In past years I’ve done several courses for The Great Courses/Wondrium (formerly The Teaching Company): Dark Matter and Dark Energy, Mysteries of Modern Physics:Time, and The Higgs Boson and Be...
This year we give thanks for a feature of nature that is frequently misunderstood: quanta. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statis...
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2023/11/23/thanksgiving-18/
Just a few years ago, Australian Catholic University (ACU) established a new Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. They recruited a number of researchers and made something of a splash, leading to a n...
This year we give thanks for Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of mome...
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/11/24/thanksgiving-17/
Just in case there are any blog readers out there who haven’t heard from other channels: I have a new book out! The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion is Volume One of a pla...
As far as I remember, the first time I stepped onto a university campus was in junior high school, when I visited Johns Hopkins for an awards ceremony for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Y...
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/03/06/johns-hopkins/
This year we give thanks for something we’ve all heard of, but maybe don’t appreciate as much as we should: electromagnetism. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangia...
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2021/11/25/thanksgiving-16/
The nature of consciousness remains a contentious subject out there. I’m a physicalist myself — as I explain in The Big Picture and elsewhere, I think consciousness is best understood as weak...
Conservation of energy is a somewhat sacred principle in physics, though it can be tricky in certain circumstances, such as an expanding universe. Quantum mechanics is another context in which en...
This year we give thanks for one of the very few clues we have to the quantum nature of spacetime: black hole entropy. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble�...
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2020/11/26/thanksgiving-15/