From Floraidh
Bring me Schrödinger’s head!
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Tag Archives: physics
The Meanest Man in Math
The Epic Story of Johann Bernoulli.
No profession is free from the kind of miserable jerks who ruin it for everyone else. No intelligence level is either. When great intelligence, prestige careers, and big egos come together, things get ugly. Johann Bernoulli was, as a person, very ugly.
Relativity is Right on Time,…
Special relativity predicts that a twin in a high-speed rocket, as viewed by his Earth-bound brother, will have a slower-ticking clock. A precise test of this time dilation, first performed in 1938, involves observing the frequency shift—or “ticking” change—in the electronic transitions of fast-moving ions. An update of this type of experiment using lithium ions has now verified special relativity’s prediction with unprecedented accuracy—a result that provides additional constraints on quantum gravity models.
The virtues of old technology
Physics and Philosophy
Quantum Gravity Expert Says “Philosophical Superficiality” Has Harmed Physics
I was young in the sixties and seventies, and shared the dream of my generation: changing the world and make it more just and gentle. We lost. I did not know what to do next. I found physics, where, instead, revolutions succeed.
The dark side of a scientific hero
Mathematics from Eastern Europe
Reflections of the Polish Masters.
This reminded me of Ulam’s Adventures of a Mathematician, which I have read at least three times.
Why psychology is harder than physics
[Varying a lot of experimental parameters is] much easier to do in physics than psychology– physics apparatus is complicated and expensive, but once you have it, atoms are cheap and you can run your experiment over and over and over again. Human subjects, on the other hand, are a giant pain in the ass– not only do you need to do paperwork to get permission to work with them, but they’re hard to find, and many of them expect to be compensated for their time. And it’s hard to get them to come in to the lab at four in the morning so you can keep your experiment running around the clock.
How a microwave oven really works
In Throwback Thursday: The Physics of Hot Pockets.
And what they do well, and not so well.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 