Jun 09 2010
The June 2010 edition of Discover Magazinehas an article on Harvard mathematician, Shing-Tung Yau. The article describes Dr. Yau as the man who has devised the math to describe string theory. String theory postulates that at the deepest reality the universe is composed of 10 dimensional vibrating strings. His particular branch of mathematics is topology. [...]
May 05 2010
An article in the April 8, 2010 edition of Nature explores the way in which flocks of birds move together while flying in formation. Scientists mounted 16 gram GPS loggers on the back of homing pigeons in order to track the flight of each bird in a flock of up to ten birds. The experimenters [...]
Mar 07 2010
I subscribe to Wired Magazine, but am sometimes frustrated by the nature of its content which can drift off into the nonsensical. Just when I am ready to give up on the publication, it prints something that renews my interest. The March 2010 issue has an article by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University [...]
Feb 09 2010
In June I did a post on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Livermore National Laboratory where scientists have built the world’s most powerful laser. The laser is in a building the size of three football fields and ten stories high. Inside the building the Livermore scientists have used hundreds of optical amplifiers, beam [...]
Feb 07 2010
One of the conceits of the Back to the Future film series was that the protagonist played by Michael J. Fox could use a time machine to return to the past and take actions which would alter the future. This idea is expressed in these lines of doggerel: There once was a young lady named [...]
Jan 24 2010
Anyone who reads articles related to global warming and climate science will come across this large word,”anthropogenic.” The term anthropogenic designates an effect or object resulting from human activity. The term was first introduced as “anthropocene” in the mid-1970s by the atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen. In previous blog posts I have written about “climate-gate.” Someone leaked [...]
Jan 01 2010
The 1982 science fiction classic, Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, is set in the fictional Los Angeles of 2019, a year now less than a decade away. The Los Angeles of the film is environmentally degraded and large blimps float in a darkened sky on a planet that is inhospitable to both humans and other [...]
Oct 24 2009
We have all played the game of flipping coins and matching them. Is it heads or is it tails? Each flip of a regular coin has an equal chance of producing a head or a tail. The coin is said to be “memory-less.” In terms of probability theory each flip of the coin is an [...]