Regular CV readers already know of John McCain's past griping about planetariums. Well, apparently that planetarium is really stuck in his craw, because he brought it up again in the most recent debate: (Obama) voted for nearly a billion dollars in p...

Japan has had a long and distinguished tradition in modern physics. Just to pick one example, the amazing efforts of Shin’ichirō Tomonaga to understand quantum electrodynamics, anticipating the work of Schwinger and Feynman while remaining...

09:37 PST: Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been eagerly awaiting word that the LHC has successfully threaded the proton beam around the whole ring. In recent days they have gotten it half way around the 27 km circumference, and within hours, they...

You know, other people talk a lot about time, too — it’s not just me. Here’s a great video from Nature, featuring a conversation between David Gross and Itzhak Fouxon about the existence of time. (Via Sarah Kavassalis.) Itzhak plays the role of the...

Greetings from Down Under! Current at the CosPA conference in Melbourne, after spending a couple of days in Sydney — a brief fling through Adelaide up next. It’s been a mixed bag so far; while I’ve had great fun interacting with people here in...

This is rather “inside baseball”, but back when Cycle 17 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) proposals were being written, I plotted up the number of proposals as a function of time until deadline. Right now, a signficant fraction of the astronomical...