Abstruse Goose: The Sliver of Perception

That vertical axis — the electromagnetic spectrum which is science-talk for light — actually goes from something like 3 x 102 to something like 3 x 1024 (in the same units), which is from radio waves, through microwaves, to infrared, to the visible (that tiny rainbow window there), to the ultraviolet, to xrays, to gamma rays. [...]

And the Winners Is

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was, in a way, a foregone conclusion. The 1998 discovery by two teams of scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—under the influence of something that scientists have shruggingly come to call dark energy, which later studies have revealed to comprise 72.8 percent of the universe—was one [...]

Abstruse Goose: Stop the Massacre

Our boy, AG, is referring to a joke:  a dairy farmer asks a physicist how to estimate milk production.  The physicist begins the calculations with, “Assume a spherical cow,” and takes it from there. Physicists are famous for this.  They call it simplifying the model.  Sometimes they have a problem that’s too complicated to be [...]

Abstruse Goose: Tempus Edax Rerum

Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you.  It just got me confused.  Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black [...]

Abstruse Goose: Partners

Theorists really do think this, that maybe every fundamental particle has a so-far-invisible partner.  The partners’ names are just the names of the regular particles only with an “s” in front: squarks, selectrons.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  in Switzerland is kicking up a lot of dust looking for them (and for another putative particle [...]

Groundwater and Gravity

4/20:   I write an email to a scientist.   I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill.  Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all [...]

Guest Post: Not So Fast

The news of a detection of faster-than-light speed neutrinos by the OPERA experiment stunned the physics and astronomy community last week.  I read the paper, and I listened to the talk from Geneva over the Web. This is seriously weird stuff! Faster-than-light speed neutrinos!? The talk was filled with wonderfully arcane geodetic methods for measuring [...]

What’s in a Name

The best thing that ever happened to the Big Bang is its name. For scientists, the acceptance of a scientific concept depends on its explanation of existing data, its prediction of observable phenomena, the observation of those phenomena, and the duplication of those results. But for non-scientists—well, for scientists, too—the popularity of a concept can come [...]

Is passion for science a heritable trait?

My dad and I share an obsession with endurance sports. We don’t just love to get outside and ride our bikes, we actually feel antsy and anxious if we go too many days without working up a sweat. As I’ve written elsewhere, our compulsion for exercise has a genetic basis. Dad and I probably have [...]

Science Metaphors (cont): Resonance

My mother was an old lady, she’d lived a good and useful life, and she died a year and ten days ago.  I hadn’t been keeping track of her death’s anniversary but I didn’t need to; I only had to figure out why I was walking around feeling, for no good reason, sad.  One of [...]