When Press Releases Collide
Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday: Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. In a report published in the international science journal Nature today (25 June), European… Continue reading When Press Releases Collide
Festive Science
There’s a nice write-up about the World Science Festival in the New York Times today: The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at… Continue reading Festive Science