Well, I dashed off a lecture summary to be printed out in time for the public lecture on Thursday: Title: Strings Everywhere? Hold it right there. What is the meaning of the title? I’m riffing on two things, one physical and the other sociological. The first, vastly more important theme … Click to continue reading this post
Well, I have to face up to it. There’s been this embarrassing thing all around town here in Aspen that I have not told you about, but I have to get it done this week. Everywhere you go around town -and I mean everywhere- there are little piles or pinboards … Click to continue reading this post
New Scientist has an article by Stephen Battersby on their top ten weirdest cosmology theories. My first thought, beore reading the article was that they were going to have a lot of fun with this, but they seem to be rather conservative about their definition of “weird”. This means that … Click to continue reading this post
Dear Reader, I’m desperately wracking my brain to find some science in this, but I cannot. Nope, reading the article does not help either. Nevertheless, it is in New Scientist (a fact that means nothing on its own, from past experience – they’ve a technology for it’s own sake focus … Click to continue reading this post
I’ve no idea what they were doing (I’ll try to find out and let you know), since I was at the concert, but it sure looked liked they were having fun out there in the Wednesday kids’ science picnic at the ACP: Two weeks ago, apparently they had the “Physics … Click to continue reading this post
The wild flowers seem to have peaked a lot earlier this year, probably due to a change in the rainfall pattern. Up on the way to Buckskin Pass yesterday, there were more deadheads than blooms. Perhaps other trails were doing better (such as the Cathedral Lake trail… look at the … Click to continue reading this post
Since I wrote an article about this last year for the non-expert to get some idea of what the discussion was about, let me first point you to it via this link. Since in that article, by way of illustration of the “Landscape” idea, I used a picture of the … Click to continue reading this post
In a rather splendid development, there’s been an arrangement made between the Aspen Center for Physics and the Aspen Music Festival and School, which (you might recall from a post of mine a long time ago) are in close proximity to one another. The result of the arrangement is that … Click to continue reading this post
Close-packed volleyball helps: After a long day of a two and a half hour long administrative meeting followed by then locking myself away in my office from lunchtime to picnic time to calculate away (with frustratingly mixed results… sigh…), it was fun to play with the other physicists, their partners, … Click to continue reading this post
So it was all quiet in the Aspen Center for Physics offices. Why? Tuesday family picnic outside…! Was it quiet out there? No! There were science experiments with the food of course! How did they get the diet cokes to erupt like that? The instigator of this was Phenomenologist Josh … Click to continue reading this post
You know, I’ve been calculating all day (and oooohhhh, what a calculation. I shall try to tell you about it sometime) and so when I did the previous post about that comic strip, and pointed to the site, I did not actually look through the site for more examples. Luckily, … Click to continue reading this post
From this comic strip: Spotted at Pharyngula. -cvj
People are excited about ethanol as an alternative to gasoline. You can just grow the basic sources needed as grain, for example. Can this solve all of our problems? Careful now: Do you know how much grain it takes to make the ethanol needed to fill up the 25 gallon … Click to continue reading this post
Here is my report on how the challenge was met. Well, we started shortly after 5:00pm. About 14 people were present, which was fun since everybody rotated in periorically, to give everyone a touch of the ball. This was welcome rest for the people who rotated out as well. Remember … Click to continue reading this post
A commenter, Edward Hessler, asked for a bit of explanation about what the difference is between a phenomenologist and a more “formal” theorist, since I recently mentioned some of us overlapping during workshops at the Aspen Center for Physics. I offered this (see below) as a starter explanation. (Feel free … Click to continue reading this post
