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Kevin Zhou
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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 Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider

The Practice of Science

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

Academic Life

  • Landau’s Theoretical Minimum
  • The PhD Grind
  • Science’s Pirate Queen
  • The Hunt For Planet Nine
  • Why is the Government Paying Us?
  • A View From an Ex-String Theorist
  • What Does Any Of This Have To Do With Physics?

Advice

  • What To Do When The Trisector Comes
  • Four Golden Lessons
  • Principles of Effective Research
  • How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 Easy Steps
  • So You Want To Be A Physicist
  • What it Means, and Doesn’t Mean, to Get a Job in Physics

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