Category: Physics
Are Los Alamos scientists really claiming to have made light move faster than light? No. They're just the victims of bad writing and worse copying.
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:56 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science Books
Does Neil deGrasse Tyson have a secret connection to Emmy?
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:30 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday: Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn's moon...
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:18 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Nature's embargo policy has some people upset, but what's more interesting is not what ticked them off, but what they don't question.
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:37 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
We had a colloquium yesterday from Ted von Hippel of Siena College, over on Route 9, about "White Dwarf Debris Disks and the Fate of Planetary Systems." The abstract was: After a brief introduction to white dwarfs and debris disks,...
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:14 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science Books
A popular book on astrophysics that is more interesting as a snapshot of what science writing used to be like than as a guide to the subject.
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:48 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn't really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater...
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:20 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
Via the arxiv Blog, a review article has been posted by the Haensch group with the title"Testing the Stability of the Fine Structure Constant in the Laboratory." The fine structure constant, usually referred to by the symbol α is a...
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:43 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History of Science
My bedtime reading last night was an old pop-science book by Isaac Asimov, about black holes and astronomy generally. He talks at some length about the size and age of the universe, and just before I stopped and went to...
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:32 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
How my intro mechanics class shows the way to explain dark matter to young children.
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Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:19 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks