For those who are interested, the scientific journal has a companion article here. It describes the design and sensitivity of the experiment, as well as some of the context. There is also a link to the actual journal article to the right, but you may need institutional access to download it.

The basic technique is called a Magneto-Optical Trap, or MOT for short, although they probably use a few extra steps to create a Bose-Einstein condensate. As an atomic physicist, I have a couple of MOTs in my lab, and the whole thing will easily fit in a 1-meter long box. These things are actually being miniaturized quite effectively, and sensor packages using cold atoms are being built that fit in your hand. I bet a government-sponsored project could get them a bit smaller still. For example, here's a story about a DARPA project that's working to make a cold-atom based inertial guidance package for missiles that will be 20 cm^3.

We most certainly *do* know why observation affects an experiment. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action - if you make a measurement of the state of a system, that variable is known to some degree of precision. Its conjugate variable is thus made uncertain to a degree prescribed by the uncertainty principle. This has nothing to do with consciousness or a living observer.

A simple double-slit experiment works because of the uncertainty in the position of the particle. The wavefunction interferes with itself as it comes out of both slits and affects the possible positions it can be observed at on the detector. If you measure whether the particle passes through one of the slits, it's position is no longer uncertain, the wavefunction changes, and the experiment reflects that. This is well-understood quantum mechanics, although the popular press likes to pretend we don't know anything about it. And yes, IAAP (I am a physicist).

And that's exactly what the CPI does. Read the FAQ. It does include food, fuel, and housing, and weights the prices. There are a lot of smart, dedicated researchers working on these data series - there's no conspiracy. Trust me, the left is far too disorganized for there to be one.

You're very wrong. The CPI is exactly what you suggest we do - they check prices of common consumer goods in real stores. If the government bogeyman scares you, look at MIT's billion price index. It's an online survey of many prices, updated in real time. And it matches the CPI very accurately.

I can second the recommendation for Hartle (the title is Gravity: an Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity). It's a great introduction that I used as an undergrad, but be warned - it's still pretty complicated, even as an introduction. The nice part about it is that it develops the concepts of curved spacetime as you need them to investigate interesting physical systems, like the geometrized version of Special Relativity (which gets you time dilation and the Twin Paradox) or Schwarzschild black holes. My favorite section is where it discusses the metric of the entire universe, which describe the expansion of space and what happens to spacetime in the distant future.

As to Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler - avoid it until you've gone through some more introductory texts. It's really easy to get in over your head and get discouraged in that text, as they dive in head-first with hard-core math.

If you think that a "fat slob" paying more for his insurance means that you'll pay less, you have a very naive view of insurance companies. Or companies in general. Also, how diligent do you think they'll be to check that you're not a fat slob? Remember that banks have been foreclosing on houses that weren't even in default!

The irony here is that 0!=1 is a true statement. And yes, I do think factorials are exciting.

I'm a physicist; I work in a laser lab. I never capitalize 'laser', and I've never seen it capitalized in any contemporary publication. Frankly, explicitly capitalizing acronyms gets really annoying once they enter common usage. It just gets in the way of effective communication.

Actually, the waste is vastly *more* radioactive, but this is still a Good Thing. There is more radioactivity, but this causes a significantly shorter half-life, so you don't have to worry about waste that is hot for 30,000 years - only decades or centuries.

I don't think "draconian copy protection" was the reason either SACD or DVD-A didn't catch on. I think the reason they didn't catch on is that they're more expensive than CDs, they can't be played in a regular CD player (or, in the case of SACD, can only be played as an ordinary CD in such a drive), and the improvement in audio is undetectable to most people. I am certainly happy with CD-quality and have no burning desire to switch. Why would you pay more when you don't see any discernible benefit?

Similarly, most people are quite happy with the quality and resolution of DVD. To get the benefit of BD you also need a large HDTV, which not everyone has yet. Of course, considering how often people watch 4:3 content stretched to fill their 16:9 screen, it wouldn't surprise me if most wouldn't notice the resolution improvement even if they have HDTV.

I mostly watch video on my laptop, and only occasionally watch HD content online. I do notice the improvement over regular DVD, but it's still not something I think about if I'm watching something that I enjoy in standard definition. I certainly don't see why I should pay significantly inflated prices for BD discs when I just don't care about the improvement very much.