The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded– it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, […]
Category: Science
284-289/366: Week in Nature Photos
Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I’m going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now. 284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a second pair of merging black holes, but I found […]
Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mundane Space, Spectroscopy, Changing Constants, Rest Energy, Magnetic Sensing, Wiffle Balls, and Revolutions
Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience. — Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC. — How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As a snobby grad student in […]
Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay
I’ve had this piece by Rick Borchelt on “science literacy” and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on “echo chambers” open in tabs for… months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won’t be […]
Physics Blogging Round-Up: Books, Entanglement, Optics, Many-Worlds, Two Cultures, and Clocks
A whole bunch of physics posts over at Forbes so far this month: —Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons: Short reviews of Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. —The Real Reasons Quantum Entanglement Doesn’t Allow Faster-Than-Light Communication: Expanding on and correcting some stuff I didn’t like […]
Division of Labor Is a Good Thing for Science and Skepticism
Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after “soft targets”. This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying […]
Imaginary Syllabus: Science of Sports and Games
It’s one of those days where none of the stuff I probably ought to be writing seems even slightly appealing, so instead I’m going to do something frivolous and morale-boosting, namely think out loud about an imaginary course. Despite being on sabbatical, I do still check my work email, and have caught the edges of […]
Physics Blogging Round-Up: ARPES, Optics, Band Gaps, Radiation Pressure, Home Science, and Catastrophe
It’s been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there’s a good bunch of stuff on this list: — How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I’m trying to figure out […]
Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mostly March Meeting
I was at the APS March Meeting last week, because I needed tp give a talk reporting on the Schrödinger Sessions. But as long as I was going to be there anyway, I figured I should check out the huge range of talks on areas of physics that aren’t my normal thing– in fact, I […]
What Should I See At The March Meeting?
I’m going to be at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore next week. This is the largest physics meeting of the year, with an emphasis on condensed matter physics (which is actually the largest single area of study within physics, though media overemphasis on particle physics and astrophysics might lead you […]