Links people have been passing to me:
The Foundational Questions Institute Community Site now has a handy RSS feed:
If, like me, you read your blogs in a newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) rather than the old-fashioned way of actually visiting every damn blog, this is a godsend. Anthony Aguirre has an interesting post, inspired in part by the Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist, on How Do We Fund Einstein Without Funding Crackpots? (To a large extent I think the present system does a pretty good job at that, actually. I would love to see much more flexibility in how researchers with a good track record get to use their funding, and much less onerous reporting requirements, but I haven’t seen any non-anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants. I’d be interested in hearing otherwise.)
I’m on a new American Physical Society Committee on Informing the Public, and one of the things (the only thing, really) I was able to help them with was some suggestions on improving their website. The APS runs a public-outreach site, Physics Central, that occupies some prime internet real estate — it’s a top-ten result when you do a Google search on physics. One of the things I suggested to keep the page current and lively was a regular update on interesting articles to appear on physics blogs — and lo and behold, they now have a regular Physics Blogosphere feature. From there, for example, you might be directed to Cocktail Party Physics, to learn about speeding Priuses, cloud chambers, the Iron Science Teacher competition, Cute Child Syndrome, the Exploratorium, and some insight into Rush Limbaugh’s manifold shortcomings. (That’s just in one post, of course; there are others.) It’s sort of like Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist, but just for physics. Now if we could only get them an RSS feed…
Finally, Terri Yu points to a series of podcasts by MIT physicist Peter Fisher on Life as an Academic. A good example is this episode on imposter syndrome — the nagging feeling that you don’t belong here among all of these actually-smart people. For the most part, they don’t either, so don’t worry about it.
Well, I just learned this on the Internets:
“First planet with water” alleged found outside solar system
I thought this wasn’t the first to have any (significant?) at all (some traces have to be just about anywhere), and this “water” is steam, but it’s neat.
As for funding or otherwise cultivating/harvesting the next generation of [out of the mainstream] Einsteins, I would also like to see more attention paid looking for good insights by gifted amateurs. (It’s a straw man to ask whether they’d come up with “new theories” – most mainstream researchers don’t even do that.) There are various loose ends and interpretations and lesser insights to tug at, as we can see looking at new answers to best interpret Thomas precession or the right-angle lever paradox or the effect of changing fields on dipoles etc. appearing in American Journal of Physics, Nuovo Cimento, Foundations of Physics, etc. even in recent decades. Fiddling with those kind of interesting but currently unglamorous and sidelined questions like the dynamics of extended bodies (especially, extending accelerating bodies, with the stress corrections) in relativity is something amateurs can actually work on (I did, and found out an interesting point about the apparent mass of accelerating bodies at the end of a long string.) I suppose its the physics equivalent of looking for comets or first sighting of novas or etc.
I’d be interested in what precisely you mean by:
“but I haven’t seen any non-anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants”
I haven’t seen any evidence anecdotal or not that would suggest the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants, but I have to admit that if it were the case, I would expect news of such a neglected talent to come anecdotally long (possibly decades) before it was properly recognised. I guess what I’m saying is that your comment suggest you have actually heard anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants, and that doesn’t half sound interesting! Tell us more!