Pens, phones, and word processors at the ready. In the coming months, President-Elect Trump will be filling some 4000 positions. These will include those that oversee science policy and direct agencies with science funding oversight. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) “FYI Bulletin” today nicely covers the appointments of most […]
I finally had a chance tonight to listen to the “TED Radio Hour” episode on the “Anthropocene”. This is the name given by some in the climate science community to the epoch of time in which we now live. The Holocene, which began about 11,000 ago when the glaciers of […]
Born in America, he’s a humble whiz kid with a penchant for physics and computers and a knack for whipping up miracles in a laboratory. His only crime this day was the apparent misfortune of being born brown-skinned. To be fair, all he wanted to do was pump gas. This was […]
I am in the middle of spending two weeks at CERN. Week 1 just ended, and Week 2 has just begun. I reflect on ducking away from SMU for two weeks of research at CERN during a crucial time for new members of our SMU ATLAS group. The first week […]
It has been a remarkable week for U.S. Presidential politics. The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, found himself abandoned by many supporters in his own party when videotape surfaced of him talking about having sexually assaulted women, using the pretense of his wealth and celebrity to then take advantage of them. […]
It’s been a while since I felt it necessary to comment on the people who profess that things like “intelligent design” are science. However, tonight on Twitter the Discovery Institute mixed their usual nonsense – their fundamental distortion of biological science – with physics. Since they took it upon themselves […]
Tonight is the first and only scheduled Vice Presidential Candidate debate for the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election cycle. Meeting on the stage will be the Republican VP candidate, Gov. Mike Pence, and the Democratic VP candidate, Sen. Tim Kaine. I’ll live blog this evening if there is anything of […]
I’ll be live-blogging observations and thoughts on the back-and-forth between the two leading U.S. Presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, during tonight’s first debate. This page should update as I post new entries. If not, refresh it. I will be looking at the debate from the perspective of assessing […]
Scientific American recently published the responses they received from many US President Candidates regarding questions on science and scientific matters. In this post, I apply the skills we expect from the practice of good argument and scientific thinking to assess the questions and the responses. Let’s focus on the “Research” […]
I thought it might be nice to reflect on the physics that I am most interested in understanding during this second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this post, I will discuss the Higgs boson, its expected interaction with bottom quarks, and how we have come to understand […]
Scientific American recently published the responses they received from many US President Candidates regarding questions on science and scientific matters. In this post, I apply the skills we expect from the practice of good argument and scientific thinking to assess the questions and the responses. Let’s focus on the “Innovation” […]
The first “debate” [1] between US Presidential candidates is coming up soon, on September 26. Recently, Scientific American published some of the candidates’ answers to a series of questions grounded in scientific issues and the policies that could be associated with those issues. In a series of posts on this […]