Physics
Just a note, awaiting for my submission to the arxiv, to mention that my request here for a ghost writer to help me put together a proceedings paper for the PIC 2009 conference has been successful.
The paper (here in the version which will be published) has me listed as author, but the real author of the text and layout is the one I acknowledge at the end, Eleni Petrakou. She put together a very clean article, which required almost no editing on my part. Thanks to her, I did not let the PIC09 organizers down and actually submitted what they asked -albeit with a few days of delay. I would not…
Have you ever caught yourself wondering, upon observing a seemingly utterly unlikely coincidence, whether there was anything supernatural at work that made it happen ? I would guess that all of us, even the most rational thinkers, have caressed that thought for a minute, at least once. A few typical examples can be given of situations which one apparently fails to ascribe to natural causes:
1) Grandma dreams of her deceased husband spelling a sequence of numbers, and the following day she sees the same sequence coming out at Lotto. Was grandpa trying to let her win a large sum ? It will be…
Americans, but in general scientists, and science-lovers of any country, should be proud of the achievements of the Tevatron collider, the 2-TeV proton-antiproton collider build over a quarter of a century ago under the prairie of Batavia (IL), and which is still the world's most powerful, and may I say successful, particle accelerator ever built by humans.
Ok, I know I will now enrage the supporters of electron-positron machines, in particular the one which discovered the charm quark and the tau lepton, or the ones which uncovered many mysteries of electroweak interactions in the nineties.…
"Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernencko: these three premiers of Soviet Union unexpectedly died around 1984, such that Gorbachev could lead the process that ended with the fall of Soviet Union, such that the US congress stopped funding the SSC, such that the Higgs was not discovered.
According to the new theory of backwards causation, you should be proud of having destroyed communism."
Alessandro Strumia (in a comment here). The sentence can only be appreciated fully if you have followed the debate on Nielsen's paper. See the post where the comment appeared, and Overbye's article here.
Many thanks to Dennis for linking, from the NYT site, an article I wrote one year ago to comment a crackpotty paper by an otherwise esteemed scientist.The essay just appeared on the New York Times site is excellent, as always with Overbye, but it is also way more balanced than my rather vitriolic attack on the theory of backward causation and, in particular, the idea that one should use the Large Hadron Collider to test it by deciding to run or not to run based on the turn of a card.I do not have much to say one year after the fact, but since I honestly believe my early piece is worth a read…
The web site of the Cornell preprint archive, arxiv.org, says it best: successful submissions to the preprint archive are a source of considerable pride (darn it, the page with the exact statement is only available just after you submit a paper, so I cannot quote it literally here since my browser has by now forgotten it!).
I am indeed as proud as a first-timer, despite the fact that spires lists 416 papers with my name on the front page, a couple dozens of which as only author. The reason is that this morning, after ten days of work which I had expected to be three and which felt like a…
Ah, the pleasure of study! I had forgotten the immense intellectual pleasure one may derive by reading a stimulating, informative book. And if half a lifetime has passed from the last time you studied something, and what is left in your brain of it is just Culture, then reading it back again combines the pleasure of the discovery (a rediscovery, in this case) with the one of putting things in perspective, combining the bits of information you recollect with all the knowledge you have acquired since the last time you put the book down.
I am currently reading Frederick James' wonderful book "…
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, by Graham FarmeloBasic Books, 2009
When Niels Bohr calls you strange, you know you're in rare company. Niels Bohr, as director of one of the great institutes of theoretical physics, came to know almost every one of the oddballs who populated the early 20th century physics community, and he rated Paul Dirac as "the strangest man" he ever met. Hence the title of Graham Farmelo's excellent new biography of this major physicist.
Dirac's eccentricity was due to his extreme reticence in conversation, and his apparent inability to…
It is easy to marvel at Einstein's relativity theory. It is less easy to really understand relativity. At least so it seems. Understanding relativity requires abilities in predicting with confidence the outcomes of relativistic experiments. For that you need a PhD in physics. Right?
I believe this to be a too pessimistic thought. Special relativity forces you to abandon some deep-rooted concepts about time and simultaneity, yet once you have accepted this, Einstein's theory is remarkably simple and elegant. In a recent blog entry, I made the case that the essence of relativity can be…
There are many super microscopes around the globe but they are not like the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). This new source has become the brightest of them all since August 2007. Some say it is more like a laser light than a flashllight in comparison with others.
"In reaching this milestone of operating power, the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is providing scientists with an unmatched resource for unlocking the secrets of materials at the molecular level," said US Department of Energy's William Brinkman. SNS…