Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Thoughts on physics, politics, and pop culture, by a physics professor at a small liberal arts college, plus occasional conversations with his dog.
You've read the blog, now try the books! How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner, and available wherever books are sold. How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books and will be available 2/28/2012, as foretold by the Maya.
"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
"Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)
Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.
Category: Physics
Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize: A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:32 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
It's been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I've got some time between flipping pancakes, so here's an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:18 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
Regular commenter onymous left a comment to my review of Warped Passages that struck me as a little odd: The extended analogy between the renormalization group and a bureaucracy convinced me that she was trying way too hard to make...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:26 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
I have nothing useful or interesting to say about electoral politics, but I suspect that's all people will want to read about today. So here's a book post that's been backlogged for quite a while. Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:51 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
On Twitter, I saw Graham Farmelo link to this Physics World blog post about Ed Witten's Newton lecture, describing it as "Edward Witten's clearest-ever overview of string theory for laypeople (i.e. most others)." Witten's a name to conjure with, so...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:28 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics: There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:50 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:49 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Publicity
At last weekend's Hidden Dimensions event, Brian Greene had a graphic of a Calabi-Yau object (it wasn't this one, but it's the same idea). He put this up several times, but never actually explained what the hell it was supposed...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:33 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:37 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: How-to-Teach
It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant doze when: "Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear!...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 12:21 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
