I had to go through them all to understand what your getting at.

So, “A Week in the Lab” has come to an end. The experiment itself goes on, of course, but the week of blogging the experiment is at an end.

As physics, it wasn’t terribly successful– the experiment didn’t succeed, after all. As a life-in-science blogging event, I think it worked pretty well. I got to cover a fair range of the experimental physics process, from the basic design stuff, to the nuts-and-bolts assembly, to the prelimanry calibration measurements, to the process of figuring things out from sketchy data, to the frustration of an incomplete experiment. I wouldn’t call it the most successful week of my experimental physics career, but I think I might be happier with how this played out than anything else I’ve done on this blog. I’ll have to look back at it again in a couple of weeks and see if I still feel that way, but at least at this early stage, I like the results.

So I thought I would point you to another case. I mean sure there is going to be trials and errors.

So where’s Clifford?

Theory predicts what observation demands. The only notable exceptions, cart before the horse, were an old paper containing no citations and that paper’s sequel,

Annalen der Physik 4 XVII 891-921 (1905)
Annalen der Physik 4 XLIX 769-822 (1916)

and look at all the trouble they eventually caused. Do you want String theories and M-theory to be relieved of goo and dribble, about 10^500 potential inconveniences at last estimation? Wait for an experimentalist to find two small bodies that locally free fall along non-parallel trajectories in hard vacuum. That constrains the symmetries of your maths and taut theory follows thereafter.

Show us an ab inito calculation of Newton’s G. You cannot! The full armamentarium of physical theory is powerless before a stepladder, some nylon fishing line, and some lead weights,

http://www.fourmilab.com/gravitation/foobar/

Theory is no stronger than its postulates. It is increasing obvious that something we know to be true in fact is not. (Green’s function and Gauss’ theorem do not behave in finite volumes of curved spacetime.) While the varietyand volume of theory is staggering, its origins are compact. An experimentalist could set it all right. (Given consistent vacuum chirality in the mass sector, make that “set it all left.”)

Uncle Al:

Show us an ab inito calculation of Newton’s G

G, like all dimensionful constants, is just an irrelevant conversion factor. Trying to calculate ratios of particle masses to the planck mass does make sense, though.

They work on boring things so they have nothing interesting to talk about.

Ha-ha. In all seriousness and all jokes aside, I have a feeling that this kind of superiority complex is rather common among high-energy theorists. I don’t think I heard as many denigrating comments from cond matter guys doing fundamental physics about folks doing materials science, chemistry or biophysics.
In fact typically I see a lot of mutual respects among most scientists – from atomic/nanoscale to mesoscale, regardless of whether it’s AMO, correlated systems, electronics, materials, chemistry or bio.
But I did hear many comments from HET guys about how all other fields of physics are “stamp collecting”. Why is that?

Let’s face it – in terms of impact on humanity and our lives, solid state/condensed matter research, materials/chemistry, biophysics, never mind medical research, would be many-fold more influential than all high energy or astrophysics.

I just wanted to add to my post linked after Uncertain Principles. I expand on the benefits here.

The “Future book” still comes to mind here. In a new, and dynamcial way.

Condensed-matter physics, especially, has been feeling lately that they have a bit of an image problem with the public, and would like to replicate the success of HET in getting nonscience folks interested. In the last few years there have been numerous proposals for a “top ten” list of big questions in condensed-matter physics to rival similar lists of big questions for HET. Which, of course, we all know is a copy of a similar list of big questions in mathematics.

I think the nonphysicist public doesn’t realize the strong thread of common ideas that runs through all fields of physics, and in particular theoretical physics. They seem to think theoretical physics is all about studying fundamental questions of the universe and experimental physics is all about technology. The truth is, we’re all in the same department and we all really do speak the same language. And there is a lot of cross-fertilization between different fields.

Still, there are some differences. Condensed-matter types (esp. experimentalists) need a lot of money to keep their groups working. If the money doesn’t flow, the jig is up, and anything that can be perceived as hurting that flow of money (such as blogging) just won’t happen. Of course, blogging may not have that effect, but it’s new and it’ll take time to get people to change their ways. Same goes for students and post-docs. I wouldn’t touch blogging with a ten-foot pole until tenure (and frankly, feel a little uncomfortable commenting on a blog too). I have no evidence that it will actually hurt me (except by taking away time I could be working), but since I don’t know, why should I take the chance? That said, there are quite a few quantum computing blogs too.

Come to think of it, could you use blogging as part of the education component of your grants? Any ideas on how to make that work?

Can these things degenerate into philosophical discourse? By our very names we can implicate ourselves?:)It had to start from someplace. A simple idea to have a greater context and meaning established from previous statements and experimental positions.

Of course by desire of experimentation, we don’t want string theory to degenrate into a religion, or anything else for that matter.:)