Richard & the Trouble with Gravity

Ann:  After you’ve gone to the immense trouble of writing a book, having to sell it seems a bit much.  My own personal best was always with the radio interviewers who began with, “So what’s the name of your book again?”  So Richard, what’s the name of your book again? Oh, right, Gravity.  What’s it […]

Tepid Feelings about Neutron Clashes

Newbie journalists love to ask where seasoned journalists find their story ideas. I’ll tell you where I find mine: Editors. They have really good ideas and sometimes they’ll just hand them to you. That’s called an assignment, and I take a lot of them. Unfortunately, LWON doesn’t give assignments. So when you sign up for […]

Redux: On Getting From “Wow!” to “[yawn]”: Yes!!!

Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy announced that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics would recognize the discovery of gravitational waves; the recipients would be Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, three of the visionaries who shepherded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) through four decades of technological and bureaucratic innovations. (Another founder of the […]