"the water still / When the blue breast of the dipping coot / Dives under, and all is mute."

[larryhammer]

In 1999, at the age of 93, physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe gave a series of three lectures on quantum mechanics to residents of his retirement home. If you were wanting a lay explanation by someone who worked with some of the greats of the field, complete with personal anecdotes, this is a good place to start. (via)

On the importance of null results: the Large Underground Xenon detector completely failed to detect dark matter, ruling out a large class of several possible forms. We know the stuff exists. We still don't know what it is. (via)

A new study estimating just how common planets like ours may be around stars like our sun -- which is to say, instruments are finally getting good enough to detect small rocky worlds.

---L.

Subject quote from "The Flight of the Duchess," Robert Browing.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You ever get the feeling that the explanation for what is currently attributed to dark matter is going to be something totally unexpected and mind-blowing and future generations will look back on our hapless speculations with the same pity we reserve for earnest hypotheses about aether and phlogiston? --Matt

[larryhammer]

Frequently.

I'm still disappointed that neutrinos have mass, because hoo boy grafting that onto the Standard Model is a very obvious kludge.

(Have I ever told you the story of phlogiston and me?)

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

No, but there's no time like the present!

[larryhammer]

I have a reproduction of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which actually isn't hard to find in the right sort of antiquarian bookstores. It is, in many ways, a hoot -- and useful, not just as a cultural artifact but in itself. And sometimes both: I taught myself double-entry bookkeeping from it -- it was new technology at the time, so the entry is extensive.

Anyway, the chemistry entry is something else again. It was written in 1770, just four years before Priestly and Scheele discovered oxygen and Lavoisier proved it was an actual element. Which means it elaborates the fullest flower of classical four-element theory, complete with all the hacks made to phlogiston theory to account for experiments to date. It is ... illuminating, how the basic concept is laid out, then modified, then special-cased. The pages almost creak under the intellectual edifice. Classic Kuhn scenario, really.

And one day, I'll find a plot for the SF novel set in a world where every word of that article is accurate. (Unfortunately, the premise rules out five-element systems, which means something Euorcentric, which means steampunk is ... problematic.)

---L.