We frequently get questions such as these:

"What is energy?"

"What are Cooper Pairs?"

"What is conservation of momentum?"

etc...etc.

And the persons who asked such questions didn't bother to explain the context of the question, what exactly did he/she wanted to know, and didn't reveal the level of education that he/she could understand.

While we welcome questions, in this day and...

Depending on your background, the introductorry book on Loop Quantum Gravity by Gambini and Pullin is a pretty good and succint. As a non-specialist who likes keeping current with today's foundation physics, I found my readings from the following sources to be pretty essential:

For Gambini's and Pullin's chapters 2 and 3:

1) "A Short Course in General Relativity" by J. Foster and J. D. Nightingale.

For Gambini's and Pullin's chapters 4-6:...

My family and I had the pleasure of spending this Thanksgiving with close friends at Los Alamos. I had a chance to discuss math foundations and genetics with Elena, a mathemetician into genetics, and quantum mechanics with Vincenzo, a particles and fields theoretician.

Vincezno and I read and discussed the paper, "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically" by Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph ( lanl.arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1111.3328...

This interesting thought experiment was brought up by my philosophy TA last week and I thought I'd pass it along in hopes for a lively discussion.

The game is as follows. You flip a coin.

H TH TTH TTTH ..........
$2 $4 $8 $16

If you flip heads, the game is over and you get the coressponding prize money. The question is, how much would you be willing to pay to play this game? Seeing that winning $2 is equally as likely as winning 4$, and winning...

I’ve always wanted to know how the universe is made.
When I first started putting my learning curve up on the web, there were few scientist who were using the web to pass on their knowledge.
This has all changed. There are now, numerous blogs explaining everything much better than I ever will be able to do it.

When the web became available, I was able to access the knowledge of the researchers and find out what they had discovered.
So far, I’ve learned that they...