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September 2008 Link Archives
Journey to the Center of the Neutron
Focus is the Physical Review's monthly look at interesting papers, explained with less jargon and complexity. Journey to the Center of the Neutron explains a little bit about where different quarks are concentrated within a neutron, which is both very interesting and a recent topic of ours!
Space X Falcon 1 Launches Successfully
The Space X Falcon 1 rocket finally made it's way into space yesterday after it's three previous defeats. Most interesting thing here is the video from the launch which was broadcast from where their employees were also watching the rocket's progress and you can hear them cheer it on. It's an amazing thing for me to watch stage one separation for this rocket - it must be so much more amazing to watch it after building the thing.
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Doomsday Has Already Occured (part 2)
The media has never been misinformed before, right? Wrong. Jennifer covers fallout from the 1999 turn-on of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Long Island, NY. It all sounds too familiar. Funny how no one remembers any black holes or strangelets...
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That's the word from CERN today. Between cracking open sector 3-4 to take a look at the magnet failure and the winter shutdown due to higher energy costs, the LHC won't see another beam until early spring 2009. Gordon Watts has the usual details on work likely to take place over the winter as well as a healthy dose of optimism.
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The Nature of the Universe, etc
From Friday: Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette had a little
conversation on bloggingheads.tv about the structure of the universe,
the LHC, calculus and poker. Now, perhaps they're just very used to
talking with each other but this was by far the most informative episode
I've seen from bloggingheads. There's something to be said for
how smart people can talk casually and have interesting things flow forth!
It's an hour long so if you're short on time I recommend the first two segments on the Higgs and what the universe is made of, about 15 minutes total.
It's an hour long so if you're short on time I recommend the first two segments on the Higgs and what the universe is made of, about 15 minutes total.
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Peter Woit's blog was filled with good physics stuff today, including this link to video lectures from the Institute of Advanced Study.
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Wilczek at the Commonwealth Club
Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics and author of the recently-published The Lightness of Being, will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 25th. Leave a comment if you plan on going - I'll be there!
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Scientists are Journalists at the NYTimes
Unlike many publications which seem to favor journalists who can spin the most sensational story (actual or fabricated) from the LHC turn-on, the New York Times uses Brian Greene to explain what the LHC is, what it does and what it might do.
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Swans on Tea rounds up multiple doomsday events in history where we have (presumably) all died. There is some excellent crackpot physics in these predictions.
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Cosmic Variance is live-blogging the Large Hadron Collider turn-on event. Keep this in mind: if they're still blogging, the world has not ended yet.
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Graphene for the 2008 Nobel Prize Win?
Speculation for the upcoming Nobel Prize this year is focusing on the two scientists who discovered Graphene. They were recently awarded the Europhysics Prize, commonly thought of as a precursor to the Nobel Prize later that year.
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The story of two Ph.Ds enlisted by the defense department to figure out just how difficult it would be for an 'Nth Country' to build their own atomic weapon without the aid of any secret documents. Assumes (and this is a big one) access to a source of plutonium.
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An excellent writeup comparing the science sides of both presidential
candidates. Admittedly, I was planning on doing the same thing but I
dawdled about for too long and got scooped by Jennifer. Plus she ends with some really awesome thoughts on Obama. Additionally, a summary on Cosmic Variance.
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A Short James Clerk Maxwell Bio
Yahoo News has a short bio of James Clerk Maxwell, someone you borrow a number of equations from but don't know a lot about otherwise.
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Another impressive series of photos from The Boston Globe's Big Picture including the many different facets of preparing the next shuttle mission; fixing and improving the Hubble Space Telescope.
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