Chad Orzel
@orzelc
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I'm a physicist, professor, blogger, and author of popular science books. Also at https://t.co/uj07yLySyZ and https://t.co/eQtx4wtixn
Niskayuna, NY
Joined July 2009
What's my new book A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIMEKEEPING about? I hope the title's self-explanatory, but I went into more detail for The Big Idea:
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@pschofie79 I was at a pho place near my house in grad school, and an old Vietnamese man sat down at my table and asked how I liked the soup. He then proceeded to absolutely shit on every other Asian cuisine for the remainder of the meal. It was hilarious.
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This is a picture of a single electron. For every 100 likes this gets, I will make it 10 times larger.
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The tricky part is walking without rhythm so as not to attract it's attention.
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Petition to make this the unskippable log-in screen for Twitter.
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You.Can't .Reduce.A.Conversational.Social.Medium.Like.Twitter.To.A.Single.Isolated.Voice. It's @IvePetThatDog.
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Today in the Pauli Exclusion Principle:.
"Physicist Brian Cox struggled to check into a hotel because actor Brian Cox was already staying there"
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This may be the thing that gives me the most hope that these young men and women will move things in a lasting way: They're specifically and concretely tying this to elections in a way that other recent movements have not.
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The problem with this tweet and the replies to it is a kind of muddling of "algebra" the process essential for all kinds of math with "Algebra" the common school course which is a bit of a grab-bag of stuff some of which matters much, much less.
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And also, not.
So, I've done a fair bit of investigation, and as far as I can tell, after talking to a number of the most qualified physicists of our time, it appears that everything is made of little wiggles.
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This should come up every time you click the "Tweet" button.
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I, for one, welcome our new canine overlords.
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BREAKING: Biden signs executive order declaring once and for all that theta is the polar angle and phi the azimuthal angle, not the other way round, and that the square root of -1 is i, not j.
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I find myself idly rooting for Andrew Yang to win the NYC mayoral race because he annoys the most irritating sorts of NYC-ers beyond all reason.
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@dog_rates Anyway, we could do with a lot less "go fuck yourself" and more "They're good dogs, Brent," is my point. 13/10, already got the mug.
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When you finish a PhD in physics they take you in a special room & tell you that cows aren't spheres, strings aren't massless, and very few things are REALLY simple harmonic oscillators. I am posting this at great physical risk to myself and my family.l.
When you finish a PhD in political science they take you in a special room & tell you that the Illuminati are real and thy start great power wars because they’re bored. I am posting this at great physical risk to myself and my family.
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To be fair, Sizzler University is a hotbed of far-left identity politics, so it's no wonder he has a skewed perspective.
This was the Iowa pol who wanted to limit Dems on state univ. faculties. His degree turned out to be a manager-training course at a Sizzler.
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Today's @EffinBirds shirt is for the people tweeting hateful nonsense at the #MarchForOurLives kids.
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An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are on a train to Edinburgh. They look out the window and see 21 sheep, one of which is black. The engineer says "Oh, they have black sheep in Scotland, too.".The physicist says "They have at least one black sheep in Scotland.".
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Another footnote to this Einstein story: Not long after the trip in question, Einstein famously got a letter from a young physicist in India, and helped him publish what's now Bose statistics. That's today in "People are complicated."
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Kickstarter to buy ads on Breitbart that are just this.
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@GravitysRa1nbow One of his papers famously doesn't cite any sources, but includes an apologetic note saying that he didn't have access to an academic library to be able to do a proper literature review.
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Today, for no particular reason, I present: Twitter Feeds of Famous Historical Physicists: . P.A.M. Dirac has been on Twitter since 2009, follows two people, and has tweeted six times. All six have gone viral.
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. the mathematician corrects them both: "There is at least one sheep in Scotland that is black on at least one side.".
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Busy day at Schroedinger Industries. RT @EmrgencyKittens: How to organize your cats. http://t.co/z3QS0fnSdL.
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Today in "SCIENCE!".
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I've hinted at this a few times, but it's now official: I've been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society, for my outreach/science communication work.
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"Let's see what's trending on Twitter this evening. ".
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High energy theory, quantum information, condensed matter physics.
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(These "Oh-ho-ho, you're making hidden assumptions!" responses fall on a continuum with those idiot PEMDAS problems that come around regularly, in that the actual actual answer is "Don't be more of a dickhead than the situation requires.").
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I can't believe this hasn't been done yet, but since nobody's coming to my Zoom office hours, here's a physics version of the "Choose Your House" game:
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@philipcball I suspect this is in part just a reflection in changes of mental health terminology over the last century. "Nervous exhaustion" seems to have been a bit of a catch-all, and there might be distinctions between their conditions that would seem more apparent to modern eyes.
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Yeah, I don't have this much time. .
Every pitch thrown directly down the middle to Josh Donaldson this year that he either took or whiffed at
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On-brand decorations applied to new Chromebook, so I can resume repping @dog_rates while writing at Starbucks.
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This is critical: Bad things routinely happen to education because otherwise sensible people can't be bothered to vote in off years.
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They used to allow smoking on airplanes. Lasers were rare and expensive. Computers that only displayed ASCII characters, no graphics.
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Occasional reminder that it's totally possible to both think that someone is on the right side politically and morally, and also that they're kind of a terrible person that you don't really want to associate with.
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Between the shirt and the mug, I feel like I have the full experience of academia covered. Thanks, @EffinBirds .
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@MattZeitlin The brief heyday of South African villains was glorious. Wonderfully hate-able regime, and just a fabulous accent.
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Roses are red.Violets are blue.If gravitons exist.They must be spin two.#PhysicsValentines.
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It would be impossible to teach more interesting and useful math without algebra-the-process. It would absolutely be possible without Algebra-the-course, though it would require a substantial rethinking of the math curriculum going back to elementary school.
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By the time an engineer reaches retirement age, they must choose their kook physics theory. There are only four options:. Relativity is a hoax.Quantum mechanics explains free will.Entaglement enables telepathy.Something about entropy. I don't make the rules.
By the time a man turns 40 he must pick his intellectual hobby. There are only four options:. * Greeks.* Romans.* Mongols.* World War II. I don’t make the rules.
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This is a nice article on Von Neumann, though being a bit contrarian, I always want to respond to praise of him by noting that he set quantum foundations back probably 30 years because of his reputation as a genius.
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I should also note that the @dog_rates reference in Chapter 9 was totally worth it for the baffled queries from editors and proofreaders who weren't familiar with @matt___nelson:
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I'd just like to put it out there that, as the author of two books explaining quantum mechanics for non-scientists (one with a talking dog, even. ), I am ready and willing to go on the @joerogan show and talk about quantum computers in a way that is not complete nonsense.
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Spicer: Hold my beer.
Picking a fight with Anne Frank over antisemitism is what I'd call a career low.
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Quantum physics.
Name something people have strong opinions on, but actually know little about.
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The CDC says that fully vaccinated people who have a Lagrangian with a continuous symmetry can use it to identify a conserved quantity associated with that system.
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Your publications are high-impact.Their conclusions are far-reaching.But my favorite thing about you.Is that you're also good at teaching. #AcademicValentines.
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"Physicists make bad philosophers, but then, so do most philosophers." -- Bill Phillips. (I don't recall the exact context of this, but it was one of my Facebook memories today.).
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My controversial liberal arts opinion is that we should stop using "the liberal arts" as a high-toned way to say "not STEM," because if your liberal arts education doesn't include math and science it's not a liberal arts education.
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Today in The Goodest of the Good:.
This is Frida. She became Mexico’s symbol for hope after the 2017 earthquakes. It’s reported she’s located over 50 people in her long rescue career. Today, her protective gear was removed and replaced with a toy to signify her retirement and a new beginning. 15/10 #GraciasFrida
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We got SteelyKid the @dog_rates book for Christmas, which is why I just spent ten minutes trying to define "woke af" in a way that makes sense to a fourth grader. .
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#IAmAScientistBecause Science turns "I don't know" into "I don't know. yet" and you won't find anything more empowering than that.
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Basically an entire month of movie-watching with the kids: Fletches, Nolans, RRR, and Shane Black: .
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The most ambitious crossover event in the history of very good dogs.
I’m with @IvePetThatDog at the AKC National Dog Show presented by Royal Canin! We’re on a mission to pet all the dogs. It’s going really well. #partner
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It's uncanny how Microsoft KNOWS to schedule Windows updates that require a reboot for days when I'll be running late and can't afford to wait five minutes for my computer to become useful.
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@pschofie79 It was triggered by my mentioning having spent time in Japan ("Japanese food, no flavor!"), then moved unprompted to Chinese ("Too greasy!") and Korean ("Koreans. They just crazy.") Thai food he said was knockoff Vietnamese, more or less.
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Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does the things a spider can. Climbs up inside the water spout, rain comes down, gets washed out. .
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New York City, don't ever change.
Donald Trump booed as he votes at his New York City polling location.
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To some extent, this is what the curricular reform shorthanded as "Common Core Math" was supposed to do- my kids started seeing proto-algebra (the process) much earlier than I did. Lots and lots of people HATED that approach, though.
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The person next to me has 97 slides in the deck for a 30-minute conference talk. #PassesNoteToFlightAttendant.
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I have spent my entire adult life in elite academia, and I remain utterly baffled as to why the city where the publisher is located is regarded as such critical bibliographic information.
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There are two kinds of famous people whose names trend on Twitter: one is "Oh, I hope nothing bad happened to them" and the other "I hope that sonofabitch got run over by a bus.".
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Hello, The Hague? I'd like to report a violation of the Geneva Convention. This Starbucks just played the Chipmunks' "Frosty the Snowman".
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Condensed matter theory; quantum information experiment.High energy theory; quantum foundations
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Charles Kittel, of multiple famous textbooks, most notably on Solid State Physics, died a couple of weeks ago. Not as celebrated as Gell-Mann, but still a hugely important figure for a lot of physics and physicists.
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@focusfronting He's a vey good writer and an exceptional live communicator of science to non-scientific audiences, which is a rare set of skills. I find his going all-in on "Well, actually. " over the last several years a baffling choice.
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James Watson's most-liked tweet was copied without attribution from Rosalind Franklin's Twitter feed. #FamousPhysicistsOnTwitter.
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This does not make the list of top ten batshit crazy things associated with Nikola Tesla.
A hummingbird appears next to Nikola Tesla. It says: "Beware of the colour yellow.".
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Advice on how to turn people away from white supremacist groups, from people with first-hand knowledge:
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This is probably the best of the eclipse photos I got from taking the kids up north to a spot where totality lasted about two minutes. Really an incredible experience, well worth the many hours of sitting in traffic.
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Careful what you reshare.
Let's go ahead and get these out of the way BEFORE #Florence hits. 1 - The shark on the flooded road pic is fake. 2 - Soldiers standing guard at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is real, but not during hurricane. 3 - The WonderWorks restaurant in Myrtle is already upside down.
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I find my copyeditor's belief that I know the difference between a hyphen and an em-dash and have purposefully used one rather than the other charmingly optimistic.
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"I'm an atomic physicist".- boring .- academic.- "So, you build bombs?". "I'm a quantum mechanic".- spooky.- buzzwordy.- both can and can't fix your car.
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Depressing how many otherwise smart people think their opponents should be swayed by lines of argument they'd find personally insulting.
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I used to use this on slides in intro physics, but not enough students recognized C&H to keep it up.
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As promised/threatened yesterday, an explanation of the spin-glass physics that won Giorgio Parisi half a Nobel Prize, on my @ForbesScience blog:
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Have you ever played billiards with physics professors?.
It's commonly known that ethicists are the least ethical people. Are there any other fields like that? Where the people in the field are the worst at what they do?.
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Sir Isaac Newton's Twitter feed alternates between screenshots of complicated calculations annotated in Latin and quote-tweet dunking on Robert Hooke #FamousPhysicistsOnTwitter.
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I will note again that one of the best policies I've ever implemented in terms of general quality of life is that when my first reaction to something said online is "Oh, go fuck yourself," I don't respond to it in public. A hard policy to stick to, but worth the effort.
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The "Tell Your Dog I Said Hi" sticker on my Chromebook is proving to be a great conversation starter at hotel breakfast. Thanks, @dog_rates.
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Using the magnetometer in my phone to find drywall screws in the new addition with the Phyphox app:
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The split-screen coffee sip at 2:39 is what really puts this over the top.
This is remarkable delivery. If it’s not on teleprompter, it’s some of the best broadcasting I’ve ever seen.
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In which I object to philosophers looking down at the sort of science done by the vast majority of professional scientists: (lunchtime @ForbesScience repost).
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Richard Feynman's Twitter feed is mostly Instagram links to photos of himself at sketchy parties and video clips of bongo playing. #FamousPhysicistsOnTwitter.
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Just arrived: My author copy of a spiffy new book from MIT Press, to which I contributed a chapter.
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Doing separation of variables in intermediate quantum today, and it's always fun to watch the math majors squirm when I treat a derivative like a fraction.
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