Physics

Author Q&A about Meltdown! The Nuclear Disaster in Japan and Our Energy Future

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Readers of this blog might be interested in the backstory of my book for young readers Meltdown! The Nuclear Disaster in Japan and Our Energy Future. A great advocate for nonfiction who writes under the online persona Book Kvetch published this very nice Q&A, which I hope you will enjoy.

Review of Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

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As I type this, the physics world is anticipating a great announcement from the Large Hadron Collider that the data analysis is at least very suggestive that the elusive Higgs Boson has been seen. Perhaps the researchers will even declare a discovery. If you want to understand the reason for the excitement, I recommend reading … Read more

More about Hidden Biases and Fukushima

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About six weeks ago, I posted a blog entry called Subtle and not so subtle biases shape assessment of Fukushima. It led to some interesting and intelligent discussion about whether nuclear energy should be part of the future worldwide energy mix. I wrote that entry as a reaction to critical reviews that described my new … Read more

Pioneer Anomaly is no longer anomalous

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Thanks to funding from the Planetary Society, of which I am a proud member, the “Pioneer Anomaly” has been definitively resolved. Physics has prevailed over speculation. Over the past 20 years, some people, including a few scientists, have looked at oddities in the trajectories of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft and proposed that our … Read more

More on Pioneer Anomaly

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This new information makes it pretty clear that the cause of the Pioneer Anomaly, that is the deviation of the Pioneer spacecraft from the trajectories dictated by gravity alone, is due to thermal sources internal to the spacecraft. A satisfying result, though it produces no new physics.

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