Promoting the LHC with a New Age video
Last Friday I received an e-mail entitled “LHC video by Bob Dylan’s son.” When I clicked on the link inside, I thought the link was out of date. What appeared on my screen was not the Large Hadron...
View ArticleThe life and fate of a Soviet physicist
On 10 November 1937 during the Great Purge, Joseph Stalin’s secret police executed Lev Shubnikov on trumped-up charges of treason. Although he was only 36 at the time, Shubnikov had already made...
View ArticleWhat’s in a name?
Juliet answered her famous rhetorical question with: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo, her besotted interlocutor, promptly agreed. But the recent kerfuffle over...
View ArticleWaves, whales, and cosmic neutrinos
Waves appear early in most university physics courses. Richard Feynman introduced them halfway through the first volume of his Lectures on Physics. And if I remember correctly, my first term at...
View ArticleThe ingenuity of experimenters
The forerunner of the steam engine was the pressure cooker—or steam digester, as its inventor Denis Papin (1647–1712) called it. By keeping water in its liquid state at temperatures higher than its...
View ArticleFashionable physics
One of my favorite physicist bloggers, Doug Natelson of Rice University, once observed with mock exasperation: I used to think that I was the only condensed matter physicist not working on graphene....
View ArticleZapping zircons
Fans of Physics Today's Facebook page occasionally send me messages, most of which are requests for more information about something to do with physics. The one I received on Monday was no exception. A...
View ArticleThe case of the radioactive tuna
Earlier this week, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to a blog post entitled “Radioactive bluefin tuna caught off California coast.” As a keen consumer of sushi, she was alarmed. As a...
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