How well verified is the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED)? If you ask this to most physicists one of the first things that comes to their mind is the agreement of QED’s theoretical calculation of the anomolous magnetic moment of the electron and the extremely precise measurement of this moment. In fact, last night, while [...]
I thought that Physical Review Letters had a policy about using new words in titles to papers. How then, did Cryptobaryonic Dark Matter by C. D. Froggatt and H. B. Nielsen get by the censors? It is proposed that dark matter could consist of compressed collections of atoms (or metallic matter) encapsulated into, for example, [...]
Comments are broken. I’m visiting Portland State Today and so probably won’t be able to fix until this evening/tomorrow. Update: Well it seems the problem is with my comment preview. So I’ve deactivated that and will be trying to get it running later. Update Update: I think I’ve got it all fixed. Not sure how [...]
My favoritest ( ) meeting SQuInT will be having it’s nineth conference in Albuquerque February 17-19. Whoop, another chance to visit the rattlesnake museum!
Jeff Hodges has put together a nice aggregater of physics blogs which he calls Mixed States.
Does God Play Dice? is not a treatise on religion and gambling, but is instead Gerard ‘t Hooft’s submission to Physics Today Physics World concerning the reconcilliation of quantum theory with general relativity. The most interesting part of this short note is not that ‘t Hooft comes out squarely on the side of hidden variable [...]
Been reading blogs too much when you should be doing work? Check out this cool application, Temptation Blocker (only for Windows): So, have a major deadline looming or ripe opportunity closing and just don’t have time to waste playing Half Life 2 or checking Bloglines one last time? Well then, add Half Life 2 and [...]
Ever wanted all of wikpedia on your computer? Well now you can with this XML dump of wikpedia.
Stephen Hawking, after being taken off his resperator, had to be resuscitated: “They had to resuscitate, and that panicked a few people,” Bristol told the audience. “But he’s been there before.” OK, there certainly is no debate: Stephen Hawking is more hard core than any other physicist out there. Hard core.
Quantum computation was put on the map, so to speak, with Peter Shor’s discovery in 1994 that quantum computers could efficiently factor numbers. It is interesting to contemplate how this discovery will be viewed in our distant future. We are now over ten years out from Shor’s discovery. Perhaps this is too short of time [...]
It looks like the decision on who will be running the Los Alamos National Lab is expected within the next week. Will the lab remain Californian, or instead become a Texan? Anyone want to make a bet?
This last Saturday I had the opportunity to go on my first ski trip of the season. Amazingly the northwest has been getting pounded by snow over the last few weeks. Now this posed a problem, because, as some of you may recall at the end of last season I did the stupidest thing I’ve [...]
