Uncertainity Principle(s)

Most people know a formulation of the uncertainity principle in quantum mechanics (by Heisenberg), where it basically gives a bound (in terms of the standard deviations of ~) for simultaneous measurements of complementary properties (i.e. measurement operators with non-negative commutator).

There are a number of other places where the principce turns up. It comes from an application of the cauchy schwarz inequality to the fourier transformation. Here's a set of (german) slides from a lecture. Recently Terry Tao posted on a a formulation of the principle due to Mongomery, which has applications in analytic number theory.

Physics: Faster-Than-Light Signals and Special Relativity; popular science articles by Ashtekar

Two things to link: The frenzy about findings and non-findings at the LHC pose a good reason to think about the possible implications. Therefore, an article by R.Geroch on the consistency of faster than light signals (e.g. neutrinos measured at the LHC) and special relativity (for example, due to partially breaking Lorentz invariance for neutrinos, but not all the other particles). There is also a blog post on FTL-neutrinos.

Moreover there is a bunch of popular science articles by A.Ashtekar (who is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity).

Nuclear Energy: Thorium Reactors

I recently discovered a small gap in my education in nuclear energy. It concerns LFTR reactors. They seem to be reconsidered after uranium based reactors were favored after world war 2 and the during the cold war due to their dual use in energy production as well as the generation of byproducs for nuclear weapons.

There are several videos on the google tech talk channlel, just two of those:

Contemporary Physics

Just some physics stuff from recent news: An article at wired about recent findings at lhc/cern regarding the charge party violation and a confirmation about the (too) fast neurino measurements at the lhc.

Some Videos on Physics

Just some simple popular science talks for some spare time in between:

Sean Carroll on the origin of the universe and the arrow of time

Part 1



Part 2



Brian Greene on String Theory

Cloaking devices

Just because it is fancy: http://skullsinthestars.com/2009/06/19/invisibility-physics-hiding-and-seeking-all-at-once/

Illusions

An interesting blog article named "Hallucinatory neurophysics
" can be found here: http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005/02/hallucinatory-neurophysics.html. Unfortuntally I wasn't able to find the paper by now. (There are, by the way, some nice videos about hallucinatory drugs on youtube, and some good articles in Spektrum). And Jack Cowans appointment to math and neurology also sounds pretty interesting. Computational neuroscience seems to be a field of its own.
I came there via a blog about "imagining more than 3 dimensions" at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/03/30/why-cant-we-visualize-more-than-three-dimensions/.

That previous blog post reminded me of the "Imagining the tenth dimenson" video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY ) which I first watched years ago. This version contains some annotations taken from the book (for which the video is supposed to be pomotional material I guess). I found them not too easy to follow and I doubt the correctness of some claims. But to discuss this I'd need the book, but one at the first glace strange thing is his integration of Everett's many-world interpretation of quantum physics.

edit: I found a paper which seems to have a similar focus: "Geometric Visual Hallucinations, Euclidean Symmetry, and the Functional Architecture of Striate Cortex" at http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-1.pdf

Stanford University lectures

I (was) stumbled over the stanford university youtube channel, containing a quite large collection of video-taped lectures:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=stanforduniversity&view=playlists

The modern physics series seems to be ok, if you don't exspect abstract math concepts explained in detail but are ok with the that's-all-we-need kind of math (or know the concepts anyways). Watch the first 10 minutes of the quantum mechanics part if you want some explaination of the purpose of lecture series.
The chemical engineering lectures seem to be stupid. I suppose they're quite self-contained in regard of the missing slides if you only have the videos, but seriously, I strongly dislike the professor and his attitude. And I so would have failed his class for he over-emphazises excercises so extremly..ridiculous :>

Nothing to tell about the rest of the lectures, maybe some point later.

Some small addition to the philosphy of science post: Popper wrote quite some chapters about probability and theories based on that. He disregared this notion for being only meta-physical, not scientific. As for my understanding, he says you need to find some way of falsification of a theory to get it out of the meta-physical trap.

The ATLAS experiment @ LHC

http://www.nonequilibrium.net/256-video-fo-day-atlas-experiment/

Check this video