[I’m making an effort to avoid serious spoilers, especially in the main body of these comments, but I’m sure there are little ones there and more in the list of specific thoughts that follows.]

A week or two ago, I finally finished reading The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (as translated by Ken Liu). It was a fun story that touched on some neat ( Read more... )

So that physics announcement that I posted the rumors about happened, and it was indeed just as big of a deal as rumor had made it. Here are a few links I've found that summarize the results nicely:

• An overview for general audiences by Scientific American.
• A nice discussion of the details along with some reasons for the usual skepticism.
• An informal ( Read more... )

If you happen to be the sort to follow a few cosmologists on blogs or social media, you've probably seen rumors swirling around like mad for the past few days. I'm not sure if this was triggered by the Harvard press release promising that a "major discovery" in astrophysics would be announced Monday at noon, or whether that release was hurried out ( Read more... )

You've probably heard at some point that tides on Earth are mostly caused by the moon, along with some smaller but still noticeable effects from the sun. In other words, the two objects' tidal forces are comparably strong (rather than being many orders of magnitude different: Uranus doesn't appreciably affect our tides!). You've probably also heard ( Read more... )

I just received the American Physical Society's monthly newsletter, APS News. In the "Letters" section, they published a letter entitled "Nothing Wrong with Fewer Women Physicists" by someone names Jeffery Winkler from Hanford, CA. Winkler was evidently "shocked" by a February article about how encouraging women to pursue careers in physics is a ( Read more... )

Every time I start teaching quantum mechanics in intro physics, I wind up feeling a little disappointed. To most students it's just another set of equations to memorize; they don't understand how much of a radical departure it is from everything we knew before. I suppose that's inevitable to some degree, since modern kids are raised on a diet of ( Read more... )

I was thinking about color this morning (yes, I do these things), and I was struck by a disturbing thought: when did I last see violet? Not purple, which I see all the time, but actual violet. [I'm not the first person to wonder this: here's a very thorough discussionPurple, as you no doubt recall, is a compound color: it's what we perceive when we ( Read more... )

The rumors were true! Both experiments at the LHC that were searching for the Higgs announced discovery-level evidence early this morning. This is a Big Deal, even if we did pretty much expect that the LHC would produce a result like this eventually. There's a lot to say (and lots of good discussions out there at various technical levels), but for ( Read more... )

Wednesday may prove to be a very exciting day in physics: the two LHC teams searching for the Higgs boson are scheduled to give a seminar, and pretty much the entire particle physics community expects their announcement to amount to a discovery (though either experiment on its own may or may not pass the official threshold this time). This is a Big ( Read more... )

I am really excited by what I've heard about Planetary Resources, a private company that has just announced plans to mine near-earth asteroids for precious metals and other resources. Here's a write-up from the Bad Astronomy blog that goes into details: it sounds like these folks have a plausible business plan (as well as the necessary level of ( Read more... )