Preposterous Universe

 
So you want to be an astrophysicist?

Yet more science blogging. All the cool kids are doing it.

Steinn Sigurðsson is an astrophysicst at Penn State, with a new blog called Dynamics of Cats. He already has some good posts up on the crucial question of how to become an astrophysicist: Part 0, Part 1.5. Okay, so he's an astrophysicist, not a mathematician.

I should also point you to Electron Blue, where Pyracantha explains how your world-view changes when you begin to think in terms of vectors. I would describe it as a shift from Aristotelian to Galilean intuition -- the world is a different place once you've internalized the conservation of momentum. Quantum mechanics is another shift entirely.

And another thing: as mentioned in the comments to the previous post, Kriston at Grammar.police found some great negatively-curved spaces, made of yarn. (For mathematical details see section 3.9 of Spacetime and Geometry.)

~ posted by Sean Carroll at 1:57 PM ~ link ~ ~ ~