Built on Facts

Is the video with the popcorn being popped by cell phones fake? Despite a bit of controversy about just how much power it takes to pop popcorn, everyone in the physics blogosphere agrees it simply ain’t happening.
But now the mystery of the origin of the video can be laid to rest as well. [...]

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Vis consili expers mole ruit sua.
- Quintus Horatius Flaccus
The words of Horace above attain a spare and austere beauty in Latin, but the meaning is carried equally well in English. Force without wisdom falls of its own weight. Two different sets of words carry his millenia-old thoughts to the present time. There [...]

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The Atlantic has a pointed and somewhat grim article by a pseudonymous Professor X (no, not that one) about assigning failing grades to failing students. It’s called In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. Professor X is an English instructor at a community college teaching largely adult students, so he’s not dealing with [...]

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There’s a video circulating on the internet that purports to show popcorn being popped by the radio waves emitted from cell phones. It’s been extensively debunked by multiple sources, including Snopes and Wired. Swans on Tea has a quantitative analysis which I highly recommend. Snopes even gives good reasons why it’s probably [...]

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When I was a young child, my uncle Fred used to try to convince me of some pretty outlandish things. His favorites were to say that the earth was flat and that England was a hoax. I was old enough to know better and I tried to argue as best I could, though [...]

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Weddings all around for my family this week. I’m in my hometown with some time to kill this summer before my TA duties resume in July, which gives me the opportunity to catch up with old friends - one of whom was married this weekend. My parents went to a different wedding of [...]

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A few brief items of interest for the weekend:
One of my favorite things to write about is the interplay between physics and pure mathematics. Beyond the basic idea that physics is the science of the mathematical description of nature, it’s further true that pure math by itself often anticipates physics in ways physicists don’t [...]

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The brilliant folk-rock musician Jonathan Coulton has written a song about the Mandelbrot set. The set is a quite neat and famous mathematical object, and that it’s crossed over into immortalization in song is one of those beautifully weird things we are privileged to see in the internet age. No, it’s not really physics [...]

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Tom Levenson has a guest post at Cosmic Variance that I think illustrates a fundamental flaw in some of the modern ideas about neuroscience. Like some physicists who embrace Many Worlds or other “interpretation” ideas without empirical evidence, many neurosciencists have done essentially the same thing in their own discipline.
The first part of Levenson’s [...]

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As far as I can tell, the word “physics” occurs twice in the Shakespeare canon. Once in The Winter’s Tale, and once in Macbeth. Here’s the latter:

LENNOX
Good morrow, noble sir.

MACBETH
Good morrow, both.

MACDUFF
Is the king stirring, worthy thane?

MACBETH
Not yet.

MACDUFF
He did command me to call timely on him:
I have almost slipp’d the hour.

MACBETH
I’ll bring you [...]

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