“What can we do about high school physics textbooks?” The question, I admit, stumped me. Not in the way that a question about whether gravity exists in other universes would stump me. That question I wouldn’t be able to answer because there isn’t an answer; the existence of other universes is speculative. This question, however, […]
Physics
(This post is the first in a three-part series. “Talking Universe Blues” will continue over the next two Fridays.) “Does gravity exist in other universes?” The question, I admit, stumped me. Did she—fourth row, on the aisle—mean that gravity might be leaking into our universe from a parallel universe? Unlikely. Her puzzled, perhaps lost, expression didn’t […]
You understand the joke, right? that high-energy physics learns the nature of subatomic particles by hurling them at other subatomic particles and when the particles collide, studying the debris? So this is funny. Also disturbing. http://abstrusegoose.com/156
I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple. What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties. I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.” Not that […]
Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons. And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers. The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]
What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his […]
On June 6, 2002, during a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recounted a particularly difficult episode in gathering intelligence during wartime. “Now what is the message there?” he said. “The message is that there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known […]
One of our favorite science writers has just published a terrific new book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. So I nabbed author Richard Panek, who just happens to be an LWON blogger, for a Q and A session. Q: Your book’s really provocative. What first drew you […]
