Physics
Category archives for Physics
Quasi Poll: Most Needed Pop-Science Biography?
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 18, 2013 
I’ve got a ton of stuff that needs to get done this week, but I don’t want the blog to be completely devoid of new content, so here’s a quasi-poll question for my wise and worldly readers: What scientist is most in need of a good popular biography? By “popular biography,” I mean things like…
Of Controversies and Clocks
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 13, 2013 
A few months back, I got a call from a writer at a physics magazine, asking for comments on a controversy within AMO physics. I read a bunch of papers, and really didn’t quite understand the problem; not so much the issue at stake, but why it was so heated. When I spoke to the…
Few-Body Systems: Cooler Than You Might Think
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 12, 2013 
Hey, dude? Yeah, what’s up? I’m not normally the one who initiates this, but I was wondering: When you were at DAMOP last week, did you see any really neat physics? Oh, sure, tons of stuff. It was a little thinner than some past meetings– a lot of the Usual Suspects didn’t make the trip–…
The Quirks of Scientific Public Speaking
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 11, 2013 
As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said “I bet this guy hasn’t given a lot of these before.” What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never…
Experiment and Theory in the Popular Imagination
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 4, 2013 A little while back, I posted about the pro-theorist bias in popular physics, and Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a long and detailed response, which of course was posted on a day when I spent six hours driving to Quebec City for a conference. Sigh. Happily, ZapperZ and Tom at Swans On Tea offer more or less…
Angry Birds, Furious Forces! by Rhett Allain
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 3, 2013 
Rhett at Dot Physics departed ScienceBlogs before NAtional Geographic fully took over, but still managed to connect with their book division for a physics text. This is part of a series they’re doing tied in with the folks from Rovio, makers of the world’s most popular smart-phone time-waster, and, as the title suggests, it uses…
Real Scientists Have Families, Too: Photo Edition
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 28, 2013 
While we’re revisiting blog topics of the recent past, another item from this weekend’s visit to the Ithaca Sciencenter, in the form of the picture above. For those with images off, or who read via RSS and won’t see the picture, it’s a photo of one of the inspirational plaques they have lining the walls…
On Journalists and Scientists Talking
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 28, 2013 Last week’s post about communications between scientists and journalists sparked a bit of discussion, and prompted the folks at the IoP’s Physics Focus blog to ask me for a guest post advising journalists on how to talk to scientists. The post is now live, with the self-explanatory headline How Journalists Can Help the Scientists They…
Mysteries of the Simulated Pendulum
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 23, 2013 
Last week, I spent a bunch of time using VPython to simulate a simple pendulum, which was a fun way to fritter away several hours (yes, I’m a great big nerd), and led to some fun physics. I had a little more time to kill, so I did one of the things I mentioned as…
American Physicists and the Under-rating of Experiments
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 21, 2013 At Scientific American’s blog network, Ashutosh Jogalekar muses about the “greatest American physicist”, eventually voting for Josiah Willard Gibbs, one of the pioneers of statistical mechanics. As both times I took StatMech (as an undergrad and in grad school), it was at 8:30 in the morning, I retain almost no memory of the subject, and…
