The virtual machine is like any piece of software and can always be improved in principle. Think of it like the updates you get for all your other software. A lot of them don't involve changing any features but just fix issues or improve performance. The Java language itself can be thought of as the feature set for…

24. There were heavily serialized shows before it, such as Babylon 5, DS9, and countless soap operas. But I think 24, which began in 2001, made the biggest splash and really had a big impact on the modern era of complex, continuous storytelling on TV.

Except for 24, which premiered three years prior to Lost. Oh, and countless soap operas.

That, and to feel smug.

Fascinating and hideous.

This is fun physics which could lead to modern advances, but do these properties somehow translate into unique attributes as far as its use as a pigment goes? Ancient Chinese craftsmen obviously didn't have access to those low temperatures and strong magnetic fields. Under normal conditions, there doesn't seem to be…

I've been thinking about doing some general blog posts on Kinja about physics topics. I'll try to remember to give you a heads up if/when I post.

It is true that BEC is distinct phase and reaching it involves a phase transition. So it is a "sudden" change. But the individual wavelengths of the atoms will continuously increase as the temperature lowers until that transition takes place. The de Broglie wavelength is the technical name for a particle's wavelength…

Actually, in a way, what you are describing does in fact happen and I bet you have read about it, just not using those words. Take a gas of argon or whatever and cool it down to super-low temperatures. At some point, the atoms quit behaving like a group of individual atoms and instead enter a state known as a…

I agree that over-reliance on CGI has become a hallmark of lazy film-making. However, as a programmer and a writer, I have to point out that the "exceptional skills of real human beings" are often manifested through keyboards.

Mass/energy is the typical way to determine scale in elementary particle physics. I think this still works in atomic physics if you talk about the binding energy of the state, as opposed to the total energy/mass. The atomic radius is basically the extent of the electron cloud. The electron cloud's size is roughly the…

"Virtual particle" is sort of a misused term. Any particle type can be virtual or real depending on the situation. The electromagnetic force between electrons is transmitted via virtual photons, but real photons also exist. Likewise, virtual W bosons transmit the electroweak force between a neutrino and an electron,…

That is correct (not the weed part, as far as I know).

I never heard that before. (The part about spatial length being inversely proportional to energy.)

They aren't really catch-all terms. They all have specific technical meanings. The broadest term of this type you could call the particles in this article would be hadrons.

Oh, sure. This will shed light on the theory of quarks, an area where theoretical calculations are notoriously difficult.

Here is the chain of reasoning. Mass is energy, i.e. the famous relationship E=mc^2. The correspondence between energy and length (either spatial lengths or lengths of time) is inverse. This is a feature of quantum mechanics. Particles have wave properties and the wavelength of those waves are smaller for higher…

They aren't generically on the scale of atoms. Some are much lighter, some are similar in mass to light or medium mass atoms. I'm actually thinking I should reverse my position, since the length scales involved are often much smaller than the size of atoms. It's one of the strange things about this field that large…

I'll respond to this once I finish my autobiography.

Twitter is the new fireworks.