Physics Blogging Round-Up: February

Another month, another collection of physics posts from Forbes:

-- Quantum Loopholes And The Problem Of Free Will: In one of those odd bits of synchronicity, a previous post about whether dark matter and energy might affect atoms in a way that allowed for "free will" was followed shortly by a news release about an experiment looking at quantum entanglement with astronomical sources acting as "random number generators." This pushes the point when local interactions might've generated any correlation between measurements back in time a thousand-plus years, which in turn ties into the question of "free will."

-- Scientific Knowledge Is Made To Be Used: Some thoughts on a division in attitudes between science and other academic disciplines, where the way we do science naturally leads to more discussion of applications.

-- Why Writing About Math Is The Best Part Of Common Core: In which I say nice things about the way my kids are being taught about math.

-- Why Do We Spend So Much Time Teaching Historical Physics?: I'm teaching the badly misnamed "modern physics" course this term, and finding it frustrating because the book I'm using isn't historical enough.

-- How Do You Create Quantum Entanglement?: Prompted by a conversation with a colleague from history, a sketch of the main ways experimental physicists establish correlations between the quantum states of particles.

A good month traffic-wise, though I was surprised by the detailed dynamics of some of these-- in particular, I expected an immediate negative response to the Common Core thing, but in fact that took a while to take off, and most of the response was positive. The only one that didn't do well by my half-joking metric of "Get more views than there are students at Union" was the science-knowledge one, and that was probably justified as it was just kind of noodling around.

So, there was February. March brings with it the end of my current crushingly heavy teaching load, which should give a little more opportunity for substantive blogging. Maybe.