Headache. Image source: Mupso . In an opinion piece from December, Brian Cox and Robin Ince argued that opinion must be separated from s...

I learned this morning that in the drawer of pessimists, I lie in the corner of existential pessimists: “Pessimists are of two types, the ...

“And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, “Wonderful! But wh...

Lara with her new glasses. When you last heard from Lara and Gloria, they could utter a few single words. Within a couple of weeks, they...

Recently, I've seen and heard a lot of talk about the relevance of science communication. Of course I totally believe it's relevant....

This is the century in which personal DNA sequencing became affordable. And so it was unavoidable that curiosity would finally have me sign ...

Some years ago at SciFoo I sat through a session by Nick Bostrom , director of the Future of Humanity Institute , who elaborated on the ris...

The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics By Leonard Susskind, George Hrabovski Basic Books (January 29, 201...

Some years ago, I bought a copy of Stephani et al's book "Exact Solutions of Einstein's Field Equations" from Cambridge U...

This week's cover of The Economist. A year ago, I told you what I think is the future of scientific peer review : Peer review that i...

The recent Nature issue has a comment titled Scientific genius is extinct by Dean Keith Simonton who is professor of psychology at UC Dav...

The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe By Anil Ananthaswamy Mariner Books (January 1...

An interesting paper that should be mandatory literature for everybody making decisions on grant or job application, especially for those pe...

January has been busy, as you can probably tell from the frequency of my posts. Lara and Gloria are now in half-daycare for 4 hours weekdays...

I keep coming across statements about the anthropic principle leaving its mark on physics that strike me as ill-informed, most recently in...

Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2012 was Barack Obama, the dullest choice they could possibly have made. I would have cast my vote...

One of the first things you learn about quantum mechanics is that particles have a wavelength, and thus a frequency. If the particle is in ...

If I look at a correlation plot in biology, sociology or psychology, I can understand what they mean with “physics envy.” Physics is the f...

A recent issue of Nature magazine featured a study by Joshua Nicholson and John Ioannidis that looked at the citation count of principal inv...