There's been a huge kerfuffle in the quantum gravity community since this summer, when some people here at UCSB published a paper arguing that (old enough) black holes may actually be surrounded by a wall of fire which burns people … Continue reading
Science involves Precise Description. To be capable of being confirmed or ruled out at the high levels of reliability associated with Science, a hypothesis must be stated in a way which is precise enough to do definitive tests. Even if … Continue reading
Recently I ran across a pretty good explanation of the Higgs mechanism (hat tip Siris) by a certain Rob Knopp, which I thought I'd link to because of its connection with my previous post on fields. When I first looked … Continue reading
What is the world made out of? In the most usual formulations of our current best theories of physics, the answer is fields. What are those? Well, if you know what a function is, you're already most of the way … Continue reading
Science requires Approximations. Every kind of professional activity changes the way you think. It rewires your brain so that even when you're off the job, things start looking a certain way. For example, to a computer programmer everything looks like … Continue reading
