In the News
drorzel | March 10, 2006ScienceBlogs is well stocked with people who will comment at length on the latest news from biology or climate science, which is nice, because I don't usually feel moved to remark on those subjects. The large amount of quality commentary on those subjects does make me fell like I ought to make a point of commenting on physics-related news stories. Happily, there aren't nearly as many of those, so I can easily accomodate this with my relatively light posting schedule (light compared to some of my every-hour-on-the-hour colleagues-- don't you people have day jobs?).
There were a few science-…
drorzel | February 22, 2006Buried beneath some unseemly but justified squee-ing, Scalzi links to an article about "counterfactal computation", an experiment in which the group of Paul Kwiat group at Illinois managed to find the results of a quantum computation without running the computer at all. Really, there's not much to say to that other than "Whoa."
The article describing the experiment is slated to be published in Nature, so I don't have access to it yet, but I'll try to put together an explanation when I get a copy. The experiment involves a phenomenon know as the "Quantum Zeno Effect," though, which deserves a…
drorzel | February 20, 2006A couple of science-related items from the New York Times:
1) An article on the Cafe Scientifique phenomenon, in which scientists put on monthly get-togethers for the general public, where recent scientific research is explained in layman's terms. It's nice to be reminded that there's still interest in learning about science-- given the numbe of news stries about people rejecting modernity on the grounds that it's icky, it's easy to forget.
(Again, I'll mention that I was pleasantly surprised that twenty-odd people showed up for my "Weird Quantum Phenomena" talk, several of them taking notes…