Science Articles

Here are some articles about how we got here, how it’s going, and what it looks like on the ground. They are all nontechnical; good technical articles are linked in my lecture notes. Regarding the quit lit, I believe that everybody should read some before committing to graduate school, but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

History and Philosophy

• The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
• Why is Maxwell’s Theory so Hard to Understand?
• The Gibbs Paradox
• The Vortex Atom: a Victorian Theory of Everything
• Failed Theories of Superconductivity
• A History of Dark Matter

The Practice of Science

• Booms, Busts, and the World of Ideas
• Why Won’t My Perpetual Motion Machine Work?
• The Theoretical Physics Ecosystem Behind the Discovery of the Higgs Boson
• A Selected History of Expectation Bias in Physics
• The Statistical Crisis in Science
• The Once and Present Standard Model

Academic Life

• Landau’s Theoretical Minimum
• The PhD Grind
• Science’s Pirate Queen
• What Does Any Of This Have To Do With Physics?
• A View From an Ex-String Theorist
• What it Means, and Doesn’t Mean, to Get a Job in Physics