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: Pop Culture
In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:59 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Course Reports
I'm using Dava Sobel's Longitude this week in my timekeeping class. The villain of the piece, as it were, is the Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who promoted an astronomical method for finding longitude, and played a major role in delaying...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:32 AM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Course Reports
I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:19 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
As mentioned a few times previously, the class I'm teaching this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 1:12 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Advent
A week and a half ago, when the advent calendar reached Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, I said that it was the first equation we had seen that wasn't completely correct. Having done our quick swing through quantum physics, the...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:07 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
I'm still getting back up to speed with the blog, as well as the huge backlog of stuff I've read during the past few months when I was too busy to blog. Thus, I am semi-officially proclaiming this Book Review...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:02 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Jobs
Someone from the American Astronomical Society ran across the Project for Non-Academic Science posts here, and is looking for someone to participate in a career panel at their upcoming meeting in Austin, TX: The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Employment Committee...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 2:37 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
"I work around the clock-- 1043 Planck times per second-- providing the gravitational attraction to hold this galaxy cluster together. And some baryonic cosmologist wants to explain me away as a modification of Newtonian gravity? "I have been silent...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 1:54 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." Ethan will presumably have a post with about...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:26 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Orac 02.13.2012
ERV 11.26.2011
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
