Science
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Vacation, all I ever wanted
OK, I’m off on vacation (holiday, as they call it in the UK). Lots of time to think, very little in front of a computer. Back in a week or so. In the meantime, congratulations to Janna and the other awardees, from the fqxi, who seem to have transcended their somewhat dubious funding source, and…
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Non-Gaussianity in Cosmology (on the Adriatic)
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I’m spending the week at the Workshop on Nongaussianity in Cosmology at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, just outside of Trieste, Italy. Just so you know I’m working hard, here’s the view from my room at the Adriatico Guest House that the ICTP runs: (More pictures here.) When I’ve got more time,…
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Majorana in superposition
This morning I found what is undoubtedly one of the weirdest papers ever to appear on the arXiv, “Ettore Majorana: quantum mechanics of destiny“, by O. B. Zaslavskii. On the one hand, it’s a short retelling of the life of Ettore Majorana, a major figure in the development of mid-20th-Century particle physics. On the other,…
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The size of the Universe
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I’m quoted today in article in New Scientist, “Universe Weighs in Surprisingly Light”. I spoke to the author, Zeeya Merali, last week about a recent article by Hans Fahr and Martin Heyl, in which they define a “radius of the universe” and therefore the amount of mass inside that radius. Because their calculation is done…
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Marx: Science and Paradox
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It is … paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things. –Karl Marx, Das Kapital, quoted by Francis Wheen in The Guardian. Or that objects in motion tend…
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Peer review
Scientists complain a lot about peer review. It’s a safe bet that most of us think that our papers are generally not improved in the process, but in the usual self-congratlulatory way, most of us probably think that we’re in the minority of good referees who actually make useful suggestions, or catch egregious errors. We…
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I thought that was my job
“Physics Elevated to an Art Form” — Oakley‘s new tag line.
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Alternative crackpots
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The New Statesman, a lefty British politics magazine (which just underwent a snazzy revamp), published a column by Ziauddin Sardar, an otherwise perceptive writer, entitled “When Knowledge is not the answer.” Without putting too fine a point on it, it is the stupidest essay I have read in a long time. He is responding to…
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