The recent results from the Planck mission have caused a flurry of activity among theoretical physicists, documented on the arXiv in an incr...

I finished high school in 1995, and the 1998 evidence for the cosmological constant from supernova redshift data was my first opportunity to...

[Howard Burton, founding director of Perimeter Institute, has a new project, Ideas Roadshow , a weekly magazine dedicated to ideas of all ty...

Dimensionally reduced scientist. “Science is the only news,” Steward Brand wrote. My reading of this sentence is that science, the explo...

Garry Gutting's recent post What Do Scientific Studies Show? at the NYT blogs is utterly unremarkable. Or so I thought, being clearly b...

Last month I had the flu. I was down with a fever of more than 40°C, four days in a row. Needless to say, it was a public holiday. While t...

It always amazes me how skewed the image of physics research in the popular press is. To begin with, the amount of coverage is totally unrep...

Microfibre cloths have become really popular during the last years. I just got one as an advertisement gift from the phone company. They’re ...

Lara, putting on her shoes. May 1st is a national holiday both in Sweden and in Germany. A good opportunity, I thought, to update you on...

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe By Lee Smolin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (April 23, 2013) This is a...

Image Source. The spatial arrangement of some large molecules can exist in two different versions which are mirror images of each other,...

Quantum gravity researcher at work. We normally think about geometry as distances between points. The shape of a surface is encoded in t...

More than once I went away from a discussion, confused about what exactly my conversation partners meant with “physics mainstream”. The “m...

I am presently reading Steven Pinker’s “Blank Slate”. He introduces the terms “proximate cause” and “ultimate cause,” a distinction I find e...

According to Special Relativity, an object in motion relative to you appears shortened. The faster it is, the shorter it appears. This is ef...

The Nordita Newsletter has gotten a major technical upgrade and the first issue of the new version is now online at www.nordita.org/news ...