{"id":21,"date":"2007-11-19T14:36:34","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T19:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/things-ive-written\/"},"modified":"2021-02-17T10:24:55","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T15:24:55","slug":"things-ive-written","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/things-ive-written\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I&#8217;ve written"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>These are in roughly increasing order of technical difficulty.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Quite a few years ago, I wrote some answers to <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/frequently-asked-questions-about-black-holes\/\">frequently asked questions about black holes<\/a>. (The sections that describe astronomical observations of black holes are a few years out of date, but the theory of black holes hasn&#8217;t changed recently, so the theoretical parts are still current.)<\/li>\n<li>Bayesian inference is the quantitative way of describing how a person&#8217;s opinions about a scientific (or in principle any other) issue get updated when new data come in. I wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/facultystaff.richmond.edu\/%7Eebunn\/bayes\/index.html\"> description<\/a> of how Bayesian inference works in a particular example, specifically how my opinion of the density of the Universe changed in the light of some new data.<\/li>\n<li>Creationists sometimes argue that biological evolution is impossible, because it is contradicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.\u00a0 This is nonsense, of course.\u00a0 I published <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0903.4603\">an article explaining why<\/a> in the American Journal of Physics.\u00a0 (This article uses intermediate undergraduate-level physics.)<\/li>\n<li>Cosmology books often describe the expanding Universe using the metaphor of a stretching rubber sheet.\u00a0 David Hogg and I think that this analogy often does more harm than good.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0808.1081\">Here&#8217;s why<\/a>. (Also published in A.J.P.\u00a0 This journal is pretty much the only place to go for articles at the boundary between physics research and pedagogical explanation.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/facultystaff.richmond.edu\/%7Eebunn\/ajpans\/ajpans.html\">How does the electric field get out of a black hole?<\/a> This question was posed a while back in the Q&amp;A section of the American Journal of Physics. Matt McIrvin and I wrote a brief answer that was published in the journal. You can view our answer in either <a href=\"http:\/\/www.richmond.edu\/%7Eebunn\/ajpans\/ajpans.html\">HTML<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.richmond.edu\/%7Eebunn\/ajpans.ps\">PostScript<\/a> format.<\/li>\n<li>John Baez and I wrote an <a href=\"http:\/\/math.ucr.edu\/home\/baez\/einstein\/\">explanation of the meaning of Einstein&#8217;s field equation<\/a>. This is one of the most important equations in physics, but it&#8217;s generally thought to be too difficult for anyone but specialists to understand. We show how to state the equation without too much daunting mathematics.\u00a0 (A.J.P. yet again!)<\/li>\n<li>I gave a <a href=\"http:\/\/xxx.lanl.gov\/abs\/astro-ph\/9607088\">series of lectures<\/a> at a NATO Advanced Study Institute on the cosmic microwave background radiation.<\/li>\n<li>You can get my Ph.D. thesis in either <a href=\"http:\/\/facultystaff.richmond.edu\/%7Eebunn\/thesis.ps.gz\">gzipped PostScript<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/facultystaff.richmond.edu\/%7Eebunn\/thesis.pdf\">PDF<\/a> format.<\/li>\n<li>In addition to the above, I&#8217;ve written a bunch of journal articles, most of which are available for download on the incredibly useful <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/find\/all\/1\/au:+Bunn_E\/0\/1\/0\/all\/0\/1\">preprint arXiv<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These are in roughly increasing order of technical difficulty. Quite a few years ago, I wrote some answers to frequently asked questions about black holes. (The sections that describe astronomical observations of black holes are a few years out of date, but the theory of black holes hasn&#8217;t changed recently, so the theoretical parts are &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/things-ive-written\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Things I&#8217;ve written<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1181,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions\/1181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}