Theory
Category archives for Theory
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…
Return of The Physics Bus
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 6, 2013 
My parents have a DVD of the Bacon Brothers singing “The Wheels on the Bus” over an animated scene, which The Pip loves and insists on watching over, and over, and over, and over… As the parent sitting through this on Sunday morning, I got a little punchy over on Twitter, and invented some quantum-physics-themed…
Time Is What You Measure With a Clock
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 29, 2013 
Last year, Alan Alda posed a challenge to science communicators, to explain a flame in terms that an 11-year old could understand. this drew a lot of responses, and some very good winners. This year’s contest, though still called the “Flame Challenge,” asked for an answer to the question “What Is Time?” This is a…
The Trouble With Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 10, 2013 
For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder” last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950: In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality…
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…
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,…
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…
The Higgs Boson in Context
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 6, 2013 
I ran across this recently while looking for something else, and was reminded of it by this discussion of jargon. It’s an attempt to explain the general historical context of the whole Higgs Boson thing, and why it’s important. I improvised this in response to somebody’s question about how I would explain that, drawing mostly…
Experiments Are Not Afterthoughts
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 17, 2013 There’s been a bunch of talk recently about a poll on quantum interpretations that showed physicists badly divided between the various interpretations– Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.– a result which isn’t actually very surprising. Sean Carroll declares that the summary plot is “The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics, which I think is a bit of an…
