I'm teaching a First Year Seminar class this fall entitled "Time Travel in Science and Literature", and I'm looking for suggestions on the "Literature" part. I honestly don't know how much reading is reasonable to assign in this context, so my main request here is for short story suggestions. (I'm also considering a couple of short-ish books: ( Read more... )

I meant to share this earlier (and I don't think I already have), but I've been swamped. I'm still swamped, but I want to close some browser tabs. So here's my fifteen five three and a half minutes of fame in the Alma College student newspaper: Physics professor Jensen receives special recognition for effort inside, outside of classroom; students ( Read more... )

So that physics announcement that I posted the rumors about happened, and it was indeed just as big of a deal as rumor had made it. Here are a few links I've found that summarize the results nicely:

• An overview for general audiences by Scientific American.
• A nice discussion of the details along with some reasons for the usual skepticism.
• An informal ( Read more... )

If you happen to be the sort to follow a few cosmologists on blogs or social media, you've probably seen rumors swirling around like mad for the past few days. I'm not sure if this was triggered by the Harvard press release promising that a "major discovery" in astrophysics would be announced Monday at noon, or whether that release was hurried out ( Read more... )

Wow. That was something. I can imagine that for folks who don't know the book well, it was probably a pretty entertaining movie. But, well, is it a bad sign for a serious epic fantasy story that I spent a fair bit of the film laughing ( Read more... )

I've been sharing links to this all over social media since I heard about it earlier today. "Robot Turtles" is a board game project on Kickstarter by Dan Shapiro (a fellow Mudder). From the looks of it, it's a fun game that's designed to teach kids (3-8 years old, he says) some basic programming concepts along the way (and that gives the kids the ( Read more... )

You've probably heard at some point that tides on Earth are mostly caused by the moon, along with some smaller but still noticeable effects from the sun. In other words, the two objects' tidal forces are comparably strong (rather than being many orders of magnitude different: Uranus doesn't appreciably affect our tides!). You've probably also heard ( Read more... )

Wow: the xkcd webcomic had an entry called "Time" a while back that was notable because the image updated every hour(?), gradually telling some sort of story. Some dedicated people have been following it carefully, and it just reached "The End" in the past day or so (3099 frames total!). The story starts out pretty slow, but it builds to a strong ( Read more... )

I've recently read two science fiction stories that proved to be more closely related than I expected, given that they were recommended by entirely different sources in (as far as I recall) entirely different contexts. Some of that may just be a matter of who I am right now and what I've been thinking about lately (apart from physics teaching and ( Read more... )

Quite a while ago, I mentioned the "#WowGood2Know" facts that I'd started including with the homework assignments in my intro physics classes; folks seem to like them. Well, this semester I mostly ran out of my existing list of those, and I decided to do something a little different: I shared a slightly longer discussion inspired by a (linked) blog ( Read more... )