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"The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, âuniversalâ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faradayâs time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ãrsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a tantalizing dream. Faraday went further than any of his contemporaries in realizing that dream, and experimentally cemented the link between electricity and magnetism and light. Faraday was by no means done, however, and in 1851 he published the results of his attempts to demonstrate that electricity and gravity are related!"
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"As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media canât provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided.
As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising that complaining about how people on the Internet are really mean or stupid. It narrows the discussion down to a central function of journalism, the independent investigation of government, industry and society and the delivery of information from such investigation. "
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"Temperature is a pretty weird thing if you think about it. How do you best define temperature? Let me go ahead and give you my favorite definition:
Temperature is the thing that two objects have in common when they have been in contact for a long time.
Yes, that is a good definition. Maybe now you can see why temperature is weird. "
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"Suppose that Earth has been visited by aliens 50 times since our solar system's accretion disk started to cool 4,567 million years ago. What would the aliens have seen? In order to simulate this, I generated 50 random alien arrival times in between then and now, sorted them, and put them in geologic context. They are listed below, in stratigraphic order."
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Why would extra Of the Earth be more ahead of time than us?
I've sent the Faraday link to some friends of mine who argue Unified Field Theory all day and night.
You and I already agree on Science Journallism mostly dropping ball (or not even putting on cleats and going onto the gridiron).
"Temperature, weirder than you think"
My students are usually happy with elementary exposition of 3 Laws of Thermodynamics, until I mention that negative infinite temperature is hotter than positive infinite temperature.
I've never dared to teach nonequilibrium thermodynamics -- even though it is at the core of the Mathematical Biology and some of the Cosmology that I research.
Great handful o' links here, Chad!