Continuing a preoccupation with movies about science, but this time about math. According to this very nice YouTube person, the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous unsolved problem in all of math and whoever solves it wins a $7 million prize. I not only can’t solve it, I can’t even understand it. It has to do with prime […]
As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan. He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe. As such, he was involved in […]
October 1 – October 5 Virginia attends a Story Collider, listens to a scientist who picks up roadkill armadillos to study the erectile tissues in their penises, wonders why more scientists don’t tell stories, advises them how to go forth and do so. Christie was pissed off before about the Komen Foundation’s insistence that screening […]
Roughly — very roughly — the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that any given measurement of reality depends on the observer doing the measuring. And if no observer measures a reality, that reality just sort of disappears or collapses or something. The many-worlds interpretation says wait! maybe the unobserved measurement really just goes off […]
I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass. But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; […]
Paul Steinhardt looks like a tidy and successful lawyer, though a touch geeky. He’s a physicist whose fields include the gritty physics of matter, the first instants of the universe, and the possibility that the universe won’t end, it’ll just cycle. He’s a theorist, that is, he uses computers, math, and his brains to make […]
September 10 – 14 Virginia says drinking to forget doesn’t work. What does work is pot. Maybe good cooks are really, sneakily good scientists, says Cameron. Whether city living makes you itchy and cranky, Science is not sure. Cassandra is. Autumn is so lovely, says Christie, but what with global warming you might not […]
My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing. Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What […]
