Science
Category archives for Science
Playground Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 24, 2013 
The playground outside SteedlyKid’s day care, amazingly in this litigious age, has a merry-go-round, a rotating disc with a really good bearing. The kids can really get the thing flying, which is kind of terrifying at times. But on the bright side, it’s an excellent venue for the physics of angular momentum: In the embedded…
Explaining, Education, and Outreach
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 18, 2013 A couple of days ago, Alom Shaha posted on the new Physics Focus blog (by the way, there’s a new Physics Focus blog…) about his dissatisfaction with some popular books: I recently read a popular science book on a topic that I felt I needed to learn more about. The book was well written, ideas…
On Talent in Sports and Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 16, 2013 Nobody’s ever going to mistake me for an elite basketball player. I’m taller than average (about 6’6″, a hair under 2m in SI units), but I’m not especially quick, or agile, or all that good a jumper. And I’m carrying at least 40lbs of extra weight above what a really good player my size would…
Real Scientists Have Families, Too
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 15, 2013 I was re-reading bits of James Gleick’s Feynman biography, and ran across a bit near the end (page 397 of my hardcover from 1992) talking about his relationship with his children, talking about how ordinary he seemed at home.I particularly liked the sentence “Belatedly it dawned on them that not all their friends could look…
E. O. Wilson and Learning the Wrong Lesson
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2013 One of the reasons I held off on commenting on the whole E. O. Wilson math op-ed thing, other than not having time to blog, was that his comments were based on his own experiences. And, you know, who am I to gainsay the personal experiences of a justly famous scientist? At the same time,…
Math and Science Are Not Cleanly Separable
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2013 One of the hot topics of the moment is the E. O. Wilson op-ed lamenting the way math scares students off from science, and downplaying the need for mathematical skill (this is not news, really– he said more or less the same thing a few years ago, but the Wall Street Journal published it to…
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…
My Beloved Brontosaurus by Brian Switek
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 9, 2013 
Back in January, thinking about science topics to add to the book-in-progress, it occurred to me that I would really be letting down SteelyKid (and pre-schoolers everywhere) if I didn’t take the opportunity to include something about dinosaurs. The problem with that, of course, is that I know next to nothing about dinosaurs, especially discoveries…
Mastermind by Maria Konnikova
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 6, 2013 I saw Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind on the book lottery stacks at Science Online, and the subtitle “How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes” practically screamed “This is relevant to your interests!” Not only am I writing a book about how to think like a scientist, one of the chapters I have in mind uses mystery novels…
Blogging Doesn’t Have to Be a Career
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 4, 2013 Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It’s basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago,…
