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Mount Lee from Mount Hollywood
While in Griffith park yesterday evening I looked West when near the top of a rise and saw one of the great sights you can get at this time of year. The stretch of the Santa Monica mountain range coming in from the West shrouded in the mists rolling in from the West. Show More Summary
Winner: Cinderella’s convertible carriage
Reader Emily Conover wins symmetry’s latest contest with her fairy-tale description of neutrino oscillation. Last month we at symmetry challenged readers to send us their best metaphors to describe the strange behavior of subatomic particles called neutrinos. The nearly massless particles come in three types, or flavors. Show More Summary
Experiment and Theory in the Popular Imagination
A little while back, I posted about the pro-theorist bias in popular physics, and Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a long and detailed response, which of course was posted on a day when I spent six hours driving to Quebec City for a conference. Sigh. Happily, ZapperZ and Tom at Swans On Tea offer more or less…
A 10-minute lesson in supersymmetry
In two new videos, Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln explains the what and the why of supersymmetry. What do the mass of the Higgs boson, the weakness of gravity and the mystery of dark matter have in common? They all might be explained...Show More Summary
I Am Python (And So Can You!)
Yes, the title is derived from Stephen Colbert’s book – I Am America (And So Can You!). But here is the main point – you too can play with python. What is python? Python is a programing language that is...
Higgs and beyond
I am writing these few lines while the conference “Higgs and beyond” is still going on at Tohoku University (Sendai) in Japan. Talks can be found here. Both ATLAS and CMS presented a lot of results about Higgs particle and the most relevant of them is the combination of the data from the two experiments […]
The tightrope of truth and courtesy
A reader calling him- or herself “A Merry Clown” left a comment on my previous post which was so wise, I decided it had to be promoted to a post of its own. Scientific discourse is the art of juggling decorum, truth and humor. A high-wire feat, attempted under imposing shadows cast by giants and [...]
100th Birthday Bash!
If you're in town on Sunday 9th June, I strongly recommend coming along to this! The Natural History Museum is having its 100th Birthday celebration with an all day series of events. There'll be new spaces and exhibits opening, including...Show More Summary
The ILC through two lenses
Two regions in Japan vying to be the site of the proposed International Linear Collider have produced wildly different promotional videos. Now that Japan has expressed interest in hosting the International Linear Collider, the next-generation...Show More Summary
Maybe one of the best emails yet?
I get a lot of unusual emails each day. Typically, offerings of alternative theories of the universe with requests/demands to review them (sorry - please send them to a journal), discoveries of remarkable forms of energy saving or propulsion...Show More Summary
Unification of forces
What if, like the individual threads that form a piece of cloth, all of nature’s forces can be woven together into one comprehensive force? The unification of forces is the idea that it’s possible to view all of nature’s forces as a manifestation of one single, all-encompassing force.
Angry Birds: Launch Angle and Range
Here is another experiment from my National Geographic book: Angry Birds Furious Forces. Like I said before, the book goes over some basic ideas in physics using the Angry Birds as examples. In this case, the experiment is just like...
Lattice Experiments
Apologies in advance to people who clicked over here because from the title they were expecting a post on discrete approaches to quantum field theory such as lattice QCD. This is mostly about lattice cherry pie, which, you'll perhaps admit, is at least as interesting. Show More Summary
Emergence
Always a delight to see my cycads go through this part of their cycle, in another seasonal favourite of mine. It starts as a little bump that extends into a long cluster [...]
Simons 75th Birthday Conference
Last week the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a conference in honor of the 75th birthday of Jim Simons. It was organized by Dennis Sullivan as a set of expository “mini-courses” on various topics related to Simons’ mathematical work. I was … Continue reading ?
Angry Birds, Furious Forces! by Rhett Allain
Rhett at Dot Physics departed ScienceBlogs before NAtional Geographic fully took over, but still managed to connect with their book division for a physics text. This is part of a series they’re doing tied in with the folks from Rovio, makers of the world’s most popular smart-phone time-waster, and, as the title suggests, it uses…
How to Think Like a Scientist: Taking Stock
For the last several months, I’ve been poking along on the book-in-progress in a very constrained manner– basically, I get to work on it in three-hour chunks on Tuesdays when I don’t have class (and this term, Thursdays as well). This is, as you might imagine, incredibly frustrating, though I do get some book-related stuff…
Blogging Is Not Mandatory
I mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking of proposing a Science Online program item about the professionalization of blogging, throwing in a link to post from a couple months ago. That included a link to this SlideShare: Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can…
Real Scientists Have Families, Too: Photo Edition
While we’re revisiting blog topics of the recent past, another item from this weekend’s visit to the Ithaca Sciencenter, in the form of the picture above. For those with images off, or who read via RSS and won’t see the picture, it’s a photo of one of the inspirational plaques they have lining the walls…
On Journalists and Scientists Talking
Last week’s post about communications between scientists and journalists sparked a bit of discussion, and prompted the folks at the IoP’s Physics Focus blog to ask me for a guest post advising journalists on how to talk to scientists. The post is now live, with the self-explanatory headline How Journalists Can Help the Scientists They…
- Large Hadron Collider
- Standard Model
- American Physical Society
- Higgs Boson
- Quantum Field Theory
- National Academy of Sciences
- Dark Matter
- Nobel Prize
- National Science Foundation
- Particle Physics
- Mars Science Laboratory
- International Space Station
- John Preskill
- Serge Haroche
- CERN
- Scientific
- Lisa Randall
- Imperial College
- General Relativity
- Perimeter Institute
