I’ll be busy today, so talk among yourselves. In the meantime, here’s an animation created by moving carbon atoms around one by one with precise (and astounding) new technologies. As the BBC reports, Researchers at IBM have created the world’s smallest movie by manipulating single atoms on a copper surface. The stop-motion animation uses a […]
An unpublished capture of a particle collision from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider: h/t: List of X
It’s time for everyone to stop calling the Higgs boson the “God Particle”. For one thing, it seems to have been publisher’s trick to boost sales of a physics book by Leon Lederman (here at UC) and Dick Teresi. As the Telegraph reports, Lederman wrote in the book “God particle”: “This boson is so central […]
Well, I thought I’d seen it all, but this Japanese commercial for a smartphone, brought to my attention by alert reader Jon, beats all. It’s a huge xylophone, placed in a hilly Japanese forest, that plays Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring as a wooden ball rolls down it. Fantastic—do not miss this one! Imagine […]
I’ve finished the book Atoms and Eden, a series of interviews by Steve Paulson of luminaries in the science-and-religion debates. The book includes interviews with people on all sides, including Karen Armstrong, John Haught, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Jane Goodall, and so on. Judging by Amazon, the book hasn’t garnered much interest, but I’d recommend […]
Here’s a YouTube video that I’m sure will be called a fake. For one thing, the notes below say that the effect is visible only with the camera, and not with the naked eye. I’m not sure why that is, but I still think this is real. Maybe it’s just blind faith. . . . […]
Last July, physicists at CERN confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. Well, I thought they had confirmed it, but according to news sources today it’s been really, really confirmed. That puzzled me, but apparently at a meeting the new particle has been announced […]
This episode smacks a bit of internet drama, which I try to avoid, but it also bears on scientific discourse, censorship, and civility, and I wanted to say a few words. According to the “Arts Beat” site of the New York Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who organized a prestigious debate on the origins of the […]
by Matthew Cobb I have a student who is writing a dissertation about the evolution of opsins – molecules that respond to light, which we use to see with. These molecules apparently have their origins deep in evolutionary time, long before there were animals, perhaps going back to 3.5 billion years, shortly after the appearance […]
Well, TED has come down a long ways since it once presented a forum for quirky, advanced, and entertaining thinkers. In an effort to keep ahead of the intellectual tide, they’ve started incorporating substandard speakers, including woomeisters, and have spawned “TEDx,” local versions of TED talks. Those, too, reached their nadir with a TEDx talk […]
