I've been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references-- quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I'm sure I've missed a few-- many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes tend to slide right over as I read (in the previous book, one section was titled "Clever Section Title Here" until distressingly late in the process)-- but for your amusement, here's what I have at the moment, in approximately the order in which they appear in the book: Star Wars The Adventures of…

A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people's attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years: Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain why the number of A's given out has increased so much over this time span, with most of it focussing on the last twenty years or so (see Mad Mike for a plausible but wrong explanation-- the fraction of students going on to graduate school isn't big enough to drive this). I think this is…

Views: Perspective in Math and Art - Inside Higher Ed "As a mathematician, I expect that people at parties will tell me that they're no good at math. I'm used to my fellow professors confessing their ignorance of my subject. I understand that many of my students think math is hard and scary. That's why I was so eager to do drawing -- something I figured would be easy and approachable -- in my math classes. But to my great surprise, I found that it is the art, not the math, that makes people nervous. As my co-author Marc Frantz told me, most college graduates have a bit of math in college,…

(A white house, Niskayuna, NY) Negotiations stalled for the 125th consecutive minute, dashing early hopes that a compromise might be reached in the tense talks that have gripped this otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood. As the crisis enters its third hour, both sides reiterated their long-standing positions. "It's 8:45pm, MythBusters is over, it's time to go to bed," said a spokesperson for the administration of Chad Orzel and Kate Nepveu. "Let's go upstairs, read some books, and go to sleep." "I no WANNNNA!!!" replied SteelyKid, the final syllable rising to a pitch that only neighborhood…

This past weekend, Kate and I were at Readercon, a SF convention outside Boston. This particular con is, as the name suggests, very literary in nature, and features a lot of panels of a more academic inclination. Unfortunately, my feelings about the humanities side of academia are in the "Oh, please," phase of their oscillation, so I ended up skipping a lot of it in favor of working on edits for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. I did go to a couple of panels, though, one of them on "Book Inflation:" Tom Easton, Leigh Grossman (leader), Walter H. Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein, Howard Waldrop.…

As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer: This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing that while it is possible to learn all about politics and philosophy in thirty seconds, understanding Einstein takes three whole minutes. So, relativity is at least six times more difficult than philosophy. (This presumably explains why there are so many physicists who dabble in philosophy,…

Prompted by this and this, among other things, one of the critical questions of the modern age: Harry Potter is a: Magic is a classical phenomenon, no matter what you may have heard, so you can choose one and only one option.

Yesterday's foray into procrastination by mathematical modeling forced me to shift some actual work into the evening hours, which meant that I completely forgot about Toddler Blogging. Which is fine, because lately SteelyKid has been reacting to cameras in approximately the same way as the reclusive celebrity of your choice, so all my pictures of he tend to look like this: Just after this shot, she heard the shutter sound, turned around, and fled crying. So, you know, I feel like a wonderful person. anyway, sorry for the delay, but at least it gave me something to post this morning. We're…

Guest Blog: Why Is Quantum Gravity So Hard? And Why Did Stalin Execute the Man Who Pioneered the Subject? In fact, the field of quantum gravity was born in 1916, even before physicists had properly explained the other fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Twenty years later, a young Russian physicist by the name of Matvei Bronstein realized that gravity would be the hardest force of all to quantize. But before he could do something about that, he was swept up in Stalin's Great Terror and executed at the age of 30. (tags: science physics magazines gravity theory…

I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph: This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I'll reproduce below the fold, along with an explanation of the math that went into the model: The two graphs are qualitatively similar, other than, you know, the godawful Excel aesthetic of the simulation results graph. One line looks relatively straight, like motion at constant speed, while the others…

On Monday, I posted a short video and asked about the underlying physics. Here's the clip again, showing SteelyKid and then me going down a slide made up of a whole bunch of rollers at a local playground: The notable thing about this is that SteelyKid takes a much, much longer time to get down the slide than I do. This is very different than an ordinary smooth slide, where elementary physics says we should go down the slide at the same rate, and empirically I tend to be a little slower than she is. So what's the difference? First of all, let's be a little more quantitative about this. Here's…

Via Jessa Crispin on Twitter, there's a really excellent article in the Paris Review about Harvard and Class: When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don't think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student. The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan's Island, it wasn't the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr.…

Jamie Leigh Jones verdict: Jury trials aren't always satisfying, but they're better than angry mobs. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine As Alan Dershowitz explained last week: "A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty. That's because only one person is on trial in a criminal case, and if that one person is acquitted, then by definition there can be no justice for the victim in that trial." If all that sounds cold, lawyerly, and inhuman, that's because the justice system is designed to be all those things. Juries…

Last week Doug Natelson noted a drop-off in active physics blogs. This had not gone unnoticed hereabouts, though I couldn't immediately think of what to say about that. Yesterday, though, former ScienceBlogs wrangler Christopher Mims provided a possible answer: Google+ has destroyed blogging completely. I would've liked to find a way to tie all this together into a deep and meditative blog post about the nature of blogging and the reasons for the decline of physics blogging specifically (to the extent that this is a decline, which is somewhat debatable). I have a faculty meeting to go to this…

Like a lot of people in SF/ Fantasy circles, I stayed up late reading last night. Unlike most of those people, though, what I was reading was not A Dance with Dragons from George R. R. Martin, but Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, the sequel to Spin and Axis, concluding a series that he said in 2007 he was "trying very hard not to think of as the Spin Cycle." Like Axis was to Spin this is a somewhat indirect sequel, and it's in a very different style than the previous volumes. Where the earlier books closely followed a small number of protagonists through a single series of events, Vortex…

Counting Crows' Recovering The Satellites | Music | We're No. 1 | The A.V. Club "Recovering The Satellites is easily my favorite Counting Crows album, precisely because it's the record where Duritz went from wanting to be a big star (or so he sang in "Mr. Jones") to equating his celebrity with slow-motion drowning. This was not an uncommon sentiment for '90s rock bands, though by 1996 the music press was no longer sympathetic to guys like Duritz being so angsty all the time. While August was generally warmly received by critics, the backlash kicked in hard with Satellites, and this had a…

Among the articles highlighted in this week's Physics is one about a new test of QED through a measurement of the g-factor of the electron in silicon ions. This comes on the heels of a measurement of proton spin flips (this includes a free PDF) a couple of weeks ago, and those, in turn, build on measurements of electrons from a few years back, which Jerry Gabrielse talked about at DAMOP. Evidently, it's magnetic moment season in the world of physics. The media reports on the proton experiment tend to be a little garbled in a way that reveals the writers don't quite understand what's going on…

A month and a half ago, I reported on a simple experiment to measure the performance of a timer from the teaching labs. I started the timer running at a particualr time, and over the next couple of weeks checked in regularly with the Official US Time display at the NIST website, recording the delay between the timer reading and the NIST clock. As a follow-up experiment, I did the same thing with a different timer, this one a Good Cook brand digital timer picked up for $10 in the local supermarket, and the same Fisher Scientific stopwatch/timer as the first experiment, with the Fisher…

RESEARCH | MATTHEW B. THOMPSON Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive. We called it the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect" and wanted to share it with the world, so we put…

(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.) It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations where the subject of writing a popular audience book on quantum physics comes up. I've had enough of these now that I can recognize a few different categories of responses, one of which drives me up the wall. I suspect that the same is true for most pop-science authors, so as a public service, let me…