I’ve been neglecting my TikTok page as much as my blog, so here’s a video that makes up for both! I talk about the really cool Barkhausen effect, which allows you to actually hear metal being magnetized.
I wrote about this effect and did a YouTube video a decade ago, so I felt like it was time to bring it back out. You can read the original post, with more details, at this link.
So yesterday I learned that there is a Bricks & Minifigs store in my area, and I had to check it out. LEGO has become so huge in recent years that official LEGO stores are no longer enough, so you get these great LEGO resale stores, where you can hunt down a wide variety of minifigs. I picked up a few just for fun, but that’s not the point of this post!
While I was there, I was astounded to see that there were actual LEGO sets made based on the 2010 Prince of Persia movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which has to be one of LEGO’s most ill-advised licenses ever.
But then a weird thought occurred to me: this means Jake Gyllenhaal has had minifigs made of two characters that he has played, because he also played Mysterio in Spider Man: Far From Home, which had its own LEGO sets!
Because of the way my brain works, I started wondering: how many actors have had more than one movie character represented by LEGO minifigs? I thought that there couldn’t be many, but in fact there are a surprising number! Because this was my obsession for the better part of a day, let me make it yours as well.
Continue readingBook 2 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Still roughly on track, though I want to pick up the pace.
One reason I like book blogging is that I pay more attention to things like book introductions and that often leads me to more interesting reads! Last year, when I read Orrin Grey’s excellent collection How to See Ghosts and Other Figments, I noted the lovely introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexico-born Canadian novelist. I am always looking for new and interesting authors to read, and so I picked up her 2019 novel Gods of Jade and Shadow, whose premise immediately intrigued me.
This novel is a modern fairy tale, set in the Jazz Age in Mexico, and features a young girl who gets drawn into a power struggle between two Mayan Gods of Death!
Continue readingI have made another history of science video for TikTok, this time focusing on the curious story of how electromagnetism was discovered in 1820 in an experiment that is utterly unique for one really big reason:
Like a lot of my TikTok videos, this represents a condensed version of a blog post I did a few years ago; if you want more detail and/or a text version of the story, here’s the link!
It’s kind of a fun phenomenon that no matter how thoroughly I research my history of science books, after they’re published I always find something that surprises me. In this case, I was tracking down some data on the physics of anomalous dispersion (more on that in another blog post), which led me to Robert Williams Wood’s textbook on Physical Optics, whose second edition came out in 1911. And in this book, I found a whole section on “invisibility of objects!”
This doesn’t change my overall narrative on the history of invisibility, as I’ve written about Wood’s 1902 paper on invisibility before, in which he experimentally tested a very curious (and certainly not true in general) hypothesis by Lord Rayleigh. I’ve also written about Wood’s science fiction novels before (two of them: here and here), and his fascinating series of physics lecture demonstrations. Wood was an all-around fascinating fellow, and he is one of a few physicists who got a mention in both my Falling Felines book and my Invisibility book!
Let’s take a look at Wood’s section on invisibility, because it is a fascinating glimpse into how physicists were even thinking about the possibility of invisibility over 100 years ago!
Continue readingBook 1 of my new modest goal of reading and blogging about 26 books this year! This one is a little bit of a cheat, as I read much of it near the end of last year, but I finished reading it for my book club this year, so I’m counting it!
A few months ago, I finally completed my long-delayed series of posts explaining quantum entanglement, and Part 7 was all about the question, “What does it all mean?” For the purpose of interpreting and predicting experimental results, quantum physics as it is currently interpreted (in what is known as the Copenhagen interpretation) works really, really well; however, from a logical and philosophical point of view, it seems filled with contradictions.
To get around these contradictions, numerous researchers have come up with different ways to interpret quantum physics, and one of those interpretations is known as relational quantum physics, as first introduced by the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli in 1994 and published in a peer-reviewed journal in 1996 [1].
Several years ago, Rovelli wrote a popular account of the concepts of relational quantum physics, titled Helgoland (2020), and I was intrigued to learn more.
I must admit that I was deeply skeptical of relational quantum mechanics when I first heard of it, but a combination of reading Rovelli’s book and some of the research papers on the subject have made the ideas seem much more compelling, at least in a broad sense!
Continue readingIt’s time to compile all my fake book titles from social media again! You can see compilation 1, compilation 2, compilation 3, compilation 4, compilation 5, compilation 6 and compilation 7 at the links.
This is a smaller batch, because I haven’t been as inspired lately and haven’t done as many. The collapse of Twitter has left me less motivated, too, but I still try to do them when a cover grabs my attention!
Some covers require minimum effort to modify and feature subjects soooo satisfying to mock.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve started to experiment with doing history of science TikToks for fun, and did one not long ago about Frank Perret’s brush with death in the path of a pyroclastic flow on Mount Pelée somewhere around 1930:
This video was based on a post I did on my Science Chamber of Horrors Tumblr ages ago on “Frank Versus the Volcano,” and in the process of prepping the video I had to track down my original source for Perret’s story, which is his 1937 monograph on his observations of Mt. Pelée from 1929-1932.
The digital copy of the book wasn’t that great, as many of the photographs had bad scanning artifacts, and that got me thinking: how much would it cost to get an original copy of Perret’s monograph? The answer, as it turns out, is about $25, so I couldn’t resist picking one up and sharing some of the original images here!
Continue readingI’ve been a bit quiet on the blog due to the holiday craziness and a frantic rush to submit a grant proposal before the deadline, but I will hopefully be back on track in the near future.
But I wanted to share some wonderful news about my book Invisibility: it was selected as a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title for 2023! What is Choice? To quote from their About Page, “Choice is a publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.” Each year, they post a list of several hundred “outstanding academic titles,” which I understand is a big deal in a practical sense because this is a list that libraries use to help them order books!
I’ve actually known for a few weeks that my book made the list, but… I wasn’t able to see the full list, which is subscription only, and I couldn’t figure out if and how to access my university library’s subscription, so I held onto the news until I had something to share. Finally today they published a selection of reviews of 5 outstanding titles in physics, and my book is included! The review is one of the most positive and lovely I’ve received yet, so I am including a screenshot of it here for my own happiness.
Honestly, this is the best review I’ve gotten by far, and it makes me really happy! Just wanted to share it with everyone.
And just in case folks are still unaware that I wrote this book, here’s a link to my publisher’s page!
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 