A couple of years ago, the physics blogosphere was abuzz over the Large Hadron Rap, and now it seems a new video has surfaced - this time a Fermilab Rap video. The lyrics to the video are available on the YouTube site, in the text below the video. (You have to expand the text window to see it.) Overall, I think I enjoyed the Large Hadron Rap a bit more, but this new Fermilab one has a pretty fun beat.
...Well, it's that time of year again. Soon, I'll be making another business trip to Washington, D.C., and will be trying to use my spare time to check out some cool Washington, D.C., science sites in the city.
...I'm pleased to announce that my recent interview on a Madison radio station - trying to explain string theory in a way that makes sense to the average listener - has been preserved for posterity, on the WORT radio website. (Thanks to our reader Stephen L for the heads up on this!) It looks like it only sticks around there for 52 days, so I'll try to get the interview copied over to the String Theory for Dummies website before the time runs out.
...A group of Chinese scientists have broken an important barrier, transferring information through a form of quantum teleportation through 10 miles of empty space (a new record) while retaining about 89% of the information (also better than has been done in the past). This doesn't mean that particles are actually teleporting, though, just that information is being transmitted through a pair of entangled photons that are separated by that distance. Still, it's an impressive feat and may well provide some insights that help us revolutionize telecommunications in the years to come by applying various forms of quantum information principles, such as entanglement.
...Okay, we get it, graphene is amazing stuff. Really, we get the hint. It does wonderful stuff.
What's it doing today? Well, apparently it can help to soak up arsenic, sparking the notion that it could be used to purify water in areas where arsenic contamination is a real problem (including, apparently, some parts of the United States).
...Last week, I tweeted (from my account @AboutPhysics) about one of my blog posts: Universe Born in a Black Hole? Here's the tweet that I twote ... er, tweeted ... anyway, here's what I said:
...New research has shown that physicists may have been over-estimating the size of the proton for most of the last century. The new research uses a method which should be more precise than previous methods by a factor of 10, and the result is that the radius of the proton seems to be about 4% smaller than the previous best estimate, which has been the average of many different measurements made over the years.
...Physics enthusiasts may have felt a rush of anticipation over the last week, as the rumormill and blogosphere got all a-twitter (if you'll pardon the expression) over the idea that Fermilab had discovered the Higgs boson. Well, it turns out that these rumors were just that.
...Tonight, I will be a guest on the Madison, Wisconsin, community radio station WORT 89.9 FM. The program, The Perpetual Notion Machine, runs from 7:00 pm to 7:30 pm Central time (that's 8:00 pm to 8:30 pm for those of us in the Eastern time zone ... everyone else can do the math on their own). I will be discussing my recent book on string theory, as well as other mysteries of the universe.
...There have long been speculations that our universe may essentially exist inside of a black hole within another universe, but many cosmologists have scoffed at this idea over the years. One example of such a theory is presented by Lee Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos, in which he theorizes not only that universes (including our own) are born inside of black holes, but goes even further to hypothesize that the whole "point" of a universe may be a natural-selection-like drive to create black holes more efficiently. (This is a gross oversimplification of his premise.) However, ideas like the one proposed by Smolin have long been relegated to the sidelines of cosmology as more science fiction than science fact.
...Planet Physics is a site that is updated daily, by adding new summaries of weblogs that are concerned with Physics. Every day, you can find something new and exciting on our site. Every day, there are new summaries and new ideas, in order to reflect the Physics news and facts as soon and as accurately as possible. Read the blogs that are written by great authors, who all have the same main interest: Physics.
Updated on July 29, 2010 09:08 AM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
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