Kate points me to a real head-scratcher from Slate, about Harry Collins posing as a physicist. Collins is a sociologist who studies expertise, and also has a very strong interest in gravitational wave detection experiments. Collins and co-workers collected a bunch of qualitative questions about gravitational waves and detectors, and got an expert in the… Continue reading An Enthusiastic Amateur is Worse Than Any Pro
Category: Science
COBE Nobel Follow-Up
The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday’s Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize– I’ll put some amusing anecdotes into another post. All the usual… Continue reading COBE Nobel Follow-Up
Chemistry Nobel for Eukaryotic Transcription
The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, “for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”. I am very much not a chemist, so all I can really do is… Continue reading Chemistry Nobel for Eukaryotic Transcription
Dynamite Money for COBE
Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a… Continue reading Dynamite Money for COBE
That, My Liege, Is How We Know the Earth to Be Banana Shaped
The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days. The work is based on the famous WMAP picture of the microwave background (and no, it’s not because the picture is oblong): As you know, Bob, the picture… Continue reading That, My Liege, Is How We Know the Earth to Be Banana Shaped
The Grad School Application Process
I’m teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I’m giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week’s was “How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School.” I’ve probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I’m too lazy to look… Continue reading The Grad School Application Process
Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science
Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a “you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut” sort of way. Obviously, she hasn’t read The Republican War on Science, or she’d understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically… Continue reading Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science
Wait ‘Till Next Year
The “Genius Grants” for 2006 have been announced, and as usual, your humble correspondent is not among the winners. Damn. You know, if I were a MacArthur trustee, I’d be sorely tempted to throw one grant a year to somebody completely bizarre– $500,000 to Giblets for excellence in Fafbloggery– just for the hell of it.… Continue reading Wait ‘Till Next Year
Take the Bad with the Good
So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here’s hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired. The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about… Continue reading Take the Bad with the Good
Stupid Infinite Universe!
The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water: While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures within that squeeze the… Continue reading Stupid Infinite Universe!