Forbes Recap
drorzel | September 1, 2017Another month, another set of blog posts. This one includes the highest traffic I think I've ever seen for a post, including the one that started me on the path to a book deal:
-- The ALPHA Experiment Records Another First In Measuring Antihydrogen: The good folks trapping antimatter at CERN have now measured the hyperfine spectrum of hydrogen, which is a good excuse to explain what that is and why it matters.
-- 7 Suggestions For Succeeding In Science In College: It's the time of year when lots of people give unsolicited advice to the college-bound, and who am I to buck that trend?
-- How To…
drorzel | August 8, 2017Another month, another collection of blog posts for Forbes:
-- The Physics Of Century-Old Mirror Selfies: Back in the early 1900's there was a brief vogue for trick pictures showing the same person from five different angles; this post explains how to do that with mirrors.
-- Why Research By Undergraduates Is Important For Science And Students: A reply to an essay talking up the products of undergraduate research projects, arguing that the most valuable part of research is the effect on students.
-- What Does It Mean To Share 'Raw Data'?: Some thoughts on the uselessness of much "raw data" in…
drorzel | July 2, 2017To make up for last month's long delay in posting, I'll knock out this month's recap of Forbes blog posts really quickly. Also, I still have Vacation Brain, so writing anything really new isn't in the cards...
-- What Should Non-Scientists Learn From Physics?: You probably won't be surprised to hear that, in my opinion, it's not a specific set of facts, but an attitude toward the world.
-- Softball Physics: How Far Can You Run While The Ball Is In The Air?: In which SteelyKid learning softball's "tag up" rule the hard way leads to an interesting problem in physics.
-- How Long Would A Fidget…
drorzel | June 20, 2017Much delayed, but this works out well because it'll give you something to read while we're away in Mexico on a family vacation. Here's what I wrote for Forbes in the merry month of May:
-- In Science, Probability Is More Certain Than You Think: Some thoughts on the common mistake people make in saying that science only predicts probabilities of future outcomes.
-- A "Cosmic Controversy" Is Mostly A Distraction: A lament about the neglect of science we know to be true versus more speculative stuff.
-- Why Do We Invent Historical Roots For Modern Science?: Claims of ancient origins for current…
drorzel | May 2, 2017It's the first week of May, which means we're due to see flowers watered by all this damn rain soon, and also a recap of the various posts I wrote for Forbes during April:
-- Why Are There Too Many Papers In Theoretical Physics?: A look at the origins of "ambulance chasing" in high-energy theory, where dozens of people jump on the slightest hint of a new effect.
-- A Little Luck Is Essential For Success In Science: Some historical examples of physicists who succeeded thanks to a lucky break of one sort or another.
-- What Sorts Of Problems Are Quantum Computers Good For? Prompted by news of a…
drorzel | April 3, 2017Another month, another batch of blog posts at Forbes:
-- In Physics, Infinity Is Easy But Ten Is Hard: Some thoughts on the odd fact that powerful math tricks make it easy to deal uncountably many interacting particles, while a smaller number would be a Really Hard Problem.
-- New Experiment Explores The Origin Of Probabilities In Quantum Physics: A write-up of an experiment using a multi-path interferometer to look for departures from the Born rule for calculating probabilities from wavefunctions.
-- The Most Important Science To Fund Is The Hardest To Explain: In light of the awful budget…
drorzel | March 6, 2017Another 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…
drorzel | February 2, 2017It's a new month now, so it's time to share links to what I wrote for Forbes last month:
-- Small College Astronomers Predict Big Stellar Explosion: I mostly leave astronomy stories to others, but I heard about this from a friend at Calvin College, and it's a story that hits a lot of my pet issues, so I wrote it up.
-- For Scientists, Recognition Is A Weird And Contingent Thing: Vera Rubin tops the list of great women in science who died in 2016, but AMO physics lost two great women but less famous women as well. I spent a while thinking about why they had such different levels of status…
drorzel | January 13, 2017This one's late because I acquired a second class for the Winter term on very short notice. I was scheduled to teach our sophomore-level "Modern Physics" class, plus the lab, but a colleague who was scheduled to teach relativity for non-majors had a medical issue, and I'm the only other one on staff who's ever taught it, so now I'm doing two courses instead of one. Whee!
Anyway, here are my December posts from Forbes:
-- Science Is Not THAT Special: Another in a long series of posts grumbling about the way we set science off from other pursuits and act as if the problems facing it are unique…
drorzel | December 1, 2016I'm not posting as much as I did last year, when I was on sabbatical (gasp, shock, surprise), so making Forbes-blog links dump posts a monthly thing is probably just about sustainable.
-- What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends: Some thoughts about, well, the math you need to learn to be a physicist. Which may not be all that much, depending on your choice of subfield. Prompted a nice response from Peter Woit, too.
-- Physics And The Science Of Finding Missing Pieces: One of several recent-ish posts prompted by my last term teaching from Matter and Interactions.
-- How To Make A White…
drorzel | November 3, 2016As the post title says, it's been a whole two months since the last time I did a round-up of my physics blog posts for Forbes. That's less content than you might think, though, because with the new academic term starting and some deadlines I had for other stuff, I posted basically nothing for most of September. October was a little busier, amounting to more than enough for a links post here:
-- How The History Of Measurement Shapes The Language Of Physics: While writing up some stuff about blackbody radiation, I ran up against the weird thing in optics where we default to talking about…
drorzel | August 31, 2016It's been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it's the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I'll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material...
-- Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than Gravity?: I got pointed to a story about the 0-60mph time for a Tesla, and said "That seems fishy..." After climbing back out of the Google rabbit hole, I tried to explain why that seemed unlikely to me, and the funny timing thing that might explain the result.
-- The Hardest Thing To Grasp In Physics?…
drorzel | August 12, 2016Several weeks of silence here, for a bunch of reasons that mostly boil down to "being crazy busy." I've got a bunch of physics posts over at Forbes during that interval, though:
-- The Camera Trick That Justifies The Giant Death Star: I busted out camera lenses and the kids' toys to show how you might make the Death Star appear as huge as on the Rogue One poster.
-- How Quantum Physics Could Protect You Against Embarrassing Email Hacks: Using the DNC email leak as an excuse to talk about quantum cryptography.
-- Four Things You Should Expect To Get Out Of College: Some advice for students…
drorzel | July 20, 2016It's been a month since the last links dump of posts from Forbes, though, really, I took a couple of weeks off there, so it's been less than that in terms of active blogging time. But I've put up a bunch of stuff in July, so here are some links:
-- The Physics Of Ancient Roman Architecture: First of a couple posts inspired by our trip to Rome, this one looking at the basic mechanics of the key structural element of Roman building, the arch.
-- What Ancient Roman Buildings Teach Us About Science And Engineering: Second post about Roman construction, in which looking into the question of how…
drorzel | June 9, 2016Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience.
-- Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC.
-- How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As a snobby grad student in cold-atom physics, I thought of old-school spectroscopy as boring and pointless, but a recent DAMOP session showed how those classic atomic physics studies still have a lot to offer for studies of astrophysics.
-- Are The Constants Of Nature Changing, And How Can We Tell?:…
drorzel | May 21, 2016A whole bunch of physics posts over at Forbes so far this month:
--Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons: Short reviews of Janna Levin's Black Hole Blues and Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
--The Real Reasons Quantum Entanglement Doesn't Allow Faster-Than-Light Communication: Expanding on and correcting some stuff I didn't like about Ethan "Starts With A Bang" Siegel's take on entanglement as a communications tool.
-- Why Does The Rising sun Change Color?: I watched a bunch of sunrises on the cruise, which led to me scribbling equations, and then a blog…
drorzel | April 19, 2016It's been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there's a good bunch of stuff on this list:
-- How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I'm trying to figure out a way to list "got 1,800 people to read a blog post about ARPES" as one of my professional accomplishments on my CV.
-- The Optics Of Superman's X-Ray Vision: Spinning off a post of Rhett's, a look at why humanoid eyes just aren't set up to work with x-rays…
drorzel | March 20, 2016I was at the APS March Meeting last week, because I needed tp give a talk reporting on the Schrödinger Sessions. But as long as I was going to be there anyway, I figured I should check out the huge range of talks on areas of physics that aren't my normal thing-- in fact, I deliberately avoided going to DAMOP-sponsored sessions.
This also affected my blogging, so the last few weeks' worth of posts at Forbes have mostly been on March Meeting-related areas:
-- How Cold Atoms Might Help Physicists Understand Superconductors: A post about the connection between ultra-cold atomic physics and…
drorzel | February 26, 2016It's been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I've been doing at Forbes, so here's the latest eclectic collection:
-- Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific thinkers. Of course, the actual game tat night was horribly ugly, not a compelling display of anything in particular...
-- How Can A Laser Make A Plane Turn Around?: A quick post on the optics of lasers, spinning off a news of the weird story about a flight that had to return after a "…
drorzel | February 5, 2016A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time:
-- 'The Expanse' Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated Gravity Right: Another post on the SyFy adaptation of "James S. A. Corey"'s books, talking about a nifty bit of visual effects that nods at the Coriolis force you'd see on a rotating space station.
-- What Is The Quantum Pigeonhole Principle And Why Is It Weird?: A paper published in the Proceedings of the…