Math and Physics
jlynch | May 7, 2009Mark Chu-Carroll has done it so that you don't have to ... read the Dembski & Marks paper that I mentioned a few days back. Shorter MC-C: "Same old rubbish." Read his full verdict here.
Update (5/11): Dembski "responds" (and apparently cannot bring himself to actually name who makes the criticism) and Mark sets him straight.
jlynch | November 22, 2008
The Tyndall Correspondence Project (of which I am a participant) has now gone online. Our aim is to follow in the footsteps of the Darwin Correspondence Project and transcribe the letters of the Irish physicist, John Tyndall. The site is a little bare at the moment, but more information and resources will be forthcoming.
jlynch | December 30, 2006This is kind of cool - pool shots in slow motion with thermal imaging.
(Seen on fark.com)
jlynch | November 19, 2006Bob Henderson is an 80 year old retired electrical engineer who thinks "Albert Einstein was a dunce." So convinced is he of this that he has written a third book on the subject: Einstein and The-Emperor's-New-Clothes Syndrome: The Exposé of a Charlatan. Notes the AZ Republic:
Henderson was, and is, qualified to be asking these questions because his work was science. He says he graduated second in his class from the University of Arizona in 1950 with a degree in electrical engineering. He then worked for RCA in New Jersey before returning home to work at Motorola. Some of his work was in the…
jlynch | July 25, 2006I was reminded of this by a recent post over at Crooked Timber. Cosma Shalazi's review of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science [amz] is titled "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" - I'd love to be able to stick that on a review!
jlynch | December 21, 2005Next semester I will be teaching Einstein's own account of relativity (amaz) in my HON 172 class. It will be interesting to see how that goes as it's not the easiest text in the world. Given that, the following caught my eye:
In a fitting cap to the World Year of Physics 2005, MIT physicists and colleagues from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) report the most precise direct test yet of Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc2.
And, yes, Einstein still rules.
The team found that the formula predicting that energy and mass are equivalent is correct to an incredible…