Standards rule OK
My title comes from the chorus of a song on the Jam’s second album, This Is the Modern World (1977). Written by the band’s singer and guitarist Paul Weller, the song is a bombastically ironic attack on...
View ArticleMind-reading computers
Last year, the website of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper became the world’s most-visited English-language news source. Although the Mail‘s website owes its popularity to a menu rich in celebrities,...
View ArticleGaming in meatspace
One evening earlier this summer, I was enjoying a martini at a hotel bar in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Although I’d brought an engrossing book to read—Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace—I looked up now...
View ArticleDoes it matter that ScienceDaily republishes press releases?
ScienceDaily is aptly named. The popular website has been posting copious news about science since its foundation 18 years ago. And I do mean “copious.” On 2 April, for instance, I counted 95 news...
View ArticleUsing statistics to catch cheats and criminals
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment,” Ernest Rutherford once declared. But when you work at the frontier of detection, as astronomers and particle...
View ArticleMonte Carlo, colloids, and public health
My first professional encounter with the Monte Carlo method came not during my long-abandoned career as an astronomer when I might have used the computational technique, but years later when I ran...
View ArticleThe importance of clarity
Two recent newspaper articles reminded me of the importance of clarity when writing about complex topics. In “Our feel-good war on breast cancer,” which was the cover article of last week’s New York...
View Article“Supercomputers are awesome and why I love what I do!!!”
My title comes from a comment made on Physics Today‘s Facebook page by Fernanda Foertter, a physicist who programs high-performance computers for a biotechnology company. Although Foertter’s...
View ArticleScenes from Married Life: A novel by a physicist about a physicist
I’ve just finished reading two novels by William Cooper, the pen name of Harry Hoff. Born in Northern England in 1910, Cooper studied physics at Cambridge University, where his academic adviser was...
View ArticleThe future of computational science—in 1977
In the spring of 1977, Queen Elizabeth II toured New Zealand to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her reign, astronomers using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory discovered the rings of Uranus, and—of...
View ArticleKnowing me, knowing you: Networks of cooperation
As part of my job as Physics Today‘s online editor, I browse the arXiv e-print server in search of interesting papers to post to the magazine’s Facebook page. Among my most fruitful hunting grounds is...
View ArticleA Czech prime minister and a Welsh wizard
The New York Times recently reported on the resignation of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas amid a corruption scandal. Hints of a romantic affair between Nečas and his glamorous and imperious chief of...
View ArticleLet’s go to Mars!
I started work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in November 1990. Not counting the two years I spent as a postdoc, it was my first job, and it lasted seven years. Looking...
View ArticleRussia’s persecutions
The July 1997 issue of Physics Today included an obituary for historian of science Viktor Frenkel. The obituary was being finalized during my very first week on the magazine’s editorial staff. I read...
View ArticleThe case of the radioactive tuna
Earlier this week, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to a blog post entitled “Radioactive bluefin tuna caught off California coast.” As a keen consumer of sushi, she was alarmed. As a...
View ArticleRomance at the speed of light
The ability to travel between different universes or between different dimensions of the same universe is a common plot element in speculative fiction. Multiple worlds not only boost the variety of...
View ArticleThe progress of research
When I ran and wrote for Physics Today‘s Search and Discovery department, I’d often end news stories with a look toward the future. Such endings not only sound a note of hope and optimism, they also...
View ArticleIn praise of flocking
Indian restaurants in 1970s Britain, especially those in the provinces, seemed to follow the same template. Menus were standardized around a few curries, among them mild creamy Korma, chili-red Rogan...
View ArticleJames Bond in space
Ian Fleming’s third James Bond novel, Moonraker (1955), centers on a plot by Sir Hugo Drax, a British aerospace tycoon with a secret Nazi past, to bomb London with a missile armed with a Soviet nuclear...
View ArticleNobel prizes for computational science
Last year I wrote this column for Computing in Science & Engineering in which I predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that Martin Karplus would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By the time you...
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