David Kordahl lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with his wife and two daughters. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Arizona State University and is now an assistant professor of physics at Centenary College of Louisiana. Previously, he taught high school and gigged as a violinist. His writing has appeared in The New Atlantis, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nautilus, and various technical journals. Email: david.kordahl [at] gmail.com
Website: https://davidkordahl.net/
by David Kordahl James Clerk Maxwell, whose theory of electromagnetism occupies the same physics pedestal as Newton’s theory of gravity, was by all accounts a good-humored and generous man, and a fairly confusing lecturer. Here is a story about Maxwell (admitted to be apocryphal in the math notes that recount it) that suggests something of…
by David Kordahl If you follow science news, there’s a good chance that you’ve recently heard about Muon g-2 (pronounced “mew-awhn gee minus two”), an experiment whose preliminary results were announced to media fanfare and general excitement. The experiment’s most recent iteration is going on at Fermilab, the physics facility outside Batavia, Illinois, but it…
by David Kordahl This is a post about conspiracy theories—yes, another one, after a year’s worth—but let’s start by remembering a benign old theory from a little over one year ago, back when ex-vice-president Joe Biden had won just one primary, down in South Carolina, where he had been aided by the endorsement of representative…
by David Kordahl In the part of my life when I was most actively trying to invent myself as a writer, I was working as a high school teacher and was desperately unhappy. (Notice the way that I put this: “I was working as a high school teacher,” not “I was a high school teacher”;…
by David Kordahl There are two main types of people who seek out arguments that contradict their beliefs: those who are not afraid to change their mind, and those cannot imagine themselves doing so. I’m not sure which type I was a few years ago when I watched Out of the Blue, a documentary that…
by David Kordahl Last month I worked on a modern sort of archaeological dig, going through the equipment in a college physics lab to see what sorts of devices were on hand. It reminded me of being a little kid, when I would tiptoe around my dad’s religious paraphernalia (he was a Lutheran pastor), not…
by David Kordahl When I was seventeen years old, I took my first college science course, a summer class in astronomy for non-majors. The professor narrated his wild claims in an amused deadpan, calmly showing us how to reconstruct the life cycle of stars, and how to estimate the age of the universe. This course…
by David Kordahl Many of the best historical movies featuring “hard” scientists have used social problems, rather than than scientific controversies, to propel their action.1 Two recently released films that address the legacy of Nikola Tesla reverse this trend. The Current War, a plummy costume drama whose planned 2017 distribution was delayed by the Harvey…
by David Kordahl Paul Halpern’s new book, Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect, takes its time to get there, but its best parts discuss the intersection of two puzzles for 20th century rationalists: psychoanalysis, and quantum mechanics. This intersection is dramatized by the correspondence of Carl Jung, Freud’s…
by David Kordahl Physicists, as a tribe, are overwhelmingly likely to believe that smart extraterrestrials exist, and are also overwhelmingly likely to believe that they haven’t visited Earth. I’m considered a bit of a kook by my physicist friends because I harbor genuine confusion on this point. I want to believe, but I also want…
by David Kordahl Physics writing, let’s face it, is usually pretty boring. In a recent essay for Tablet, Adam Kirsh diagnosed one reason for this. When physicists write non-technical literature, they often begin with the assumption that the world as revealed by physics is the real one, and that the job of physicists, when they…