Physics
Category archives for Physics
Modern Physics and Scientific Thinking
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 21, 2013 
Yesterday’s big post on why I think people should embrace scientific thinking in a more conscious way than they do already (because my claim is that most people already use scientific thinking, they’re just not aware that they’re doing it) is clearly a kind of explanation of the reason behind my next book, but what…
Why Should You Think Like a Scientist?
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 20, 2013 As you may or may not know, I’m currently at work on a book called How to Think Like a Scientist. This raises the fairly obvious question in the post title, namely, why should people think like scientists? What’s the point? In a sense, this is (as Ethan Zuckerman pointed out at lunch the other…
Against Kaku-ism
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 19, 2013 I had lunch with Ethan Zuckerman yesterday, and we were talking about technology and communicating science to a mass audience, and Michio Kaku came up. Specifically, the fact that he’s prone to saying stuff that’s just flat wrong, if not batshit crazy– see this angry post from 2010 for an example. It was amusing, then,…
Science Kids, Fictitious Forces, and Frictionless Surfaces
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 12, 2013 
SteelyKid has started to demand Sid the Science Kid videos, which of course we are implacably opposed to around here. One of the recent episodes available online was “Slide to the Side,” talking about friction. While this partakes a bit of the Feynman “Energy makes it go” problem, it was generally pretty good, and prompted…
The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 1, 2013 
This is the physics book that’s generating the most buzz just at the moment, by noted string theorist Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky, based on a general-audience course Susskind’s been running for years. It’s doing very well, with an Amazon rank in the 300′s, which is kind of remarkable for a book with this many…
Other Scientists and “The Public”
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 26, 2013 Over in Twitter-land, Ben Lillie of the Story Collider asked an interesting question, which sparked some discussion that he’s Storified on a Tumblr blog (just in case the date stamp wasn’t enough to mark this as 2013…). The original question was: Partly I’m wondering if there is a reason to have an event series for…
Help Wanted: Adjunct Physics Faculty
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 22, 2013 We’ve got calls out to the local grad programs, and I’ve mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, but it can’t hurt anything to post it here as well: we’ve got a huge overabundance of first-year engineering students that is forcing us to open extra sections of our intro physics classes to accommodate them.…
Direct and Indirect Heating: Why Don’t Power Plants Change Local Climate?
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 19, 2013 This past weekend, I was at Boskone, where I appeared on a few science-y panels. One of these was on the possibility of beaming power down from space: Energy From Space Beam me down some juice, Scotty? Let’s talk about the possibilities — and practicalities — of really long-distance power transmission. Tom Easton (M), Jordin…
Physics Is For Eternal Five-Year-Olds
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 15, 2013 Yesterday’s post about differences between intro physics and chemistry sparked an interesting discussion in comments that I didn’t have time to participate in. Sigh. Anyway, a question that came up in there was why we have physicists teach intro physics courses that are primarily designed to serve other departments. It’s a good question, and in…
Physics vs. Chemistry: Nobody Does Research on Newtonian Mechanics
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 14, 2013 Not long ago, I had a meeting with the Dean, who is a chemist. One of the things I talked about was my plan for distributing teaching assignments in the next few years, which ran into an interesting cultural difference. I explained how I was trying to make the distribution of assignments a little more…
