Link: Falsifiable science and good science
Sabine Hossenfelder has become an outspoken skeptic of the idea that a new, even-bigger-than-the-LHC particle collider will achieve any breakthrough in high ...
All posts tagged with physics
Is science nearing an end of practical progress?
An article in The Atlantic by Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen asks why it seems like scientific progress is slowing down: “Science Is Getting Less Bang ...
Ejecta rays point to the problem with ‘ideal’ models
The PNAS Journal Club points to an interesting research study on craters: “Journal Club: Researchers may’ve finally solved mystery of crater ray formation”.
Link: Are physicists barking up the wrong tree?
Sabine Hossenfelder has a book coming out next month, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. She pursues the question of why physicists today follow ...
Are lab exercises worthless? If they try to reinforce concepts, maybe so.
An essay by Natasha Holmes and Carl Wieman in Physics Today recounts their experiences designing introductory physics labs: “Introductory physics labs: We ca...
Link: High-energy physics and the non-discovery of new particles
Dennis Overbye in the New York Times covers this week’s news from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where hopes of “new physics” beyond the Higgs boson are ...
Link: Why astro/physics isn’t fun anymore
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has written an evocative essay about her experience becoming a physicist, and the daily frustrations and challenges of being differe...
Link: Does ‘singularity’ have the right meaning for technology?
Many futurists and not a few science fiction writers hold the idea that computer technology is developing toward a point where artificial intelligence will b...
"I think the senior people, they actually think that if you work very hard, you'll make it"
Science magazine has an article in its “careers” section about the job prospects for the hundreds of young physicists who worked on the Large Hadron Collider...
Some physics history from Andrei Linde
At the Edge website is a memoir-essay by the physicist Andrei Linde: “A balloon producing balloons: a big fractal”.
One way to make better science writing
Alison Flood in the Guardian notes the scientific interests of celebrated novelist Cormac McCarthy: “Cormac McCarthy’s parallel career revealed as a scienti...
Higgs hunting
I follow physics news but generally don’t post about it. But after the recent Higgs boson press conference, I found this article by Lawrence Krauss to be a v...
Kaku cockup
I can’t bear to watch it again, and I don’t see why I should tolerate anyone else having to watch it. But I can’t sit quietly while physicist Michio Kaku tel...
Long run paper trail
Gordon Watts writes an interesting story of tenure review and the productivity of a long-lasting experiment in particle physics: “200 Run 2 Papers from DZERO...
Making a Hawking
Cosmos posts a long biographical retrospective from Stephen Hawking about his life and work. A lot of it will be review for people well-read on the history o...
Tokamak coconuts
Tokamak fusion reactors need charcoal to adsorb certain particles. It was a very lucky day for some coconut growers:
Science sensationalism
Backreaction: “Science, Writers, and the Public - A bizarre love triangle”:
People particles
Last week’s Science included an article by Adrian Cho examining the way that social modelers use math to describe human behavior on a large scale (“Ourselves...
Pulsar navigation
The physics arXiv blog from MIT Technology Review points to a paper that describes a way to use pulsars as an interstellar GPS system.
Cloaking
“Cloaking” is like the physics version of the hobbits – catchy name from a fantasy story and fascinating to the press. But there came a time reading “invisib...