I have once again fallen down on the job, or at least the part of it that involves letting ScienceBlogs readers know what I’ve been posting at Forbes. I blame the Labor Day holiday and the start of school.
Anyway, it’s been a bit over two weeks since the last round-up, so a bunch of new posts:
—Physics: Complicating Everything Since The 1600’s: A look at the subtle and picky issues that need to be addressed before you can claim to have definitively tested something in physics.
—A Qualified Defense Of “Science Literacy”: A bunch of people on blogs and Twitter were hating on the science literacy quiz run by Jon Miller, in ways that I don’t quite think were fair.
—The Surprisingly Complicated Physics Of How I Didn’t Lose My Phone: I left my phone on top of the car after a trip to the pool, and it stayed there all through the drive home. To celebrate, I wrote about the physics of friction. In the latest round of “my life is weird,” this got written up in the Daily Mail.
—Physics Is Most Interesting When It Stops Making Sense: One of the things that really didn’t work about The Three-Body Problem, for me, was that it gets the mindset of physicists slightly wrong. If you want to drive physicists to despair, you don’t show them data that make no sense, you show them data that are perfectly, boringly consistent with the Standard Model.
—Science Can Be As Beautiful As Art: Yet another response to the dumb but ubiquitous “science is too clinical to allow appreciation of great art” argument.
—Why Every College Student Needs To Take Science Courses: Some advice for the STEM-averse: college science courses are probably more helpful less scary than you expect, and they’ll make you a better human being.
And, you know, for as much as I feel like I’ve been slacking a bit, that’s a bunch of stuff, right there. This week will genuinely be slow, though, as the first two days are lost to Rosh Hashanah and chasing the kids around while day care is closed.
On “interesting when it stops making sense”:
Yes, I know someone who left particle physics when the big experiment he had spent his life on kept coming up with confirmation after confirmation of the standard model. He was tops at what he did, so he could have still been doing it if it hadn’t bored him to tears.