Blogger: Peter Steinberg
URL: entropybound.blogspot.com
First post: April 2004
Who is the blog written by?
Peter Steinberg is a nuclear physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US. He is acting project manager of the PHOBOS experiment, which used Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to search for unusual events produced during collisions between gold nuclei. He is also involved with the PHENIX experiment, which seeks to discover a new state of matter known as the quark–gluon plasma. In addition to his own blog Entropy Bound, Steinberg is currently blogging on a website that was set up last year to publicize the involvement of US scientists with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
What topics does the blog cover?
Mostly events from Steinberg’s working life and physics-related news. Recently, several posts have been devoted to Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho’s lawsuit against the LHC (Physics World May p3; print edition only). Steinberg questioned Wagner’s claim to be a nuclear physicist, and this prompted a long response from Wagner in which he accuses Steinberg of libel and threatens legal action. Steinberg subsequently withdrew the offending post.
Who is it aimed at?
Entropy Bound grew out of the “Quantum Diaries” project, in which 33 physicists, including Steinberg, wrote about their life and work for a year to celebrate the International Year of Physics in 2005. This was essentially an outreach project, and the material in Entropy Bound has remained at a level appropriate for non-physicists while also maintaining an audience within the physics community itself.
Why should I read it?
One of the main things that this blog has going for it is that it looks great. Steinberg illustrates most of his posts with a well-chosen image, which often adds significantly to their appeal. The standard of the writing is also pretty good.
How often is it updated?
Not as regularly as most blogs — usually every few days to a week, but sometimes a couple of weeks can pass between new posts. This is partly as a result of Steinberg having to divide his time between this blog and his blog on the LHC, and posts on Entropy Bound sometimes consist just of a link to a new entry on the other blog. The sparseness of the posts, however, also reflects the fact that Steinberg obviously chooses his topics a bit more carefully than many scientist bloggers — when he does write about something, it is generally interesting and worth the wait.
Can you give me a sample quote?
This may seem strange in a world where scientific information is increasingly disseminated electronically (as it should be, and for free, when taxpayer dollars are paying for it!), but I just got the greatest thing in my office mailbox today: a book. A real book. While I’ve been published in my share of conference and workshop proceedings, and various papers have ended up published on real paper and stashed away in real libraries, this one feels a bit different. The book in question is the latest edition of Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. I’ve always seen these on various library bookshelves over the years, and been given photocopies of various articles throughout the years. And somehow the design feels very book-ish, sober red cover, with all of the contributors’ names embossed in gold. Feels snazzy. Classy, even.
