Category Archives: Science

It all started with the Big BANG!

Just when I felt I had watched my Friends DVDs one time too often, a fellow physics teacher told me about a TV series about physicists that apparently is on TV in Germany right now. She always watches it with her husband, another physics teacher, and said she thought I might like it. I watched a few scenes of The Big Bang Theory on Youtube and decided to order the first two seasons on DVD from the UK (no, we still don’t own a TV set). I was hooked after the first few episodes!
I have since finished both seasons and am eagerly awaiting the release of the third season on DVD.

Today, the New York Times had an article about the sitcom: Exploring the Complexities of Nerdiness, for Laughs. The show’s physics advisor, David Saltzberg, who is a professor at UCLA, has a weblog called, of course, The Big Blog Theory.

“Houston, we’ve had a problem…”

Forty years after the Apollo 13 mission, Universe Today takes a look at the missions, the accident and how the astronauts got back to earth safely: 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (Link via MetaFilter: Surviving a Space Scrape 40 years Ago.)
So far, nine of the 13 parts have been posted. (I’m going to add the other links as the pages become available.)

Gene Kranz was the flight director for NASA‘s Gemini and Apollo Missions. Here’s a Discovery Channel Video of Kranz talking about his experiences with the Apollo 13 mission. I’m reading Kranz’s book Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond right now and enjoy it immensely.

Your daily dose of science

Chad Orzel is a physics professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, and has written How To Teach Physics to Your Dog, which will be published later this month. He’s also the author of a weblog called Uncertain Principles, where he published an 18 minute long video called The Bohr-Einstein debates, with Puppets. It’s well worth watching and really entertaining, although I have to agree with Orzel that the fake German accent of Albert Einstein really is atrocious (compare to the real Albert Einstein‘s accent). I’m sure I could fake a German accent better than Chad Orzel. ;-)

Science links

Trailblazing – three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing.

“Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010.
Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.”

Link via MetaFilter: Selected Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

More science links in this MetaFilter thread: Math education – how should math be taught?