Volume I - Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr Series, Vol 1)
ArmsControlWonk (Free subscription) | yesterday
‘Tis the season for giving thanks – at least for U.S. readers of ACW . One of the many things I am thankful for is the opportunity to have had conversations about arms control with McGeorge Bundy. He was one of the principle architects of the Vietnam War. I was one of 10,000 people arrested during the “May Day” anti-war demonstrations on May 4, 1970. (On this occasion, I wasn’t...
Judeopundit (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
The Large Hadron Collider keeps having the wrong sort of collisions. According to a Time article , the latest mishap may have happened when a "passing bird . . . dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator . . . " Just a bit of unwanted randomness? Not according to some scientists: While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed...
The J-Walk Blog (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Question: Did a time-traveling bird sabotage the Collider? Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont...
Chas' Compilation (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Large Hadron Collider: Damaged by a Time-Traveling Bird? Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont...
西儒 ─ The Western Confucian (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
The story followed on these pages twice earlier this week — God vs. God Particle and Nature Abhors a Higgs Boson Particle — has been picked up the so-called "mainstream" so-called "media" — Large Hadron Collider: Damaged by a Time-Traveling Bird? A summary: Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical...
Uncertain Principles (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Last week, I promised to do a puppet show if my DonorsChoose challenge entry claimed more than 1% of the $200,000 that Hewlett-Packard is donating to this year's Social Media Challenge. If you're quick with arithmetic, you'll see that the puppet-show threshold was $2,000. The actual contribution was $4,064.70, more than double the threshold amount. Clearly, I needed to aim higher... So, you'll be...
Peak Energy (Free subscription) | 10/22/2009
Off topic but entertaining - The Times has an article on a strange series of setbacks suffered by the large hadron collider at CERN - Large Hadron Collider Sabotaging Itself from the Future? . Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment. Is it...
Lawyers, Guns and Money (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
or so suggests physicist Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. I've been following the various crackpot theories of how the Large Hadron Collider at Cern will lead to the end of the world, if not the end of the Yankees, with mild amusement. This is equally amusing, but it's not sourced from the tin foil hat brigade, but a couple real live physicists doing, presumably, real...
IPBiz (Free subscription) | 10/17/2009
In an essay titled "The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate," DENNIS OVERBYE writes: But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe. As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are...
The Lay Scientist (Free subscription) | 10/17/2009
There's a very odd story about the large hadron collider at CERN in the Telegraph, New York Times and other places. It proposes a solution to why the multi billion dollar collider has encountered so many problems - it is sabotaging itself from the future. From the future. The strangeness begins: Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute...
The Church Mouse (Free subscription) | 10/14/2009
Every now and then a story emerges in the news that is so absurd it is funny. The latest is the attempts to explain why the 3 billion Euro Large Hadron Collider broke a week after it was first switched on. You may remember the Large Hadron Collider from when it first appeared. This is the machine that is designed to create and observe a 'Higgs boson' sub-atomic particle, sometimes called the 'God particle'....
Ask Slashdot (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider...
Physics Buzz (Free subscription) | 10/08/2009
The book currently on my nightstand is a slim, bright blue volume with the title Introducing Quantum Theory . It's part of the "Introducing…" series, which presents big ideas and great thinkers, such as psychoanalysis, Derrida, and Stephen Hawking, in a purposefully friendly, unimposing format. I have to admit I was a little skeptical when I first cracked open Introducing Quantum Theory...
Rhapsodyinbooks's Weblog (Free subscription) | 10/07/2009
It is impossible to overestimate the contributions to science made by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Not only did he come up with the theory of electrons traveling in discrete orbits around an atom’s nucleus, but he also originated the idea of the quantum leap between orbits – the basis of quantum theory. [...]
Indecision Forever (Free subscription) | 09/25/2009
I'm not really buying skoalrebel's assessment that Obama needs to be "inpeached" for taking away our flavored tobacco — though that nonsense does piss me off — but, hey, there's always room for disagreement amongst intellectuals. (I mean, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr couldn't agree on the simplest aspects of quantum theory, but they still [...]
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