My black holes class and other responsibilities ate my brain the last two weeks, so I forgot to post a “week in review” last week. So, here’s the highlights from the last two weeks. If it’s more heavily weighted toward black holes even than usual, that’s hardly surprising.

• Of fire and ice and Harlow Shapley (Galileo’s Pendulum): In 1918, a poet named Robert Frost met an astronomer named Harlow Shapley. The result, according to Shapley, was “Fire and Ice”. Most people probably don’t remember who Shapley was anymore, but in his day he was one of the most prominent astronomers, helping to map the galaxy and measuring its size.
• Portrait of a black hole, part 1 (Galileo’s Pendulum): When trying to understand the curved four-dimensional spacetime of gravity, we have to resort to metaphor and simplified pictures. Here’s my attempt to describe spacetime around a (non-rotating) black hole using a dynamic analogy: a flowing current, against which objects must move.
• A scientific love affair (Galileo’s Pendulum): Like many (most?) little kids, dinosaurs captured my imagination, sparking me to think about science for the first time. However, black holes, pulsars, and other products of extreme gravity inspired me in a different direction when I was in sixth grade. Here’s a partial story of my love affair with gravity.
• The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics: the Higgs boson (Galileo’s Pendulum): The 2013 Nobel Prize was awarded this week to François Englert and Peter Higgs for the theoretical prediction of what is now known as the Higgs boson. This post celebrates that award, but also delves into how the Nobel Prize fails. In promoting the “lone (male) genius” view of science and thereby failing to acknowledge contributions by the others who deserve recognition for the Higgs boson, the Nobel Prize does a disservice to that which it seeks to honor. Bonus: what the Nobel Prize has to do with the leg lamp from A Christmas Story.
• Measuring a superconducting qubit by manipulating its environment (Ars Technica): Now for something completely different! Quantum systems are complicated, involving interactions between the objects we want to study, the environment of those objects, and our measuring apparatus. A new experiment shows a way of measuring an object’s properties indirectly by performing environmental measurements instead. The result is a picture of a superconducting quantum bit (or qubit) as it evolves in time.