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# All Blogs / Academics / Physics / Popular

### Straight

In class tomorrow I'll introduce one of my favourite equations: $$\frac{d^2x^\sigma}{d\tau^2}+\Gamma^\sigma_{\rho\nu}\frac{dx^\rho}{d\tau}\frac{dx^\nu}{d\tau}= 0\.$$ ... Wait - Where did everyone go?! Come back! I'm not expecting you to know what it means, I just wanted to talk a bit with it sort of... Show More Summary

### Uncertain Dots: Episode 3

This week’s hangout with Rhett Allain, in which we talk about how we got into physics, how we find stuff to read, what we enjoyed on physics blogs this week, what we do and don’t like about Twitter, and the revenge of the Sith. The specific blog posts we mentioned: Frank Noschese’s analysis of gravity…

### A second chance at sight

Silicon microstrip detectors, a staple in particle physics experiments, provide information that may be critical to restoring vision to some who have lost it. In 1995, physicist Alan Litke co-wrote a particularly prescient article for Scientific American about potential uses for an emerging technology called the silicon microstrip detector. Show More Summary

### The Perfect Wave

Sometimes when I have come across claims of exotic phenomena at the far-out edge of the field of BSM physics based on branes and string theory (like time travel, or brane-world explanations of the bad OPERA result), my initial reaction … Continue reading ?

### Coriolis Force on a Kicked Football

During last night’s Superb Owl, there were some great tweets looking at science with some type of connection to football. Here is one that got me thinking: A 50-yard field goal in MetLife stadium will deflect nearly 1/2 inch due...

### The Evergreen Topic of Grade Inflation

There was a flurry of re-shares last week for this article about Yale shutting down a site that aggregated student course evaluations, which is fine as far as it goes, but repeats a stat that really bugs me: About 43 percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A’s, up from 31 percent in 1988…

### Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings

It’s taken me a disgracefully long time to finish the review copy of this I was sent back in the fall, mostly because I didn’t read anything not immediately related to the book-in-progress for most of November and all of December. Which is to say, the long delay is not in any way a reflection…

### Finally!?

Some rather exciting looking rainclouds, and a strong wind! Will we get some decent rain? Something like a biblical downpour, as promised by these clouds? [Later:] A few spits of rain, but really nothing. Then back to sunshine again, disappointingly. Show More Summary

### The Perfect Theory

Cosmologist Pedro Ferreira has a new book about to come out, entitled The Perfect Theory. The author accurately describes the book as a “biography of general relativity”, and it’s quite a good one, of the short and breezy variety (as … Continue reading ?

### Sports Are Science

Unless you’ve been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks– or, you know, foreign– you’re probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt…

SteelyKid is one of the biggest fans of Union’s women’s basketball games. Not necessarily the team, just going to the games– she rampages all around the lobby, and as the crowd is generally pretty sparse, everybody is cool with that. The Pip has started coming along this year, and the two of them chase each…

### Back to work

I would like to have a lot more time to write on my blog. Indeed, time is something I have no often and also the connection is not so good as I would like in the places I spend most of it. So, I take this moment to give an update of what I have […]

I’ve always thought more philosophers of science should be weighing in on the debate over “falsifiability” and the “demarcation problem” surrounding string theory and the multiverse (i.e. are these really science?). This is a complex and tricky subject that they … Continue reading ?

### On Persistence and the Counting of Things

Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly’s follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer– and they’re both very good at what they do. You should buy their books,…

### More “tweets”

“How ‘Quantum’ is the D-Wave Machine?” by Shin, Smith, Smolin, Vazirani goo.gl/JkLg0l – was previous skepticism too GENEROUS to D-Wave? D-Wave not of broad enough interest? OK then, try “AM with Multiple Merlins” by Dana Moshkovitz, Russell Impagliazzo, and me goo.gl/ziSUz9 “Remarks on the Physical Church-Turing Thesis” – my talk at the FQXi conference in […]

Meet four more physicists who talk about their work on Twitter in symmetry’s third installment of #FollowFriday. Pop culture can sometimes perpetuate the notion that scientists hide away in ivory towers doing work unintelligible to the public at large. But science doesn’t have to be inaccessible or incomprehensible. Show More Summary

### Small College, Exotic Particles

Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of “Dirac Monopoles”. This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don’t fully understand, so writing it up isn’t a simple matter. The…

### Measuring the Strength of a Magnet

Bigger magnets aren’t always “stronger”. But how do you make a comparison between different magnets? One way is to determine the magnetic dipole moment of the magnet. Magnetic Dipole Moment Maybe you aren’t quite sure about dipoles, but let me...

### Watch the next big neutrino experiment come together

A video from Fermilab highlights some of the many steps needed to build the largest neutrino experiment in the United States. Coordinating the construction of an international particle physics experiment is never an easy task. This is...Show More Summary

### Appearances and So Forth

Since somebody asks nearly every time I mention my TED@NYC appearance back in October, I can now confirm that I will not be speaking at TED this year. Which I found out the same way as everybody else: when the full speaker list for this year’s TED was released today. If you’re curious about the…