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What Do You Mean, The Universe Is Flat?, Part 1
The universe is three-dimensional. The universe is four-dimensional—three for space, one for time. The universe has nine, or ten or eleven dimensions. Matter curves spacetime. The universe is flat. The...
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Cool Math & Physics Blogs
From time to time, I’ve done something that could be construed as blogging for years now (at my web site, sciencewriter.org), but I am still a blogosphere novice. As far as I understand, it is good...
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The Information: James Gleick Chats with Robert Krulwich
James Gleick is best known for his groundbreaking bestseller Chaos, and has also authored inspired biographies of Newton and Richard Feynman. His new book, The Information, came out earlier this year...
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Strings, Geometry, and the Ultimate Reality: The Debate
Can strings be the ultimate constituents of the universe–more fundamental than matter or energy, and even than space or time? If they’re not made of matter or energy, what are they, then? If you look...
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What Do You Mean, the Universe Is Flat?, Part 2: In Which We Actually Answer...
Stand up. Walk 10 feet straight ahead. Turn left by 90 degrees. Walk another 10 feet. Again, turn left by 90 degrees. Do it for a third time: walk. then turn left. Now the next time you walk 10 feet...
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Project Polymath: Collaborative Mathematics through Blogs
[This article was originally posted on ScientificAmerican.com on March 17, 2010 and I am shamelessly recycling it here] In the mid-20th century the encyclopedic works of French mathematician Nicolas...
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Fox Commentator Distorts Physics
This is not a climate science blog, nor is it a political or media critique blog. But it does cover physics, so I’d like to get some physics facts straight. On the August 6 edition of Fox and Friends...
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A Galactic Challenge: How Would You Teach Left from Right to an Alien...
The concept of handedness—of left and right, say, or of clockwise and anti-clockwise—is deceptively simple. In fact, I think it is among the most subtle in all of science and mathematics. In this post...
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The Lede Desk: Fighting the Scourge of Boring Writing
It was a dark and stormy night in New York City, so why was I instead slouching on my couch in sunny Rome? Because I was concocting a weather report-anecdote-question-postural opening for this blog...
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Galactic Challenge, Part II: The Richard Feynman Files
In a recent post, I proposed a riddle on handedness and how one could communicate one’s notions of left and right to faraway aliens. It should perhaps surprise no one that the way I formulated the...
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Galactic Challenge Part III: The “Easy” Solutions
Which hand is this? Scores of readers responded to my Galactic Challenge (proposed in Part I of this series), with lots of cool ideas. The challenge was to explain our concept of left and right to far...
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Why There’s No Such Thing as North and South
Spot the cultural bias The human mind often confuses familiarity with understanding. You’ve learned the basics of a field. You’ve memorized the rules and used them so many times they have become second...
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Archimedes and Euclid? Like String Theory versus Freshman Calculus
Archimedes spiral imaged in UV rays, from the Archimedes Palimpsest, which will be showcased next month at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore The archetype of the science genius didn’t use to be...
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Superluminal Neutrinos Would Wimp Out En Route
The heat is on, too [Note: October 5 update and clarification added at the bottom] Neutrinos that go beyond light speed? Not so fast, say two theoretical physicists. In a terse, peremptory-sounding...
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The Periodic Table, and Why Batteries Don’t Work the Way You Think
The chemical elements—the varieties of atoms existing in nature and even some that are manmade—are an endless source of fascination. But something about them remains mysterious to most people, perhaps...
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“‘We Hate Math,’ Say 4 in 10 — a Majority of Americans”
How did I miss this until now? This clip has apparently been making the rounds of the Interwebs for years, but I couldn’t resist posting it after I saw it on Facebook this morning. I have no idea where...
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On the Physics Nobels, The Atlantic Gets Dark Energy All Wrong
Let's keep it within the galaxy, Jim The piece run by The Atlantic last week on the Nobel Prizes for Physics, sadly, contained a number of misleading or inaccurate statements on physics and cosmology....
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The Cosmic Magnifying Lens
Objects may be closer than they appear; in the distant universe, objects are, in a sense, even farther than they appear The observable universe is one big, giant magnifying lens. At large distances,...
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A Step-by-Step Guide to Cosmology’s Best-Kept Secret
How far is each of these galaxies? Appearances may deceive. In my previous post, I described the little-known and somewhat counterintuitive idea that objects in the distant universe appear larger and...
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The Man Who Put the “Big” in “Big Bang”: Alan Guth on Inflation
On the night of December 6, 1979–32 years ago today–Alan Guth had the “spectacular realization” that would soon turn cosmology on its head. He imagined a mind-bogglingly brief event, at the very...
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Where’s My Higgs? LHC Physicist Joe Lykken Speaks
On December 13, CERN will release the results of a new data analysis in the search for the Higgs boson. at the LHC. As I was reporting my article, which appeared today, on December 7 I spoke on the...
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Waiting for the Higgs, With the Man Who Built the LHC
Lyn Evans led the design and construction of CERN's Large Hadron Collider They call it “the machine.” Thousands of physicists working at the LHC are looking for the Higgs boson and other new...
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The Reawakening of X-Ray Delta One
–Come in, Dave. Dave, come in. Do you read me, Dave? Please come in, Dave. –Wh… where am I? –I am glad you are waking up, Dave. Your vital signs were fairly normal but I was having difficulties...
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Book Review: Our Magnetic Earth, by Ronald Merrill
A magnetic sense is now well documented in dozens of animal species. It turns out that tracking the geomagnetic field—that same invisible thing that points compasses—is handy for life, in lots of...
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The Courage to Be Wrong: Reading the Biography of Stephen Hawking
In July 2010, the editorial department of Scientific American—where at the time I was on staff—received a review copy of a book was slated to come out in September. It was a slim, drab-looking,...
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