Oh So Boring…

This is just a little annoyance of mine, but it’s something that’s been grating on me.  Recently, I decided to make a concerted effort to use CiteULike as a way to semi-organize the papers I read on the web. (I’m fairly certain that I had a previous account a while back, with quite a few (50, 60) papers in it, but for the life of me I can’t seem to remember/find it.)

Still, that is no reason not to start again.  So, I’ve been adding papers, and I noticed something that just bothers me. When you add a paper to CiteULike, you get to “rate” your…enthusiasm about the paper.  From “Top priority!” (5 stars) to “I might read it” (2 stars), it’s all good.  But then you get to “I don’t really want to read it” and that gives it one star.  That one star seems…odd to me.

To me, one star still means it’s a paper I want to read.  Maybe it’s in astronomy or some field I don’t know much about, but if I’ve taken the time to press the CiteULike button and save it to my “library”, it seems like the least amount of interest would be “might read it”, not “not gonna do it”[1]. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure how long this offer will last, but the current issue of Contemporary Physics is being offered for free, free, FREE!  That means you don’t have to pay some gazillions of dollars for access.  (Or work at a research institution with a subscription.)

And if there was ever an issue of Contemp Phys to read this is the one.  It’s the 50th Anniversary Issue.

For those who’ve never read Contemp Phys, it’s a journal which is dedicated to making current, sometimes bleeding-edge, physics intelligible to a wider audience.  That often includes other physicists and, quite often, one certain theoretical chemist.

In this issue, you’ll find works by many of the big names of physics.  No, wait, this is Physics.  Names like Salam, Peierls, Hawking, and Chandrasekhar. But many of the articles are written by names just as big, just not as well known.  No matter what, though, ALL of the papers in this Issue are uniformly great.

That said, I was happy to see that one of my all-time favorite papers was included.  This is Otto Frisch’s famous “Take a photon…” paper. In this paper, Frisch presents a series of Gedankenexperiment (thought experiments) as a dialogue between various characters in regards to the interference of a single photon.  If you love great quantum physics, this is the paper for you.  If you love the freakiness of quantum mechanics, this is for you.  Heck, if you are interested in the quantum computing and information, one of modern physics’ big fields, this is a paper for you.

But, really, all of the papers in this issue (and remember there is a second page of papers…which isn’t quite apparent on InformaWorld’s site) are for you.  Read them all.  You will learn something in one of them. Probably in all of them.