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Interference with 10,000-Particle “Particles”: “Matter-wave interference with...
I’m teaching Quantum Optics this term, and one of my students picked “Atom Optics” off the list of suggested paper topics. When he asked for pointers, I said “You should check out the diffraction...
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SteelyKid, Scientist
One of SteelyKid’s classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent “new kinds of water.” The...
View ArticleMissing the Eureka Moment
Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on...
View ArticleScience at Bedtime
“Daddy? How do you make water?” “You mean, what is it made of?” “Yeah, what’s water made of?” “Hydrogen and oxygen.” “Oh. And what’s hydrogen and oxygen?” “They’re chemical elements.” “So, when we...
View ArticleOn “Excessive Technical Detail”
I’ve seen a few links passed around to this Tom Siegfried post about science literacy, which is mostly a familiar story about how polls show most Americans giving incorrect answers to science...
View ArticlePNAS: Grant Goodyear, Oil Industry Nuclear Physicist
I’ve decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to...
View ArticleAdvent Calendar of Science Stories 6: Party in Mesopotamia
Borne of the flowing water (…) Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag, Borne of the flowing water (…) Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag, Having founded your town by the sacred lake, She finished its...
View ArticleAdvent Calendar of Science Stories 17: Kickstarter in 1921
There’s no way I could possibly go through a long history-of-science blog series without mentioning the great Marie Skłodowska Curie, one of the very few people in history to win not one but two Nobel...
View ArticleAdvent Calendar of Science Stories 21: Hot and Cold
Another weekend day, another story I’m going to outsource a bit. In this case, to the original scientist, who at the time of his discovery was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Tanzania: In 1963, when I was...
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Thermal Thursday: How Good Is My Mug?
One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a Seek Thermal camera to use with my Android phone. This allows for a lot of idle physics-y fun, taking pictures of things in thermal mode. One idea...
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