Blogs
drorzel | March 20, 2016I was at the APS March Meeting last week, because I needed tp give a talk reporting on the Schrödinger Sessions. But as long as I was going to be there anyway, I figured I should check out the huge range of talks on areas of physics that aren't my normal thing-- in fact, I deliberately avoided going to DAMOP-sponsored sessions.
This also affected my blogging, so the last few weeks' worth of posts at Forbes have mostly been on March Meeting-related areas:
-- How Cold Atoms Might Help Physicists Understand Superconductors: A post about the connection between ultra-cold atomic physics and…
drorzel | February 26, 2016It's been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I've been doing at Forbes, so here's the latest eclectic collection:
-- Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific thinkers. Of course, the actual game tat night was horribly ugly, not a compelling display of anything in particular...
-- How Can A Laser Make A Plane Turn Around?: A quick post on the optics of lasers, spinning off a news of the weird story about a flight that had to return after a "…
drorzel | February 19, 2016One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty "mentoring." It's rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn't about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that:
Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise.
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc)…
drorzel | February 5, 2016A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time:
-- 'The Expanse' Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated Gravity Right: Another post on the SyFy adaptation of "James S. A. Corey"'s books, talking about a nifty bit of visual effects that nods at the Coriolis force you'd see on a rotating space station.
-- What Is The Quantum Pigeonhole Principle And Why Is It Weird?: A paper published in the Proceedings of the…
drorzel | January 21, 2016Over at Scientific American, Amanda Baker has a story about what scientists say they would tell their younger selves.
I reached out to eight of my colleagues who are currently in STEM fields and asked them a series of questions about their childhood interests in science, school experiences, and roadblocks that they faced on their path from elementary school to their current positions. [...]
Their feedback covered not only what drew them to science, but also what had almost pushed them away. Below I have consolidated the feedback into five main points, including the advice they would give…
drorzel | January 14, 2016It's been a disgracefully long time since I did a links post covering what I've been posting over at Forbes. In my defense, December was a complete mess of a month...
Anyway, here's a great big bunch of stuff:
-- Football Physics: Can We Do Better Than Tossing Coins? In which I try to ease the sting of a bad overtime loss for my Giants by writing about the physics of generating random numbers.
-- How Big Is the Moon? Understanding Camera Lenses: Talking about angular size and resolution based on photos of my back yard.
-- Holiday Gift Physics: The Flying Turtle Scooter: SteelyKid has one of…
drorzel | November 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of physics-y posts over at Forbes:
-- Why Scientists Should Study Art And Literature: My big defense of "the humanities," explaining why those subjects are worth studying even if you plan to go into a STEM field instead. I'm very happy with how this came out.
-- Baseball Physics: How Batters Beat The Best Computers: In honor of the World Series. "How" here means "look, they do this"-- I don't have a detailed explanation of the mechanics that make it all work.
-- Football Physics (With Bonus Rugby): The Physics Of Bouncing Balls: Mostly about a really cool try in the…
drorzel | October 30, 2015I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:
-- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:
It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…
drorzel | October 27, 2015I was out of town last week, and doing talk prep leading up to that, so it's been a little while since my last collection of Forbes links. Here's the latest from over there:
-- Football Physics: The Forces Behind Those Big Hits: A look at force, momentum, and acceleration in tackling.
-- The Science Of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: What Is Quantum Harmonic Oscillation? A question on Twitter provides an excuse to use some video of The Pip bouncing on playground equipment to discuss the physics of the harmonic oscillator in both classical and quantum forms.
-- The Science Of Alternate Worlds: The…
drorzel | October 19, 2015It's been a while since I did it, but on a few occasions in the past, I've done posts here titled "Who Are You People?" asking readers to comment and say something about themselves. This is not remotely scientific, as a survey of blog readership, though.
Happily, an actual scientist is stepping up for this: Dr. Paige Jarreau, known to Twitter as FromTheLabBench and author of a blog by that name is a postdoc at LSU studying science communication, with a focus on social media. She's put together a reader survey and recruited a bunch of bloggers to promote it, including yours truly.
The survey…
drorzel | October 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of science-y blogging at Forbes:
-- Football Physics: Deflategate Illustrates Key Concepts: In which I use the ever-popular silly scandal over deflated footballs as an excuse to talk about three-body recombination.
-- The Annoying Physics Of Air Resistance: Air resistance is an annoyance to be abstracted out in intro physics classes, but looking for its influence with video analysis is kind of fun.
-- How NASA's Viking Mars Probes Helped Prove Einstein Right: We think of missions to Mars as primarily about searching for life, but they have also helped test fundamental…
drorzel | September 25, 2015Another collection of posts over at my blog for Forbes:
-- Wormholes, Monopoles, And Weyl Fermions: Making Exotic Physics Inside Ordinary Matter: A sort of deep background look at what makes condensed matter cool. Drawing heavily on Jimmy Williams's talk at the Schrodinger Sessions.
-- Why Does My Car Change Color In The Morning?: SteelyKid pointed out that my car appeared paler than normal in the morning, and explaining why suggested a quick optical physics post.
-- Football Physics: Nobody Catches The Ball At Its Highest Point: My Giants frittered away a lead against the Falcons over the…
drorzel | September 14, 2015I have once again fallen down on the job, or at least the part of it that involves letting ScienceBlogs readers know what I've been posting at Forbes. I blame the Labor Day holiday and the start of school.
Anyway, it's been a bit over two weeks since the last round-up, so a bunch of new posts:
--Physics: Complicating Everything Since The 1600's: A look at the subtle and picky issues that need to be addressed before you can claim to have definitively tested something in physics.
--A Qualified Defense Of "Science Literacy": A bunch of people on blogs and Twitter were hating on the science…
drorzel | August 28, 2015I seem to be settling into a groove of doing about two posts a week at Forbes, which isn't quite enough to justify a weekly wrap-up, but works well bi-weekly. (I'm pretty sure that's the one that means "every two weeks" not "twice a week," but I always struggle with that one...) Over the last couple of weeks, I've hit a wide range of stuff:
-- Planning To Study Science In College? Here's Some Advice Pretty much what it says on the label. I saw a bunch of "advice to new students" posts, and said "Oh, I should do one of those..." so I did.
-- The Physics of Star Trek: Teleportation Versus…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…
drorzel | July 10, 2015The big development of the week is that I bought a new car, as seen in the featured image. This ate up most of Tuesday, but I still got some quality physics blogging in over at Forbes:
-- The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors: A look at two quantum-mechanical phenomena and one quirk of biology that can be used to make people see colors.
-- Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics: An update of an old post here, Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics. You can see from the titles that, in the intervening five-and-a-half years, I've managed to simplify quantum mechanics by…
drorzel | July 3, 2015Another busy week of physics-y blogging over at Forbes. I'm pretty bad about remembering to post pointers to individual posts here, but I can probably just about manage to do a weekly links dump of what I've been posting.
-- What's The Point Of Science Without "Eureka!" Moments? Picking up on a conversation I had at Convergence, about whether there's any point in doing experiments whose outcome won't be a surprise.
-- Should We Have An Institute For Low-Energy Fundamental Physics Picking up a bit from one of the Convergence talks, where Savas Dimopoulos suggested forming an institute to…
drorzel | June 5, 2015I'm massively short on sleep today, and wasn't going to blog until I saw somebody on Facebook mention that June 5th 1995 is the date of record for the first Bose-Einstein condensate at JILA in Boulder. I couldn't let that pass, so I wrote it up for Forbes:
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995, I was a young grad student having just finished my second year at Maryland, and one morning I packed into the conference room at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg (where I worked in the group of Bill Phillips) with most of the rest of the Atomic Physics…
drorzel | May 31, 2015Over at Wired, Rhett has a post providing mathematical proof that he takes too many photos. As is traditional, he includes homework at the end of the post, specifically:
Now it is your turn. Find the number of photos you have taken each year. Is it possible for you to detect changes in your life by significant changes in the image rate? Maybe you purchased a new phone or had a new addition to your family which resulted in an increase in images. That would be cool if you could see that in your data.
Well, I can't really resist a challenge like that, so I went looking at my own photo…