Skepticism’s healthy. These days we don’t have to believe a news story. But to get the benefits of skepticism we need to check stories out. A good-news story in a past Science Seen post has a simple message: Hot water can cure the common cold. Some who read the post or social-media re-posts were skeptical. […]
Think for a moment about the big picture of physics research. New physics comes from analyzing strange events. That’s why the biggest and most expensive experiments create strange events. Such events usually happen in small volumes for brief times. For example, the $10-billion-dollar 27-km-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) mashes two protons into a subatomic-sized volume […]
Physics beat out chemistry to become the Senior Science in the second physics revolution starting around 1900. A hundred years ago this revolution held huge promise. Now historians of science call it the Unfinished Revolution. What went wrong? It is a strange but, in the end, illuminating five-part story. Part One: In 1851 mathematician Bernhard […]
It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of reports of terrorism. Yet we all can do something to stop it. This is especially true of those who work (as I do) at journalism: writing news and editing and publishing. Do journalists have a special duty when terrorism becomes news? It’s widely thought that journalists […]
— For Bill Rachinger, sine quo nihil . . . CERN’s Large Hadron Collider or LHC is back in the news. And behind the scenes there is fine physics that is little-known. It is the world’s biggest machine. Liquid-helium-cooled magnets bend twin beams of hydrogen nuclei (aka protons) in a circle. They collide at up […]
You likely do not often think about how you are put together on a microscopic scale. You are a conspiracy of cells. Roughly a hundred trillion of them, each one more or less autonomous. Each shapes its environment (you) by talking to co-conspirators. Cells do this instinctively. Their ancestors survived by doing it for millions […]
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. So says J.R.R. Tolkien’s hero-wizard, Gandalf, to Saruman (an anti-hero wizard). More than a century of successful atom smashing seems to say that Gandalf got this wrong. But let’s take a closer look at what we have—and what we […]
Wanderlust has got us traveling again. We are in Europe, taking trains and walking in cold city streets. What is hot in Europe now? (Okay, this is not rocket science. It’s not obvious that there is any science in it, though there is.) Hot? How about those Poles? We’re checking out their second city, Krakow, […]
These days there’s news about the pros and cons of vaccinations. There is good news and there’s bad news. Let’s unscramble them, because we can learn from both good and bad. There is good news about ebola vaccines. Ebola is about eight times less infectious than measles but it’s far more deadly. It’s a gruesome […]