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 stories about how it might make a black hole that will eat the whole New York metro area. This isn't my field (not by a long shot), but I think this is terrifically exciting work, not least because the observations that they've made confound existing theories-- the "plasma" acts more like a liquid…
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 of archeologists working in Egypt have a photo-blog of their dig. The guys at BioCurious do us all a favor by reading the responses at the Edge Question Center, and indexing the interesting answers. In academia, Timothy Burke is teaching a class I'd like to take. Elsehwere in academia, Dave Bacon is…
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 using a Michelson interferometer to measure laser wavelengths and the index of refraction of air, while the other half measured the speed of light-- it was like a "Greatest Experiment Nominee" re-enactment event. Only with lasers...), we had a visit from Dave DeMille of Yale, who I had invited a…
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 science. It's just the skunk toy we were playing tug with: The greenish stuff hanging from her tongue in the top picture is stuffing from inside the skunk. She loves her toys, but she's very hard on them. (I don't really expect to make this a regular feature, but it's a nice excuse to practice posting…
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 symmetry and conservation laws, Dirac's theory of the electron, and the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper on quantum non-locality. (Newton's Principia Mathematica had a comfortable lead when I last checked, so if you're a partisan of one of the other candidates, go over there and vote...) Of course…
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 general web logs. In late June 2002, I decided to start a general-interest weblog, which I've been updating regularly for the last three and a half years. Recently, the nice folks at Seed were kind enough to invite me to join their ScienceBlogs project, leading to the site you're now reading. The…
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 answer: National Just Read More Novels Month. I hereby, unilaterally and with no other authority that which I have granted myself, declare January to be National Just Read More Novels Month or NaJuReMoNoMo, pronounced Nah-JOO-REE-Moe-NO-Moe if you really think you are going to have a chance to say it…
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 class from getting stale. This has led to a reduction in blogging because I've been preoccupied with educational matters. Happily, PZ Myers comes along with a post about education. It's one of those chain-letter sort of posts, starting with an op-ed by Olivia Judson with some unkind words about high…
As you can tell from the date stamp, it's now 2006, so the World Year of Physics is over. The people behind Quantum Diaries are shutting their blog collection down (though several of the diarists will be continuing on their own sites), and John "End of Science" Horgan pops up in the Times book section to say that there will never be another Einstein:Einstein is far and away the most famous and beloved scientist of all time. We revere him not only as a scientific genius but also as a moral and even spiritual sage whose enduring aphorisms touch on matters from the sublime ("Science without…
Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous is blogging the MLA. (I'm sure he's not the only one, he's just the only one I'm reading...) As I understand it, the Modern Language Association meeting is pretty much the be-all end-all of humanities meetings. It's sort of fascinating to read about, coming off as sort of a cross between DAMOP and Worldcon (look, a Dealer's Room! People getting a little punchy!). Of course, most of the things that make it fascinating to me are the areas where it diverges from my experience of professional meetings-- the cattle-call interviewing and the people reading pre-…
It's that time of year again, when everybody who has the slightest interest in pop culture starts making "Year's Best" lists. I'm usually at a major disadvantage when it comes to this sort of thing, as I can never really remember when any particular album was released, and I buy a lot of stuff that isn't new, so I end up associating all sorts of songs with a given year that aren't really eligible to be the best of that particular year. Technology has come to my rescue, though, in the form of iTunes, which lets me sort songs by rating and year of release. It's not foolproof (somehow, it claims…
One of the more contentious recurring topics around here over the years has been education policy, mostly centering around the question of teacher evaluation and teacher's unions. It's probably the subject for which there's the biggest gap between my opinions and those of some of my regular readers. As this is a good time of year for peace and reconcilliation, let me point to this guest post at Calpundit Monthly, in which Paul Glastris talks about the problems of "gifted" kids under the "No Child Left Behind" system, and pushes a Washington Monthly article on Value-Added Testing. The idea…
I've managed to leave string theory alone for a while, but a post came across Mixed States today that I can't avoid commenting on. Lubos Motl points to a news article about a recent measurement at MIT and NIST, in which Dave Pritchard's group used their cyclotron mass spectrometry technique to mesure the change in mass of a nucleus after emitting a photon. They pitch this as a test of E=mc2, and Pritchard is quoted thusly:"In spite of widespread acceptance of this equation as gospel, we should remember that it is a theory," said David Pritchard, a professor of physics at MIT, who along with…
It's that time of year again, when eager undergraduates start thinking about their futures, including the possibility of graduate school. This inevitably leads to emails of the form "Hi, Professor, could you write recommendations for me for these nine schools? And by the way, they're due Friday. Thanks!" Happily, Sean Carroll comes to the rescue of those of us in need of a way to put off writing recommendation letters, by offering unsolicited advice on getting into graduate school in physics. The advice he gives is mostly good, and comes from the perspective of someone who has read…
I'm probably just about the last science blogger on Earth to note this, but the Dover Panda Trial decision was handed down today, and it's a doozy. I particularly like the summation:Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an…