Notes and Neurons

Bobby McFerrin demonstrating the intuitive power of the pentatonic scale at the World Science Festival 2009:

J. Robert Oppenheimer: His life and his physics

Reading:

Cloaks and Medals

Professor Sir John Pendry, the physicist behind the concept of "invisibility cloaking", has been awarded the Institute of Physics's 2013 Isaac Newton Medal.

The Square Kilometre Array

Design and construction of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the largest and most powerful radio-telescope in history, is about to begin very soon. Most of the SKA will be deployed in Africa.

(The?) Engineering Prize

It's ironic that there is no universally recognised prize, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in science, for breakthroughs in engineering. Ironic because, of course, Alfred Nobel was an engineer himself. Perhaps the newly inaugurated Queen Elizabeth Prize will remedy this situation. 

Instant: The Story of Polaroid

Some say the world will end in fire

Who's The Master?

2013 will see a battle royal for supremacy of the global smartphone and tablet markets. Should be interesting.

Noblest Nobel

My favourite Nobel prize this year was in the category of economics. It was awarded, in part, for empirical work on market design by Alvin E. Roth, an engineer turned economist (fittingly enough).

It's a tech thing

From Bonkers World by Manu Cornet:

How Mo Ibrahim built Celtel

From the October 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review:

How Mo Ibrahim built Celtel from scratch into one of the largest mobile operators in Africa.

A general theory of tech start-ups

Eric Ries's general theory of tech start-ups.

The Age of Insight

Eric Kandel has lived a long and extraordinary life. He began his career as an intellectual historian and, via various fascinating stops along the way, including medicine and psychoanalysis, became one of the world's leading neuroscientists. Now he has written a long and extraordinary book which weaves together many of the (apparently) disparate strands of his life. It's on my wishlist:

Physics and Finance

Never the twain shall meet? Perhaps not.

Knots and Quantum Theory

Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), is unusual in that he is both a first-rate mathematician and a first-rate theoretical physicist. In recent work on the surprising linkages between knot theory and quantum physics, Witten demonstrates both these capabilities as well as a third one: he is an excellent expositor both in print and in person:

100 reasons to be a scientist

From the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP): Not quite 100 personal accounts of the joys of scientific careers.

Of Higgs and bosons

In his essay "Physics and reality" (see endnote), Einstein observed that the fact that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible is a miracle. By "comprehensible" Einstein meant that the inner workings of the physical world (or what he called "the world of our sense experiences") can be understood and explained by rational means (or "thinking", as he put it so simply and beautifully). Yesterday's announcement (4 July 2012) of definitive experimental evidence of the so-called Higgs boson was yet another manifestation of this most wonderful of miracles. That a few squiggles published in the pages of an otherwise obscure physics journal can possibly constitute a fundamental breakthrough in our collective understanding of the universe is astonishing. Professor Matt Strassler, a specialist in the area, explains the significance of the discovery.

Endnote:

Excerpt (p. 351) from A. Einstein, "Physics and reality", Journal of the Franklin Institute, Volume 221, Issue 3, March 1936, Pages 349-382:

The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking (operations with concepts, and the creation and use of definite functional relations between them, and the coordination of sense experiences to these concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." It is one of the great realizations of Immanuel Kant that the setting up of a real external world would be senseless without this comprehensibility.

In speaking here concerning "comprehensibility," the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by relations between the concepts and sense experience, these relations being determined in any possible manner. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle. 

Turing @ 100

Alan M. Turing's centenary

The Joy of Stats

Presented by Hans Rosling

A beautiful find

Via Light Blue Touchpaper: The recently declassified contributions of John Nash to the science of cryptology.