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The Courage to Be Wrong: Reading the Biography of Stephen Hawking
In July 2010, the editorial department of Scientific American —where at the time I was on staff—received a review copy of a book was slated to come out in September.
Degrees of Freedom
The boundless dimensions of math and physics
The Sciences
Book Review: Our Magnetic Earth, by Ronald Merrill
A magnetic sense is now well documented in dozens of animal species. It turns out that tracking the geomagnetic field—that same invisible thing that points compasses—is handy for life, in lots of situations...
Space
The Reawakening of X-Ray Delta One
--Come in, Dave. Dave, come in. Do you read me, Dave? Please come in, Dave. --Wh… where am I? --I am glad you are waking up, Dave. Your vital signs were fairly normal but I was having difficulties reawakening you...
The Sciences
Waiting for the Higgs, With the Man Who Built the LHC
They call it “the machine.”Thousands of physicists working at the LHC are looking for the Higgs boson and other new particles, and many of them have contributed to building the gigantic detectors that are taking most of the media limelight these days.But humming 100 meters under the Franco-Swiss border is the apparatus that makes it all possible...
The Sciences
Where's My Higgs? LHC Physicist Joe Lykken Speaks
On December 13, CERN will release the results of a new data analysis in the search for the Higgs boson. at the LHC. As I was reporting my article, which appeared today, on December 7 I spoke on the phone with Joe Lykken, a Fermilab staff theoretical physicist...
Space
The Man Who Put the "Big" in "Big Bang": Alan Guth on Inflation
On the night of December 6, 1979--32 years ago today--Alan Guth had the “spectacular realization” that would soon turn cosmology on its head. He imagined a mind-bogglingly brief event, at the very beginning of the big bang, during which the entire universe expanded exponentially, going from microscopic to cosmic size...
The Sciences
A Step-by-Step Guide to Cosmology s Best-Kept Secret
In my previous post, I described the little-known and somewhat counterintuitive idea that objects in the distant universe appear larger and larger the farther they are, in a reversal of the usual rules of perspective...
The Sciences
The Cosmic Magnifying Lens
The observable universe is one big, giant magnifying lens.At large distances, objects appear to be larger than their true size, and the farther they are, the bigger they look.
The Sciences
On the Physics Nobels, The Atlantic Gets Dark Energy All Wrong
The piece run by The Atlantic last week on the Nobel Prizes for Physics, sadly, contained a number of misleading or inaccurate statements on physics and cosmology.Gregg Easterbrook, the journalist who wrote it, has a storied past as a science writer...
The Sciences
"`We Hate Math,' Say 4 in 10 -- a Majority of Americans"
How did I miss this until now? This clip has apparently been making the rounds of the Interwebs for years, but I couldn't resist posting it after I saw it on Facebook this morning.
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