An unbearable pressure...

from xkcd.

Lisa Randall on Colbert

on the string theory note (wanted this separated from the previous post), here's colbert interviewing lisa randall. always fun when physics is made humorous (even if the physicists aren't particularly funny).

Colbert does astrophysics

to be an astrophysicist, you must:
1) ask questions
2) be open minded
3) know things
4) teach those things
colbert rocks my world.

Someone please try this:

determining the speed of light using your microwave oven and a chocolate bar.

Inflation Now and Then

there is a nice little essay in the current issue of nature physics, written by my man mike turner, entitled "cosmology: inflation alive and well." the essay discusses the birth of the inflationary paradigm over 25 years and the state of present research on the topic, but the reason i think it's a nice essay is because it highlights how much cosmology has changed in the last 25 years (since i was born!), and hints at possible changes ahead.

i also found this little gem, which - even if not quite as hilarious as the penning trap clip - still is pretty sweet, and goes well with the above article.

Physics Movies

[Courtesy of Mark J.] Hilarious stuff.

The Bourne Approximation
The Godfather Particle (or The Godfather, Particle II)
My Super Ex-Symmetry
Anyon Hall
The Vampire Laplace
Delta-function Force
Schrodinger's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Silence of the Lamb Shift
March of the Penguin Diagrams
Weekend at Bernoulli's
It's a Wonderful Half-life
Pulp Fictional Force
Bridge on the River Quark
The String
The Green Kilometer
Dial M-theory for Murder
The Graduate (Student)
Right Hand Rule Luke
Once upon a Spacetime in America
The Minkowski Candidate
Boundary Terms of Endearment
Colloquium for a Dream
The Big Bang Chill
Scherk
Abelian Ted's Excellent Adventure
The Big Lobochevsky
Riemann Holiday
The Usual SUSY
Citizen Kantor
Deriving Mrs. Daisy
2001: A Spacetime Odyssey
Laurent of Arabia
De Sitter House Rules
Milne Dollar Baby
Riemann Begins
Quantum Field of Dreams
The Rocky Kolb Horror Picture Show

Blog Rating

well, we've got nothing to worry about here. it's too bad, really. i've got to start kickin it up a notch, bad language wise.

symmetry Magazine Cover

too good to not post. (image credit: symmetry magazine)

The Search for Dark Energy

may's issue of symmetry magazine is a joy to read, it's got lots of good stuff, including a nice article about the search for dark energy (my current research area) and a nice stringy article featuring a debate between brian greene and lawrence krauss. always entertaining, those two. and, with cartoons by new yorker cartoonist roz chast, there's even something for those who refuse to read. (image credit: symmetry magazine)

Science Paparazzi

Stephen Jay Gould Speaks Out Against Science Paparazzi

CAMBRIDGE, MA-Paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould spoke out against the increasingly aggressive tactics of the paparazzi Tuesday, railing against "the reckless throngs of photographers that relentlessly hound America's top scientists."

this came up in a discussion today. definitely among the funnier of the onion's physics-related stories.

Electromagnetic Spectrum

today's xkcd.com image. check them out regularly, really funny stuff. click for larger image.

Philandering String Theorist Can Explain Everything

New Yorker Confusion

i know it's kinda cheap to not post for a few weeks and then steal posts from fellow bloggers. but i can't let this one go. (theoretical) physicists love to be photographed in front of their blackboards, full of seemingly incomprehensible squiggles. (i could pick on too many friends and colleagues, so in diplomatic physics spirit, here is feynman.) what's going on in the image above? it's not incomprehensible! as ryan points out, a second-year physics major can decipher the blackboard above: it displays a diagram of the decay of a neutron into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino (standard beta-decay, not even in quark notation), the schrödinger equation, the heisenberg uncertainty principle, einstein's mass-energy relation (in its incomplete form)... well, what's the fun in that? where is the mystery? we're supposed to be incomprehensible!

Physics Lectures

oh how familiar it all is, from all perspectives... (image credit: the physics teacher)

Best of Physics In the Onion

it's time to get back to the old classics: here are some of the gems of the onion physics articles. my absolute favorite is, bush finds error in fermilab calculations. here are some other great ones: evangelical scientists refute gravity with new "intelligent falling" theory (posted on sav sethi's door in the u of c research institutes), raging lunatic obviously took some advanced physics, christian right lobbies to overturn second law of thermodynamics, and world's top scientists ponder: what if the whole universe is, like, one huge atom?

"What shocks me about an electron in a Penning trap is..."

this is absolutely hilarious: conan o'brian and jim carrey talk quantum physics. credit goes here.

[penning traps are actually quite cool: at CERN they are used to store antimatter.]