Category: Physics

Over at Information Processing, the bit processor, Steve, has an interesting post up about your chances of getting a faculty job in high energy theoretical physics. (In between the best posts on the financial turmoil around 1, 2, 3.) If you’re a high energy theoretical physics graduate student, and don’t want to get depressed today, I would recommend avoiding the post so as to keep up your illusion of safety, but if you want a good dose of reality, check it out.
Continue reading “Theoretical Physics Jobs. Now With Crazy Proposed Solutions!”

The physics blogosphere is abuzz about the start up of the large hadron collider. There is a hole in Texas which is very jealous. And of course, everyone is happy that the Earth was not destroyed or a bubble universe wasn’t created.
Continue reading “The Looming Danger”

Physics and Physicists points to an article: “The Einstein formula: E_0=mc^2 ‘Isn’t the Lord laughing?'” by L.B. Okun on confusion about Einstein’s famous mass and energy formula.

Abstract:The article traces the way Einstein formulated the relation between energy and mass in his work from 1905 to 1955. Einstein emphasized quite often that the mass $m$ of a body is equivalent to its rest energy $E_0$. At the same time he frequently resorted to the less clear-cut statement of equivalence of energy and mass. As a result, Einstein’s formula $E_0=mc^2$ still remains much less known than its popular form, $E=mc^2$, in which $E$ is the total energy equal to the sum of the rest energy and the kinetic energy of a freely moving body. One of the consequences of this is the widespread fallacy that the mass of a body increases when its velocity increases and even that this is an experimental fact. As wrote the playwright A N Ostrovsky “Something must exist for people, something so austere, so lofty, so sacrosanct that it would make profaning it unthinkable.”

Reminds me of a (apocryphal?) story my Physics 1 TA told me. He described how a friend of his, who was rather geekly looking, you known glasses with tape holding them together stuff, was walking down the street one day when a group of local yokels drove by. The group, spotting the weak geek sought immediately went into yokel mocking mode and so shouted at him “Hey geek! E equals MC squared!” The geek thought for a few seconds and yelled back “Only in the rest frame!”