A while back, I talked about a colloquium where Steven Boughn of Haverford argued that it’s practically impossible to detect a single graviton. It was a very nice talk, relying mostly on simple dimensional analysis arguments, and very basic physics. Today, via Wolfgang Beirl (via Mixed States), I see that Boughn and Tony Rothman have […]
Libertopia Approaches?
The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that’s slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make […]
Weekend Links Dump
I may do some fiddling with the blog template over the weekend, but I’m unlikely to post anything substantive until Monday. Here are a handful of links that caught my eye in recent days to fill the gap: Via a mailing list: A weirdly cool hand-written web clock. Also via that mailing list, a group […]
Future Great Experiments
Looking at the ScienceBlogs front page, I suspect that I may be well out of my league, especially when it comes to posting frequency. There’s just no way I can post that many entries in one day, especially not a day like Thursday. In addition to my lab this morning (in which half the students […]
Thursday Night Dog-Blogging
In recognition of the fact that somebody else is now hosting my image files, here’s some pet-blogging, a day earlier than is traditional. Because dogs should always come before cats… What’s Emmy staring at so intently? Could it be the new ScienceBlogs home page? Well, no. She’s not that into science. It’s just the skunk […]
Greatest. Experiment. EVER.
Quite a while back, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance had a post seeking nominations for “The Greatest Physics Paper Ever.” Back after a long hiatus, he’s now holding a vote among five finalists: Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, Emmy Noether’s paper on symmetry and conservation laws, Dirac’s theory of the electron, and […]
Begin at the Beginning
Welcome to the new home of Uncertain Principles. If you’ve been reading the site over at Steelypips.org, that probably means something to you. If you’re here for the first time, that might take a little explanation. I started a book log in August of 2001, and quickly got drawn into reading a lot of general […]
Read More Novels Month
I’m sort of marking time for a couple of days here, for reasons that will hopefully be explained soon. There are some interesting posts in the works, but I want to wait for a few more days. Of course, I need something to fill the time, and indirectly via Drink at Work, I find that […]
Science is Utterly Wet
Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I’m teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I’ve taught before, but I’ve been putting a significant amount of time into revising my lecture notes, to keep the class from getting stale. This has led to […]
The New York Times Says God Is Dead
As you can tell from the date stamp, it’s now 2006, so the World Year of Physics is over. The people behind Quantum Diaries are shutting their blog collection down (though several of the diarists will be continuing on their own sites), and John “End of Science” Horgan pops up in the Times book section […]