The first and oldest of the experiments in the Top Eleven is actually a two-fer: Galileo Galilei is nominated both for the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and for his experiments on the motion of falling objects. Who: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the great Italian physicist, astronomer, and general Renaissance man. When: He’s known to […]
Month: January 2006
Great Experiments: Top Eleven
Evil elves have apparently snuck into the house in the middle of the night, and stuffed my sinuses with cotton and motor oil (the dog is sitting here muttering “I told you there were evil elves out there but did you listen? ‘Stop barking at nothing,’ you said…” Or maybe that’s the drugs.). This sort […]
Physics Face
Thursday night, I needed to work late, so rather than upset the dog by going home for dinner, and then leaving, I went for sushi at a local restaurant. I had a very pleasant meal, which I spent reading through the first few chapters of the textbook I plan to use for my Quantum Optics […]
Great Experiment Round-Up
It’s depressingly typical of my life that we would get BoingBoing-ed on a weekend when I’m visiting the in-laws… I’ve gotten a bunch of responses to my earlier request for “Great Experiments” in other areas of science, and I thought I’d collect the links in one post (many of them show up as TrackBacks to […]
It’s Funny ‘Cause It’s True
We’ve had an outbreak of mathematician jokes in comments, so it seems only fair to offer up a thread for the mockery of physics. Sadly, there really aren’t many good physicist jokes. My personal favorite: A physicist, a chemist, and a biologist get together for a few drinks, and get to talking about life, the […]
In Which I Sell Ads for the Man
I probably ought to say something about the New York Times piece on ScienceBlogs yesterday, except, well, there’s not much to say. It’s about two paragraphs in a media column, focussed entirely on the fact that they’re going to try to sell ads on these sites (presumably, the big Seed ad on the right will […]
Where Have All the Experimentalists Gone?
Over at Gene Expression, Razib spins an interesting question off my call for blog posts: why are there so many biology bloggers? As I said in comments over there, I think there are two main reasons why you find more bio-bloggers than physics bloggers. The first is that there are simply more biologists than physicists– […]
What It Takes
In the ongoing string theory comment thread (which, by the way, I’m really happy to see), “Who” steps off first to ask an interesting question: One way to give operational meaning to a theory being predictive in the sense of being empirically testable is to ask What future experimental result would cause you to reject […]
Pop Culture Interlude
I’m giving an exam this morning, and I’ve got some oral lab report presentations to listen to this afternoon, plus I need to put together some Mathematica activities for Friday. This doesn’t leave great deal of time for detailed science blogging, so here are some pop song lyrics, courtesy of the four-and-five-star playlist on iTunes. […]
Call For Blog Posts
Newton’s Principia has won the prestigious Cosmic Variance Greatest Paper contest, with Dirac’s theory of the electron coming in second. I’m still accepting nominations for the greatest physics experiment ever (probably until the weekend, when I’ll have time to do something with the list…). Thinking about this, it occurs to me that this might be […]