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Physics Blogging Round-Up: December

By drorzel on January 13, 2017.

This one's late because I acquired a second class for the Winter term on very short notice. I was scheduled to teach our sophomore-level "Modern Physics" class, plus the lab, but a colleague who was scheduled to teach relativity for non-majors had a medical issue, and I'm the only other one on staff who's ever taught it, so now I'm doing two courses instead of one. Whee!

Anyway, here are my December posts from Forbes:

-- Science Is Not THAT Special: Another in a long series of posts grumbling about the way we set science off from other pursuits and act as if the problems facing it are unique. In reality, a lot of what we talk about as issues of science education are challenges faced by pretty much every other profession as well, with less hand-wringing.

-- The Surprisingly Complicated Physics of Sliding On Ice: Revisiting that time a couple of years ago when I wrote a bunch about the physics of luge, this time talking about a much more basic question: Why is ice slippery?

-- "White Rabbit Project" Physics: G-Forces: I had a bunch of conversations with the producers of the new Netflix show "White Rabbit Project" a year or so ago, and some of what we talked about turned into an episode on "g-forces" in acceleration.

-- ALPHA Experiment Shines New Light On Antimatter: The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has done the first spectroscopy of antihydrogen. It's pretty rudimentary by the standards of precision measurement folks, but still an important step.

-- What Should You Expect From Low-Energy Physics In 2017? It's Hard To Say: I was reading posts about (high-energy) physics news to look for in 2017, and realized I couldn't write an AMO physics equivalent. So I wrote about why I couldn't make predictions about my home field.

So there, two weeks into January, is what I wrote about in December. I've got a couple of posts up already this month, but we'll save them for the January recap, which I'll try to get posted before March. No promises, though, because this extra class has thrown things into disarray...

Tags
Atoms and Molecules
Blogs
Experiment
Forbes Recap
Physics
Science

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