In Praise of Physics Poetry, Spacetime SQUIDs, & Searching for the Impossible

Just to let you know that after a couple of special podcast editions from the quantum foundations meeting in Erice, Italy, Brendan and I are back with the regular podcast.

In this month's podcast, we're celebrating poetry about physics and maths. In April, I visited Penn State University, where I met with Emily Grosholz, a poet and philosopher of math and science, who works at the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, which is headed up by FQXi's Abhay Ashtekar. Grosholz shares three of her poems with us on the podcast: In Praise of Fractals, The Dissolution of the Rainbow, and Among Cosmologists. (Evelyn Lamb, who blogs over at Scientific American, has a nice review up of one of Groshloz's anthologies here.)

At the COST quantum foundations meeting in Erice, Italy, that I attended back in March, I met with FQXi's Sorin Paraoanu. You'll know about his new research building an artificial space-time from superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), from Nicola Jones' recent article for us. In an extended interview on the site, Paraonu talks a bit more about the progress of the experiment, as well as his recent publication in the New Journal of Physics, about testing the Landau-Zener formula for the transition probabilities between states of a qubit.

And finally, reporter Sophie Hebden talks to FQXi's Jen Eisert about his quest to find undecidable problems in quantum mechanics. Again, you'll be familiar with some this if you read Sophie's article, "Searching for the Impossible" -- but listen to he podcast piece for more details and to learn about Eisert's unusual skill for dating architecture.

Enjoy listening!