It is amazing to me how much the Higgs boson has featured in the press and entered the public consciousness lately. I fear this is partly because CERN has such a large and effective press office. This was particularly brought home to me when my wife sent me the above cartoon which one of her friends had posted on Facebook.
On the one hand, I think it is good that physics is getting all this publicity. On the other hand I think the scientific significance of this discovery is being blown out of proportion, driven by the large budgets involved....
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Lamenting the disintegration of elite USA universities
Elite universities in the USA have nurtured and enhanced my whole academic life. In 1983, I moved to the USA as an international student, co...
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Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...
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I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
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If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
Possessing even a scant amount of knowledge about quantum mechanics makes you an instant expert since you know far more about it than most people ever will.
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