For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us. Oh, physics. It’s flummoxed both Cassie and me. First, you’ll see Cassie’s delightful video about a not-so-delightful experience that soured her on the […]
Physics
For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us. My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix […]
The death of Neil Armstrong in August prompted no end of tributes invoking heroism, patriotism, vision, courage, valor, and all sorts of other abstractions. Understandably so. Armstrong’s giant leap was in fact the first baby step in one species’ attempt to leave home. Less in the news, though, was a more concrete matter: hard science. The […]
This was originally posted June 8, 2010 and probably ten people read it. I hope you don’t mind my running it again. It reminds me of my favorite Abstruse Goose. The picture’s a little alarming, but justly so. I had two trees in the front yard, and I’d watch the squirrels jump between them, across […]
From “On Being the Right Size,” by J.B.S. Haldane: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” Recently, a couple of my friends have fallen. One, a woman, […]
This is my puppy, Conan, and the reason I’ve been buying a lot of dog books. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, dog books are for skimming, not reading. They’re hokey, repetitive, poorly written and peppered with pseudoscience. But Friday I found an exception: Inside of a Dog, a fascinating, science-rich story of how dogs […]
Ann and Richard were each pleased and proud that their books have won the same lovely prize, the American Institute of Physics’ Science Communication Award. The prize comes with money — always nice — and a Windsor chair that says American Institute of Physics on the front and has a formal citation inscribed on a […]
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 […]