Built on Facts

I propose an experiment. Head on over to Cosmic Variance or Bad Astronomy. Count the posts on the front page that have to do with their respective subject areas and how many have to do with politics or religion. Hold that ratio in your head for a moment.
Professor Orzel on Uncertain Principles [...]

[Read more →]

Grab a hydrogen atom, hit it with a photon of the appropriate energy, and bump it up to its first excited state. After a while it will spontaneously release a photon and resume its quiescence in the ground state. Simple enough, and the general idea of atoms absorbing and spontaneously releasing photons is [...]

[Read more →]

As you read this, I’m probably on the road back to my university to start teaching the second summer session for Physics 208 - Electricity, Magnetism, and Light.  It starts this Wednesday, and it’s the second half of the calculus-based intro physics class. Mostly engineers take it, though I’ve seen a few from scattered [...]

[Read more →]

A few days ago I wrote a pretty basic post about the trajectories of a football.  Dr. Pion suggested the real physics in football was in the inertia tensor of the ball itself.  True enough.  As such, this post is going to be a little tough in places for people who haven’t seen this kind [...]

[Read more →]

You may have heard of the actinides, lanthanides, oxides, and various other -ide names from chemistry. Here’s another: pnictide. Rolls right off the tongue, no?
Well, you may be hearing more about them in the future.  In the race - now more like a marathon - to understand superconductivity, research has focused on the [...]

[Read more →]

“I returned day before yesterday,” he answered, while he leaned his arm on the keys, bringing forth a crash of discordant sound.
“Day before yesterday!” she repeated, aloud; and went on thinking to herself, “day before yesterday,” in a sort of an uncomprehending way. She had pictured him seeking her at the very first [...]

[Read more →]

The problem with particle physics is the difficulty of acquiring new data.  The major way particle physicists get data is to accelerate individual particles to tremendous energies and smash them into each other.  If you have enough E, the universe will obligingly generate some mc2 in the form of new particles flying out from the [...]

[Read more →]

I would never have thought that so recently after starting this site that I’d be invited to do something as cool as be a guest on SETI radio. But I was, and it was awesome. This week they’re doing a fascinating show about the science of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the [...]

[Read more →]

A few days ago I saw the movie Rudy for the first time.  It’s a story of a young guy in the 70s who wanted to play for the Notre Dame football team.  He was a small guy, and after tremendous adversity finally managed to get on the practice team to function essentially as a [...]

[Read more →]

Is the universe made of math? That’s a question going around internet science-fan circles of late, and it’s a pretty difficult question. Roughly, a cosmologist named Max Tegmark believes in a very concrete form of mathematical Platonism - the idea that math is “real” in some sense. Now I and many other [...]

[Read more →]