January 29, 2006
The lunar new year on Janurary 29, 2006 marks the beginning of the Year of the Dog in the Chinese system. We are pleased to present New Year's Greetings from Her Majesty, Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna:
Bow before Emmy! Bow before Emmy NOOOOWWWWWW!!!!
Or, failing that, at least rub her belly:
January 28, 2006
Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it's really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or "Street Ball" on ESPN2 in the wee…
January 27, 2006
This is true.
A guy I knew in graduate school, he had a buddy who was working late in the lab one night. He was all alone, and he got a little bored, so he took a two-liter soda bottle, and he filled it halfway up with liquid nitrogen. Then he screwed the cap on tight.
Now, liquid nitrogen, when it…
January 27, 2006
Next up in the Top Eleven is an experiment whose basic technique is still in use today.
Who: Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), a British scientist who made a number of discoveries in physics and chemistry, but received credit for very few of them.
When: 1797.
What: Cavendish's modern claim to fame is…
January 25, 2006
Some interesting astrophysics news this week, from Nature: scientists have used "microlensing" to discover a extrasolar planet only five times Earth's mass:
Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb looks much more like home. It lies about 390 million kilometres from its star: if it were inside our Solar System…
January 25, 2006
Third in the Top Eleven is Sir Isaac Newton, who squeaks in with two nominations for two different experiments.
Who: Isaac Newton (1642-1727), famous English physicist, mathematician, alchemist, Master of the Mint, and Neal Stephenson character.
When: Newton was secretive and reluctant to publish…
January 25, 2006
The second in the Top Eleven is the first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, by Ole Christensen Roemer (whose last name ought to contain an o-with-a-slash-through-it, that I've rendered as an "oe").
Who: Ole Roemer (1644-1710), a Danish astronomer.
When: The crucial observations were…
January 24, 2006
The first and oldest of the experiments in the Top Eleven is actually a two-fer: Galileo Galilei is nominated both for the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and for his experiments on the motion of falling objects.
Who: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the great Italian physicist, astronomer, and…
January 24, 2006
Evil elves have apparently snuck into the house in the middle of the night, and stuffed my sinuses with cotton and motor oil (the dog is sitting here muttering "I told you there were evil elves out there but did you listen? 'Stop barking at nothing,' you said..." Or maybe that's the drugs.). This…
January 23, 2006
Thursday night, I needed to work late, so rather than upset the dog by going home for dinner, and then leaving, I went for sushi at a local restaurant. I had a very pleasant meal, which I spent reading through the first few chapters of the textbook I plan to use for my Quantum Optics class next…
January 22, 2006
It's depressingly typical of my life that we would get BoingBoing-ed on a weekend when I'm visiting the in-laws...
I've gotten a bunch of responses to my earlier request for "Great Experiments" in other areas of science, and I thought I'd collect the links in one post (many of them show up as…
January 21, 2006
We've had an outbreak of mathematician jokes in comments, so it seems only fair to offer up a thread for the mockery of physics. Sadly, there really aren't many good physicist jokes. My personal favorite:
A physicist, a chemist, and a biologist get together for a few drinks, and get to talking…
January 21, 2006
I probably ought to say something about the New York Times piece on ScienceBlogs yesterday, except, well, there's not much to say. It's about two paragraphs in a media column, focussed entirely on the fact that they're going to try to sell ads on these sites (presumably, the big Seed ad on the…
January 20, 2006
Over at Gene Expression, Razib spins an interesting question off my call for blog posts: why are there so many biology bloggers?
As I said in comments over there, I think there are two main reasons why you find more bio-bloggers than physics bloggers. The first is that there are simply more…
January 19, 2006
In the ongoing string theory comment thread (which, by the way, I'm really happy to see), "Who" steps off first to ask an interesting question:
One way to give operational meaning to a theory being predictive in the sense of being empirically testable is to ask
What future experimental result…
January 18, 2006
I'm giving an exam this morning, and I've got some oral lab report presentations to listen to this afternoon, plus I need to put together some Mathematica activities for Friday. This doesn't leave great deal of time for detailed science blogging, so here are some pop song lyrics, courtesy of the…
January 17, 2006
Newton's Principia has won the prestigious Cosmic Variance Greatest Paper contest, with Dirac's theory of the electron coming in second. I'm still accepting nominations for the greatest physics experiment ever (probably until the weekend, when I'll have time to do something with the list...).…
January 17, 2006
There was a postdoc in my research group in grad school who had a sister in college. She called him once to ask for help with a math assignment dealing with series expansions. He checked a book to refresh his memory, and then told her how to generate the various series needed for her homework…
January 16, 2006
Today is the last day to vote in Cosmic Variance's Greatest Physics Paper contest. If you haven't voted yet, go over there and pick a paper.
Locally, I'm still collecting nominees for the Greatest Physics Experiment. A quick scan through the comments gives the current list as:
The Michelson-Morley…
January 16, 2006
There's a slightly snarky Review of Leonard Susskind's book on string theory (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design) in the New York Times this week. Predictably, Peter Woit is all over it.
The central issue of the book, and the review, and Woit's whole blog is…
January 15, 2006
I'll have something more serious to say on this subject tomorrow (I want to sleep on it, and take another look at the post in the morning), but I have one quick comment on the New York Times review of Leonard Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape:
Susskind's insider perspective also lends an air of…
January 15, 2006
A while back, I talked about a colloquium where Steven Boughn of Haverford argued that it's practically impossible to detect a single graviton. It was a very nice talk, relying mostly on simple dimensional analysis arguments, and very basic physics.
Today, via Wolfgang Beirl (via Mixed States), I…
January 14, 2006
The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that's slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy…
January 13, 2006
I may do some fiddling with the blog template over the weekend, but I'm unlikely to post anything substantive until Monday. Here are a handful of links that caught my eye in recent days to fill the gap:
Via a mailing list: A weirdly cool hand-written web clock.
Also via that mailing list, a group…
January 13, 2006
Looking at the ScienceBlogs front page, I suspect that I may be well out of my league, especially when it comes to posting frequency. There's just no way I can post that many entries in one day, especially not a day like Thursday.
In addition to my lab this morning (in which half the students were…
January 12, 2006
In recognition of the fact that somebody else is now hosting my image files, here's some pet-blogging, a day earlier than is traditional. Because dogs should always come before cats...
What's Emmy staring at so intently? Could it be the new ScienceBlogs home page?
Well, no. She's not that into…
January 11, 2006
Quite a while back, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance had a post seeking nominations for "The Greatest Physics Paper Ever." Back after a long hiatus, he's now holding a vote among five finalists: Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein's General Relativity, Emmy Noether's paper on…
January 11, 2006
Welcome to the new home of Uncertain Principles. If you've been reading the site over at Steelypips.org, that probably means something to you. If you're here for the first time, that might take a little explanation.
I started a book log in August of 2001, and quickly got drawn into reading a lot of…
January 10, 2006
I'm sort of marking time for a couple of days here, for reasons that will hopefully be explained soon. There are some interesting posts in the works, but I want to wait for a few more days. Of course, I need something to fill the time, and indirectly via Drink at Work, I find that Foma* has the…
January 4, 2006
Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I'm teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I've taught before, but I've been putting a significant amount of time into revising my lecture notes, to keep the…
