February 16, 2006
The final and most recent of the Top Eleven is an experiment that goes right to the heart of the weirdness inherent in quantum mechanics.
Who: Alain Aspect (1947-present), a French physicist. (Again, Wikipedia is a let-down, but CNRS has useful information.)
When: Around 1982 (there are several…
February 15, 2006
A continuation of the lecture transcription/ working out of idea for Boskone that I started in the previous post. There's a greater chance that I say something stupid about quantum measurement in this part, but you'll have to look below the fold to find out...
At the end of the previous post, I…
February 14, 2006
I'm teaching our sophomore-level modern physics course this term, which goes by the title "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." The first mid-term was a couple of weeks ago, on Relativity (special, not general), and the second mid-term is tomorrow, on Quantum Mechanics, and then…
February 14, 2006
In case you've ever found yourself longing for a math/physics version of J.B.S. Haldane, Scott Aaronson ponders the nature of God.
February 13, 2006
The penultimate experiment in the Top Eleven brings us up to the first nominee who's still with us..
Who: Rudolf Moessbauer (1929-present) (that's Mössbauer with a heavy-metal ö), a German physicist. (The Wikipedia link is for consistency with the other posts, but contains very little information.…
February 13, 2006
Like PZ, I wasn't going to mention the whole "Cheney shoots another hunter" thing, because that is, after all, part of the sport of hunting. And while I don't personally hunt (I prefer fishing), I went to a high school where classes were unofficially cancelled on the first day of deer season, so I…
February 12, 2006
The New York Times this morning has a long article on the stolen paintings of Edvard Munch, most notably the iconic painting "The Scream." Copies of "The Scream" (there are apparently four versions, which I didn't know) have been stolen on two different occasions: in 1994, two thieves propped a…
February 12, 2006
My Terrapins lost to the hated Dukies yesterday, 96-88. I'd be more down, but they actually played pretty well-- they just aren't that good a team this year, and Duke is better than they are. They gave a great effort, though, and might've had a chance if they'd had more than half of the right game…
February 11, 2006
Miscellaneous quick things that I've noticed this week that don't quite rate a full post of their own:
First, a couple of links from : LiveScience offer a list of "Science Myths", with correct explanations. It gets scare quotes because "science" is pretty broadly defined, but there's some…
February 10, 2006
The preliminary Boskone program has been posted, and I'll soon be adding another tag with a "Participant" ribbon to my Wall of Name. (I have a big collection of nametags from various meetings hanging on a wall in my office.)
Excerpts of the schedule will appear below the fold, with scattered…
February 10, 2006
The next experiment in the Top Eleven is a set of observations, not an experiment.
Who: Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), an American astronomer, and the guy the Hubble Space Telescope is named after.
When: He was nominated for two related but different discoveries which were announced in 1924 and 1929.…
February 9, 2006
In a comment to the AP post, "hogeb" asks an excellent question about pedagogy:
I'd like to enlist your advise and the advise of any readers who can provide it. I teach physical science to pre-service elementary school teachers. I try to elucidate the somewhat subtle differences between the…
February 8, 2006
Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics:It is the very apotheosis of "a mile wide and an inch deep." They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen…
February 8, 2006
I'm a bad basketball fan.
Duke played North Carolina last night, and I didn't watch. The Blue Devils are the #2 ranked team in the nation, the Tar Heels are the defending national champions, it was a back-and-forth game that went down to the wire, and I didn't watch any of it, other than a short…
February 8, 2006
The eighth of the Top Eleven is an experiment by the man who set the gold standard for arrogance in physics.
Who: Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a New Zealand-born physicist who famously declared "In science, there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting." He was awarded the Nobel Prize…
February 7, 2006
There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn't mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things.
In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through…
February 7, 2006
The seventh entry in the Top Eleven is an experiment that leads directly to all forms of wireless communications.
Who: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894), a German physicist.
When: 1886
What: Hertz studied electromagnetism, and in particular, the prediction from Maxwell's Equations that it ought to…
February 6, 2006
The Steelers won the super Bowl last night, in a game that didn't hold any rooting interest for me. As a result, I spent most of it doing other things-- making gourmet fried stuff (about which more later), marking a big stack of homework assignments, and writing today's lecture (solutions of the…
February 6, 2006
I feel like I ought to say something about the whole Danish cartoon mess, but really-- and this isn't something you'll hear me say often about issues touching on religion-- PZ has it about right. The paper in question has every right to print them, but when you get down to it, the cartoons…
February 5, 2006
I've occasionally joked in the past that it's unfair that the biologists get all the attention from the religious wing nuts. I mean, modern cosmology ought to be just as big an affront to the young-earth creationist types as evolution, so what are we, chopped liver?
Of course, now that a story has…
February 4, 2006
The 2006 Locus Reader's Poll is now up, with a convenient on-line ballot for you to vote for your favorite books and stories of the year. For those not in the know, Locus is sort of the trade magazine of the science fiction field, publishing extensive reviews, and also all manner of publishing news…
February 3, 2006
I realized the other day that since moving to ScienceBlogs, I'm turning into John Scalzi (Does my new body have a brand name?), what with all the posting of cute images (and spending an inordinate amount of time taking pictures with an eye toward posting them), and assigning other bloggers homework…
February 3, 2006
(Because, as anybody knows, that's the answer to "Pop Quiz, Hotshot"...)
The answer to the pop quiz posted below is "v." That is, the speed is unchanged between the start of the problem and the collision between the ball and the pole. There are several ways to see this-- conservation of energy is…
February 2, 2006
Kate and I will once again be attending Boskone in a couple of weeks, and for the second year running, I'll be on a handful of panels. I had a great time as a panelist last year, so I volunteered again, and I've been looking forward to finding out what I'll be on.
I got the preliminary schedule…
February 2, 2006
I play pick-up basketball at lunchtime a couple of days a week (in a good week, anyway). It's become a running joke that after a particularly long or hard-fought game, I'll announce my intention to give a pop quiz that afternoon in class. "Just work quietly at your desks, folks. I'm going to sit…
February 1, 2006
The next experiment in the Top Eleven is probably the most famous failed experiment of all time.
Who: Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward Morley (1838-1923), American physicists.
When: Their first results were reported in 1887.
What: The famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which tried and…
February 1, 2006
Though the tagline promises politics in addition to physics and pop culture, I try to keep the political content to a minimum. Not because I'm particularly worried about offending anyone, but because I don't particularly like the way I sound when I write about politics these days. I get very cranky…
January 31, 2006
Via Kieran Healy an example of the happy coexistence of science and religion: The Vatican Observatory. I particularly like Kieran's comment regarding the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope: I think that's just fantastic--like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the…
January 30, 2006
I should probably stick to doing only one audience-participation thing at a time (there are more Top Eleven posts on the way), but it's a busy week for me at work, and I'm not really going to have time to post a lot of long articles, so there will be a few "talk among yourselves" entries over the…
January 30, 2006
Next up in the Top Eleven is a man who is largely responsible for the fact that we have electricity to run the computer you're using to read this.
Who: Michael Faraday (1791-1867) a poor and self-educated British scientist who rose to become one of the greatest physicists of the 19th Century.
When…
