Tag: nuclear physics
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The lowdown on the highest energy light
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Incredible hulking facts about gamma rays From lightning to the death of electrons, the highest-energy form of light is everywhere For Symmetry Magazine: Gamma rays are the most energetic…
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Nuclear pasta and neutron stars
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The Inside of a Neutron Star Looks Spookily Familiar Exotic ultra-compressed matter can look like pasta, among other things For Nautilus: Hot fluids of neutrons that flow without friction,…
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Sinners in the hands of an angry GLaDOS
It’s one of those nagging thoughts many of us have had: is our existence a reality or an illusion? Philosophers and scientists have grappled with the question, though today much of the discussion focuses on a related question: do we live in a computer simulation? In my (first hopefully of multiple) essays for Aeon magazine,…
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Madame Wu and the backward Universe
(Since my weekly round-up experiment seems to have failed horribly, I’m going to try to go back to linking and summarizing individual articles I’ve written around the web on this blog. We’ll see if I keep it up!) Chien-Shiung Wu is one of those physicists that everyone should know about, but not enough do. A…
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A century of the Bohr atom
Many of us are familiar with the Bohr atom: a simple model with a nucleus and planet-like electrons orbiting in circular paths. It’s a useful picture, even though it’s not complete. Bohr proposed it in 1913, but it took about ten more years for physicists to work out why it worked — and to refine…
Bowler Hat Science 