Built on Facts

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Obama and McCain, huh? Glad that’s over with. I was starting to think we might be better off if the entire city of DC just slid into the Potomac. But now that it’s over, I’m sure the TV pundits, newspaper editorialists, and bloggers will be back to discussing the latest progress in [...]

[Read more →]

Swans on Tea has a short but very fascinating post about paper. Turns out the little milimeter thick gram-mass bits op finely smashed tree pulp our civilization relies on shares a lot in common with mile thick billion-billion-kilogram-mass tectonic plates. Here’s a selection from the preprint’s conclusion:
Looking in more detail at the correlations [...]

[Read more →]

There’s not many people who love space exploration more than me. And I’m not one of these scientists who wants to scrap manned spaceflight to divert the budget to cheaper and much more scientifically useful unmanned probes. Human exploration of space is both a necessity for the future and a noble endeavor purely [...]

[Read more →]

There’s a joke in physics that asserts that the time until commercial fusion power generation becomes viable is 15 years - and has been since 1940. Maybe that 15 years is a constant of nature, and like a jogger on a treadmill there’s no forward progress despite all the effort in the world.
Maybe, but [...]

[Read more →]

“Remember Fermilab?” Isn’t it a little premature to be nostalgic? After all, it’s the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Well, at least it will be until the famed LHC starts operations this year. Once that happens, the contribution Fermilab’s machine can make to fundamental physics will be far superseded. [...]

[Read more →]

Not too many decades ago, some scientists discovered that certain materials would conduct electricity perfectly if you got them cold enough. Not just conduct electricity well - those materials actually conduct with zero resistance. Appropriately, the phenomenon was named superconductivity.
The problem for making thus useful is that you have to make these materials [...]

[Read more →]