Bookanalia
The annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is always a great event, I highly recommend it to anyone in the area. This year’s edition is on April 20-21. I have a special honor, which really should...
View ArticleWhat “The God Particle” Hath Wrought
You’ve doubtless heard the joke: We can’t call the Higgs boson the “God Particle” any more, because now we have tangible evidence that it exists. But the label “God Particle,” attached to the poor...
View ArticleVolumes of Science
This weekend featured the latest edition of the LA Times Festival of Books, the largest book festival in the U.S., and a great celebration of the written word. The Saturday and Sunday festivities...
View ArticleCP Violation and the Information/Anti-Information Asymmetry
Do a physics experiment. Now take that experiment, change all the particles to antiparticles, and reflect the entire apparatus around some fixed plane. If you get an equivalent result, we say that the...
View ArticleNautilus
As the media/communication/intellectual discourse landscape changes rapidly beneath our feet in response to the internet revolution, it’s great to see innovative new projects come to life that seek to...
View ArticleMorgan, Jon, and the Mystifying Balloons
Morgan Freeman appears on the Daily Show to chat up his new movie, but Jon Stewart just wants to ask questions about physics and physicists. They are both fans! (Hat tip Megan Parlen.) The Daily Show...
View ArticleNew Video Project
Here’s an experimental project I’m involved in: a prospective web-based video series in which I talk to groups of people about exciting science topics. All very new and untested, but did one recording...
View ArticleThere Is No Classical World
Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter is a fun place. It’s led by people like John Preskill, Jeff Kimble, and Alexei Kitaev — some of the world’s great scientists — so you know the...
View ArticleThe Nobel Prize Is Really Annoying
One of the chapters in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is titled “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.” The first being dynamite, of course, and the second being the Nobel Prize. When I first read it I was...
View ArticleDon’t Start None, Won’t Be None
[Final update: DNLee's blog post has been reinstated at Scientific American. I'm therefore removing it from here; traffic should go to her.] [Update: The original offender, "Ofek" at Biology Online,...
View ArticleThe Spark in the Park
A few years ago, not long after we moved to LA, Jennifer and I got a call from some of the writers on the TV series BONES. There’s already a science component to the show, which features brainy...
View ArticleScience in the (Classic) Movies
Here’s something to help you get 2014 started off right: for all of January, Turner Classic Movies is turning its Friday Night Spotlight on “Science in the Movies.” Every Friday night they’ll be...
View ArticleParticle Fever: Catch It!
A brief search of the archives reveals that I truly have not done my job in plugging Particle Fever, the new documentary about particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. I guess it would have been...
View ArticleParticle Physicists and Cosmologists on Twitter
Katie Freese, a well-known particle cosmologist who has a new book coming out, was asking if I had an tips about publicity. Short answer: not really, no. I haven’t really figured that one out. But one...
View ArticleArrrgh Rumors
Today’s hot issue in my favorite corners of the internet (at least, besides “What’s up with Solange?”) is the possibility that the BICEP2 discovery of the signature of gravitational waves in the CMB...
View ArticleParticle Fever on iTunes
The documentary film Particle Fever, directed by Mark Levinson and produced by physicist David Kaplan, opened a while back and has been playing on and off in various big cities. But it’s still been...
View ArticleUnsolicited Advice: Becoming a Science Communicator
Everyone who does science inevitably has “communicating” as part of their job description, even if they’re only communicating with their students and professional colleagues. But many people start down...
View ArticleWarp Drives and Scientific Reasoning
A bit ago, the news streams were once again abuzz with claims that NASA was investigating amazing space drives that violate the laws of physics. And it’s true! If we grant that “NASA” includes “any...
View ArticleInfinite Monkey Cage
The Infinite Monkey Cage is a British science/entertainment show put on by the dynamic duo of physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince. It exists as a radio program, a podcast, and an occasional...
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