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Nature or Nurture?
During our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket, we took refuge from the rain in the Open door bookstore, where a short while later I saw the following scenes at opposite ends of the kids-book aisle (also the “Featured Image” for this post, but I’ll reproduce it to save the RSS folks from having to…
Simulating a Pendulum
There’s a famous story about Richard Feynman at Cornell suffering from the science equivalent of writer’s block, after WWII. He was depressed and feeling like everything he did was pointless, until one day he spotted a student throwing a plate up in the air in the cafeteria. As the plate spun, it wobbled, and the…
Homework Is Evil?: “The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course”
One of the perennial problems of teaching intro physics is getting students to do their homework, so I was very interested to see Andy Rundquist on Twitter post a link to a paper on the arxiv titled “How different incentives affect homework completion in introductory physics courses.” When I shared this with the rest of…
Mobility on 2+2 Wheels
SteelyKid has a new prize possession: a training-wheel bike! You can’t quite hear what she says at the end of this, when she stops the bike, but it’s “That should be a full video!” She knows her fan base. On the way back, she wiped out (the first bad crash on the new bike) and…
Wolfgang Pauli, Father of the arXiv
The book-in-progress (which is coming along, albeit slowly, thanks for asking) is built around making analogies between scientific discoveries and ordinary activities. This necessarily means telling a lot of historical stories, which is both good and bad. The bad part is that actual history is way messier than the streamlined version you get to use…
Calculating the Angular View of an iPhone
I have a new iPhone. You know I am going to use this for both videos and images that can be analyzed. It’s just what I do. So, before I need it I am going to measure the angular field...
Ok, Here Goes
It has been a while since I shared a snippet of the book project with you, so here's an update:
Yesterday I completed a short burst of activity in which I re-did two pages in a story that were just horrible to behold. This is a panel form one of the pages. I'm pleased [...]
A banner day at the LHC
An artist honors the people and science of the CMS collaboration. There’s a new splash of color at Point Five, the home of CMS detector on the Large Hadron Collider. Five vivid banners drape the gray walls of the complex, lending the warehouse a cathedral-like atmosphere. Show More Summary
CMS harbors new physics beyond the Standard Model
In these days is ongoing LHCP 2013 (First Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference) and CMS data seem to point significantly toward new physics. Their measurements on the production modes for WW and ZZ are agreeing with my recent computations (see here) and overall are deviating slightly from Standard Model expectations giving Note that Standard Model is alive and […]
Moniz confirmed as Energy Secretary
The US Senate has unanimously confirmed MIT physics professor Ernest Moniz as the next Secretary of Energy. Ernest Moniz, an MIT physics professor with extensive experience with particle accelerators and national energy policies, has...Show More Summary
D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Two years ago almost to the day, I announced my retirement as Chief D-Wave Skeptic. But—as many readers predicted at the time—recent events (and the contents of my inbox!) have given me no choice except to resume my post. In an all-too-familiar pattern, multiple rounds of D-Wave-related hype have made it all over the world [...]
One Ring to Rule Them All
This week in Sweden the Nobel Foundation is running a symposium on LHC results. It’s invitation only, but the slides of the talks are available here. One of the scheduled talks today was about string theory, and I was wondering … Continue reading ?
We Take the Cosine Function For Granted
This all started with a student my wife was helping with high school trigonometry homework. Here is one of the questions. Here is the solution that the homework was looking for: This uses the trigonometry sum of angles formula and.....
Bad Luck for Kepler
Steinn has a nice post about the sudden ending of the Kepler mission, due to a crucial component failure. As he notes: "Kepler has discovered almost 3,000 planetary candidates, of which about 100 have been confirmed through a variety...Show More Summary
String Theory and the Scientific Method
There’s a new philosophy of science book out, Richard Dawid’s String Theory and the Scientific Method (available online here if your institution is paying Cambridge University Press appropriately or if you have a credit card). It comes with endorsements from … Continue reading ?
Bad practices
Today, I made a serious mistake. I have sent again a rejected paper to the same journal. The point is that this is the kind of journal that has several Editors that can manage papers. So, one could improperly think that a rejected paper sent to different Editors could in the end go through. The […]
Cherries in the bean cake
What’s the difference between circular and linear particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider and the proposed International Linear Collider? Symmetry takes a trip into the kitchen pantry to find out. Already celebrated for bringing the world news of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is only beginning its long journey of discoveries. Show More Summary
Could the Student Be Wrong In This Rant?
Maybe you have seen the rant by Texas student Jeff Bliss. Most are using this to point out the problems with some teachers. I really don’t know everything that went on in this classroom, but let’s just consider part of...
Final
Well, I've got to say goodbye to another excellent group of students from my undergraduate electromagnetism class. We had the final today (starting at 8:00am - ack!), and given the lack of rioting, tears, and throwing of rotten fruit during the exam itself, I assume that it was not too bad an exam to sit. Show More Summary
The top 40 physics hits of 2012
The Higgs boson is a popular subject among the most-cited physics papers of 2012, but a particle simulation manual takes the top spot. Think of it as a particle physics version of pop radio's “top 40” countdown: INSPIRE, a database of...Show More Summary
- Large Hadron Collider
- Standard Model
- American Physical Society
- Quantum Mechanics
- Higgs Boson
- National Academy of Sciences
- Dark Matter
- Nobel Prize
- National Science Foundation
- Particle Physics
- Mars Science Laboratory
- International Space Station
- Serge Haroche
- John Preskill
- Stephen Hawking
- CERN
- Brian Greene
- Sean Carroll
- Imperial College
- Scientific
