After seven years living amongst our neighbors to the south, I have recently returned “home” to the US of A. I say “home” because I’m a West Coast kid and now I live in Baltimore, which is nothing like the West Coast. Honestly, I culture-shocked less moving from California to Mexico City. And also, because…
So. Everybody got excited about gravitational waves coming from the mergers of neutron stars and black holes. My Facebook feed which is full of scientists and science writers got further excited about a newish phrase everybody used, “multimessenger astronomy.” My Facebook feed agreed that “multimessenger astronomy” is an all-around dreadful phrase. Not only does it sound corporate and…
October 7 – 11 This week, another LaWONian did us proud: Michelle is in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013! In her latest post she finds biologists fretting over a flock of very tiny — and very endangered — sandpiper chicks. Cameron and cursive are not friends. But that doesn’t mean the end…
Physicists, like the ancient Greeks, like to gossip about their gods. A few days ago, three physicists* were talking on Twitter** about a review by a fourth physicist, Freeman Dyson, of a biography of one of these gods, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and about his war with another one, John Archibald Wheeler. Physicist #1: Oppenheimer did…
About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons. Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study…
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…