By Alan Reifman, Non-Physicist
The Pope of Physics is a 2016 biography of Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), written by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin. Segre's uncle Emilio was a student of Fermi's in Rome, whereas Hoerlin's father knew Fermi from Los Alamos, New Mexico in the post-World War II years. I began reading the book earlier this year, before I knew that the movie Oppenheimer was coming out. Both The Pope of Physics and…
Vox provides a very clear explanation of Henrietta Leavitt's 1908 discovery that allows us to estimate the distance to stars and galaxies. The book Einstein's Greatest Mistake (which I previously reviewed here ) also discusses Leavitt's contributions (pages 137-142). This section of the book explains why stars differ in their degree of pulsation: "We're used to our sun shining pretty evenly, at…
The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three researchers for their work in quantum entanglement and its applications. This posting from Daily Kos features a compilation of links, explanations, video tutorials, and other material pertaining to the prize-winning research. I wrote a watered-down introduction to quantum entanglement back in 2005, which is available here .
My friend Alan Nathan, a retired professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and one of the leading experts on the physics of baseball, appeared on the Society for American Baseball Research's SABRcast several weeks ago. The archived audio is available here (you have to scroll down a bit when the new page comes up). Professor Nathan discusses both historical and current…
David Bodanis begins his 2016 book Einstein's Greatest Mistake with a depiction of a once-great scientist who had become a forlorn figure in his later years. He was usually alone when he walked home after a day at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, isolated intellectually and socially from other scientists, many of whom "no longer took his ideas seriously" (p. xii). How…
Vox explains "Why ski jumpers hold their skis in a V," as opposed to the older style of keeping their skis parallel ( link ).
Vox explains the climate-change modeling -- "account[ing] for the roiling randomness present in everything from materials to the motion of the atmosphere, and still mak[ing] useful predictions" -- that earned three researchers this year's Nobel Prize in physics.
The San Jose Mercury News reports on physicist Samantha Schultz's position as a pitching analyst with the Oakland A's Major League Baseball team ( link ). The following paragraphs from the article describe the kinds of things she does with A's pitchers: “One of my biggest strengths is to take this complicated stuff and put it into baseball language,” Schultz said. “It’s not like I’m on the mound…
For fans of American football, the New York Times has an article ( link ) on three physicists' explanation of why the axis of a spiral forward pass changes -- from nose pointing up at release to nose pointing down as the receiver catches the ball -- even though the laws of physics say the axis should remain the same.
The 7-10 split is when the only pins standing after a bowler's first shot of a frame are the leftmost and rightmost pins in the back row. It's obviously extremely difficult to knock out both pins on one's second shot, but until I saw this video from Wired , I didn't know how difficult. Professional bowlers, in fact, topple both pins for a spare less than 1 percent of the time! And the only reason…
Sean Carroll has a piece in the New York Times , arguing that physicists have largely lost interest in understanding the foundational principles of quantum mechanics. The article provides a clear overview of what Carroll considers the two outstanding issues remaining to be understood.
To mark the passing of Murray Gell-Mann , who died 10 days ago at age 89, I offer a link to this 2000 article from The Atlantic on the often-difficult working relationship between Gell-Mann and his CalTech colleague Richard Feynman. The article doesn't always portray Gell-Mann in a favorable light, but describes his brilliance and, in my view, brings him to life so that readers will feel like they…
If you were to leave the book The Cosmic Cocktail on your coffee table, any guests would likely think it pertained to bartending. However, this book by University of Michigan professor Katherine Freese, actually details the quest to learn what material comprises dark matter . Freese's preferred candidate for dark matter is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle or WIMP. Writes Freese: "A major…
Five-Thirty-Eight explains the data collection and processing technology behind the just-released "glowing-doughnut" image of a black hole. As the article notes, the black hole was not directly photographed. Rather, "The telescopes collected high-frequency radio waves from space, and four independent teams of scientists used algorithms to convert the radio signals into visual images." The article…
The Twitter feed MLB Barrel Alert provides a lot of data on how well the batter has gotten the barrel of the bat on the ball for each home run hit in the major leagues. The tweets provide, in visual form, home-run balls' launch angle, exit velocity, peak height, final distance, and time in the air. The pitch's velocity and type of pitch (e.g., fastball, slider) are also given. For reasons unknown…
Jorge Cham is the creator of PHD Comics and himself a Ph.D. holder from Stanford. Daniel Whiteson is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. Put the two together and the result is the book We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe . Part comic book, part physics and astronomy text, and part compendium of hit-or-miss jokes, No Idea reviews unanswered…
This new article explain's water's slipperiness in terms of density, chemical-bonding, and friction. There's even a theory that there are two kinds of water! The writer quotes James Kakalios, whose book on quantum mechanics and technology I previously reviewed here .
Two recent Nature articles offer possible progress in the quest to characterize dark matter. A Science Daily article quotes one of the authors, Tel Aviv University professor Rennan Barkana, to the effect that "the discovery offers the first direct proof that dark matter exists and that it is composed of low-mass particles." Massive particles -- the weakly interacting variety being known as WIMPs…
Via Peter Woit/Not Even Wrong, the Economist has an article on how elaborate experiments designed to test unified theories are not providing support for them .
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for their work on the detection of gravitational waves. The official award announcement is available here , whereas some background information on the discovery can be found in this prior posting .
Columbia University physicist Brian Greene recently brought an animation of the double-slit experiment to the CBS Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to mark the 90th anniversary of the study that helped launch the development of quantum mechanics. "The math of quantum physics... describes [the seemingly strange result of the double-slit experiment] perfectly," noted Greene, but arguments continue to…
A decade ago, two books for educated, lay readers attempted to poke holes in string theory: Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong (which I reviewed here ) and Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics (which I reviewed here ). While I can't claim with certainty that no books were published in this genre over the past decade that attempted to argue for string theory, I at least did not see any. That changed with…
Pete Heureux, a beach volleyball player with a degree in physics, analyzes the float serve for Volleyball Magazine . What I found most interesting was the information presented in Figure 7. Researchers had a machine deliver simulated serves, varying features of the ball itself (e.g., a honeycomb outer surface), along with contact speeds and angles, and the part of the ball struck. Serves with…
Dominic Walliman provides an eight-minute video entitled "The Map of Physics" to illustrate the different subdisciplines in the field and how they relate to each other.
Ethan Siegel writes in Forbes magazine that, despite results at the Large Hadron Collider falling completely in line with the Standard Model of particle physics, "there are a large number of observations that tell us quite clearly that there’s very likely more to the Universe than just the quarks, leptons and bosons of the Standard Model." Some of the five areas should be familiar, such as dark…