As you undoubtedly know, quantum theory — the most precisely accurate most fundamental theory about the universe’s most basic particles and forces — comes down to the uncertainty principle. That is, if you know where and how forcefully and how fast a particle is going (its momentum), you can’t at the same time know where […]
Physics
One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe […]
ast weekend, my friend Sarah Gilman won the women’s woodsplitting competition at the 41st annual Mountain Fair in Carbondale, Colo., out-chopping several close rivals — including a local county commissioner — and taking home a championship tiara and an six-pound splitting maul. It was Sarah’s second tiara, and second prize maul; she first won […]
I slept through the Higgs boson announcement on July 4. Whatever the news that the Large Hadron Collider physicists would be trumpeting in the middle of the New York night, it wasn’t going to change by 9 a.m. No, what I would be monitoring throughout the day were the press releases and media coverage. Would […]
Science, so useful to our lives in so many ways, also usefully supplies metaphors from which we may find comfort or edification. An astronomer told me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, was surrounded by a tenuous halo of hot gas. “How can gas stay hot, out there in space?” I asked. […]
Science is known to be fatal; it kills people — this is all but a cliché. World War I was the chemists’ war: chemists developed chlorine as a bleach and a disinfectant, then turned it into chlorine gas, which flooded (along with other gases) into enemy trenches. World War II was the physicists’ war: physicists […]
“My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.” The line has always gotten laughs. It comes at a point in my public talks when I want to convey how comically recent is our current understanding of the universe—so recent that people who were present at the creation still walk among us. I’ve never thought […]
Abstruse Goose’s little mouseover says, Please credit the original artist. And he’s right, it’s nice to look at the world as though it’s art. You can’t help but notice the original artist had great taste in color and in which colors to put together. Like, the night sky is the original setting for diamonds against […]
