After posting that rosey and optimistic trend in the number of high school students enrolling in physics, we are now faced with this very discouraging news about how mathematics is taught is our schools in the US. Since I do not have any children, I obviously do not encounter such issues normally. However, after reading David Klein's (Dept. of Physics, Cal State University, Norridge) editorial in Am. J. Phys.[1] on the state of mathematics education funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)...

One positive news on the physics front is that the newly released statistics on US high school physics enrollment shows record number of students taking physics classes. The trend is expected to continue. All the numbers are good. There are reported increase in the number of girls and minorities enrolling in physics.

Let's hope we can now also focus on the quality of the physics education that these students are getting.

Zz.

Another myth, or urban legend, debunked by science. The scenes of people being sucked or drowned in quicksand cannot happen.

<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050926/full/050926-9.html">
[Free access to this link is for a limited time only]</a>

Zz

Here's an interesting situation that seems to have not been addressed before. Why is it that those who question the validity of Bell-type experiments to show the QM properties of entanglement, or those who still believe in "Local Realism", or those who are still clutching to the so-called "detection loophole" in these experiments, are NEVER themselves experimentalists, or have ever performed these types of experiments? I mean, think about it for a second. Typically, in physics,...

It appears that there is finally a slam-dunk evidence of superfluidity in a strongly-interacting Fermi gas. The latest results from the Ketterle group at MIT-Harvard have a convincing evidence of superfludity Li6 fermions via the formation of superfluid vortex lattice.[1] While there have been several publications within the past few years that indicated evidence of BE condensate forming in Fermi gasses[2,3,4], this is the most convincing and irrefutable evidence of the formation of such a state....