Physics Blogging Round-Up: Gravity, Pigeonholes, Groundhogs, and Weirdness

A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time: — ‘The Expanse’ Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated […]

Back-of-the-Envelope Gravitational Which-Way

There’s a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent– with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the background […]

Problems with the Pipeline

Via Curt Rice (or, more precisely, somebody on Twitter who posted a link to that, but I didn’t note who) there’s a new study in Frontiers in Psychology of the STEM “pipeline”, looking at the history of gender disparities in STEM degrees. You can spin this one of two ways, the optimistic one being “Women […]

The Bright Side of the BICEP2 Story

I’ve done yet another piece for The Conversation, this one expanding on something I’ve been saying in interviews promoting Eureka: that knowing the process of science can help people sort good science from bad. In this particular case, I take the somewhat #slatepitch-y angle that the recent high-profile unraveling of the BICEP2 experiment’s claim to […]

Pros and Cons of Super Bowl Science

The ending of last night’s Super Bowl couldn’t’ve been more perfect as a demonstration of the point I was making about scientific thinking in football (and, you know, in that book I keep flogging…). First, on the positive side, you have New England’s Malcolm Butler making the key play: “I knew what was going to […]

Super Bowl Athletes Are Scientists At Work

I wrote up another piece about football for the Conversation, this time drawing on material from Eureka, explaining how great football players are using scientific thinking: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL (and Seattle fans tend to agree). Sportswriters and some […]

Deflategate on Discovery Canada

I know I said I was done with this story, but this was actually recorded last week: The Daily Planet show on Discovery Channel in Canada contacted me last week when all this deflated-football silliness was exploding, and got a cameraman to come over and record me talking about it. The episode aired Monday night, […]

Deflategate: The Final Chapter

The low-level cold I’ve been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would’ve been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top […]

Tom Brady and the Ideal Gas Law: Physics of Deflategate

So, as mentioned yesterday, I got an email asking me about the weird scandal involving the Patriots and underinflated footballs, so I wrote a piece for the Conversation on the subject. since a few people had beaten me to citations of the Ideal Gas Law, though, I decided to bring my own particular set of […]