Category: Physics World
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A black hole in a bathtub and other analog experiments
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Studying impossible systems with analogues How do you study a phenomenon that cannot be replicated on Earth? You study one that has nothing to do with it, but looks…
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How physics and biology work together to understand cell organization
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Cells get organized How researchers probe the physics of motion, communication and organization in cell networks, and how understanding these systems could help us tackle serious issues in medicine…
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The physics of dinosaurs!
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Like many (most?) of us, I was a huge dinosaur fan as a kid. I read every horrible, outdated book I could get my hands on. I read Robert Bakker’s…
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Could gravity have mass?
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Might gravity have mass? From Physics World: When confronted with something unexplained in the data, scientists face several possibilities. Maybe there’s an error and the result is spurious. Maybe…
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I Love Q, and now you can too!
I wrote a feature story for Physics World on an interesting little discovery about neutron stars, but unfortunately the article wasn’t in their free online edition. HOWEVER, the editors have kindly let me repost the article here in PDF format for free download! (Here’s the summary I wrote a few weeks ago.) Physics World is…
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The three little words every pulsar wants to hear
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! UPDATE: you can now download this article in PDF format! See the follow-up post or the update below.] I can’t help falling in Love with Q From Physics World: The…
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We are bound by symmetry
Physics is largely a matter of finding patterns in natural processes and translating that to mathematical expression. That’s a horribly oversimplified view, of course, but there’s no question that physics (and other branches of science) seeks to find symmetries. The huge successes of modern particle physics have largely arisen from identifying symmetries — and when…
Bowler Hat Science 