A colleague from economics recently said he was interested in how physicists think, and more specifically, how they come up with research ideas. I thought it would be a good idea to try to set up a list, based on my reading and experiences, of the various techniques, voluntary or involuntary, that I have seen physicists use: Yielding to inspiration : These ideas come from the subconscious. First one has to fill the brain with a lot of information, then a lot of thinking has t

This post is a review of What is Inside a Black Hole? by Stephen Hawking. It is a 67-page reissue of two of his essays from his longer book Brief Answers to the Big Questions . Apart from the title essay, it includes the essay Is Time Travel Possible ? Inside a black hole : The essay recalls the early black hole thoughts of John Mitchell, the grand impetus provided by Einstein's general theory of relativity, the quantitative work of Karl Schwarzschild, the pioneering contri

This post is about C. N. Yang, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, who passed away last week at the age of 103. Yang received the Nobel prize in 1957 and made towering contributions to several areas in physics, as detailed below. Quick academic bio : Yang was born and educated in China until the masters level; he obtained his thesis in theoretical physics from the University of Chicago under Edward Teller (sometimes known as the father of the Hydrogen bomb).

This post is a review of The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics (859 pages) . The book came out a while ago, in 1991. Since science moves on, one might expect that the material is quite dated (the classic advice is to read the latest in science and the oldest in literature). But I think the volume, which is a collection of essays and popular writing (all reprints) on the topics mentioned above, has merits which keep it relevant and valuable even today. For

This post is about the award of the Nobel prize in physics 2025 to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis. From the announcement ,...

In 2022, I became a minor celebrity among my friends for a week for correctly predicting that Alain Aspect would win the physics Nobel...

It has been said that the death and taxes are the two inevitable facts of life. To this list I am inclined to add reviews. It seems no...

This post is about the recently reported experimental confirmation of a theoretical prediction of Stephen Hawking about black holes....

The Nobel prize for physics will be announced on Tuesday October 7, 2025. As a warm up exercise in preparing for this event, I will...

This is a review of David Nasaw 's biography of Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist. At 880...

Millionaires (this includes billionaires) who dropped out of high school or college are often invited to universities to speak to...

The last stop this summer was Lancaster, UK, for a conference (see if you can find me in the photo) on low temperature physics, which...

This post is a review of the book The Woman Who Ran AIIMS . AIIMS is the All India Institute of Medical Sciences located in Delhi. It is...

This post is about two recent visits I made to academic campuses in places somewhat exotic. Malta Malta is an archipelago of five...

This is a review of the The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo . It is the biography of Paul Dirac, one of the pioneers of quantum physics,...

An intellectual, said Aldous Huxley, is someone who has found something more interesting than sex. I would like to revise that opinion: I...

First an apology for missing last week: the piece was ready, but I was in a place with spotty internet, so I could not upload. For this...

Like most of us - maybe more than most of us - I often have gripes about technology. This post reproduces a piece that I wrote many years...

On the recent trip to Italy, talk arose of Ettore Majorana, the Italian scientist whose contributions are now considered fundamental in...

As promised - this post is about Florence. Galileo The city houses the Villa Galileo , where the scientist was imprisoned and spent the...