Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

The very meaning of socialism

Hehe, Lubos Motl will go crazy… I received a rather strange email message yesterday; since it was from unspecified person (spam in other words), I decided to share it with you – see below. An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire [...]

Lithium problem

Apart from being a very nice review of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), recent paper by Karsten Jedamzik and Maxim Pospelov discusses an important open problem in the physics of BBN. In short, the lithium problem in physics of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is seeming underproduction of . What do we mean by that? Well, the lithium [...]

Rocky Kolb’s lecture on Dark Universe

… namely, about dark matter and dark energy as you may imagine. The lecture itself (2009 Buhl lecture at Carnegie Mellon U) is actually very clear and suitable for newcomers/non-scientists. So, if you want to know in some details (more or less technical) what the modern cosmology is all about, please check out this lecture.

Other interesting things in ArXiv (11 Jun 2009)

Basically, there were so many interesting and useful papers (or at least they were useful for me) – lecture notes, reviews – that it will give me hard time posting reviews of all of them here – since I am lazy, I’ll just try to list some of them. Umut Gursoy et al. “Thermal Transport [...]

Notes on strongly coupled QCD in the continuum

By continuum here we mean using methods different from lattice QCD, which is currently our main instrument for quantitative understanding of QCD physics at strong coupling. What can we actually do apart from lattice simulations to study properties of QCD in this regime? Not much really. As recent minireview paper by M. Pennington explains, one [...]

Carnegie Mellon’s contribution to Star Trek universe

… apart from training Spock, I mean – the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon U. discusses several interesting projects being developed at the University which are worth putting into the universe of Star Trek.

Tour of Ares IX

Jim Halsell (former astronaut) takes Miles O’Brien on a tour through the various components of the new NASA Ares IX rocket.

Into dark ages or again about GRB090423

Back in April, I already wrote about GRB090423 – currently the most distant detected object in the Universe. Yesterday, two papers with details of mesurement have appeared in astro-ph (unfortunately, Icannot give you the links – see my comment below). Let me remind you that currently the redshift of the most distant galaxy we observed [...]

How to spot a black hole on the Sky

Here is a video from NewScientist featuring simulations by Loeb and his collaborators (we have discussed Loeb’s results several times on NEQNET). The idea is that BH acts as a strong gravitational lense, so if we have a close system “star-BH”, we will see a very specific pattern of light when the companion star crosses [...]

This and that in ArXiv on Monday

Due to unbelievable overload of the last days let me simply list the recent papers in ArXiv that I found the most interesting: 1. Quantum information T. Tilma el al., “Is entanglement a critical resource for quantum metrology?” Can we beat the shot-noise limit (and get to the Heisenberg limit) in quantum metrology by playing [...]