For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It’s a time-limited email link, so look quickly.) As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it’s aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus ranges from pretty […]
Category: Two Cultures
Poetic Physics
Via Making Light, Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has some sharp words in response to the alleged Deep Thoughts on his Starbucks cup: When Einstein explained his theory of relativity, he couldn’t express it in the precise, scientific writing of physics. He had to use poetry. Poetry: the connection of words, images, and the […]
How the Other Half Grades
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as […]
Two Cultures in Meetings
Prompted in part by Rob Knop’s post on meeting with humanists, an observation about the nature of academia attributed to our late Dean of the Faculty, a former Classics professor: The key difference between disciplines in terms of administrative business on campus is that scientists tend to do their research work (experiments, calculations, simulations) in […]
Step One: Change Disciplines
Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I’ll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows […]
Poetry About Physicists
Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site, […]
Algebra and Storytelling
(It’s Presidents’ Day, so remember to vote!) Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape […]
Pith-Helmeted Anthropological Reporting
Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous is blogging the MLA. (I’m sure he’s not the only one, he’s just the only one I’m reading…) As I understand it, the Modern Language Association meeting is pretty much the be-all end-all of humanities meetings. It’s sort of fascinating to read about, coming off as sort of a cross […]