Welcome to The Language of Bad Physics at its new home on the PLoS Blogosphere (PLoGosphere?)*.  For those not familiar with this blog, I focus on three main types of posts, a weekly “This Week in the Universe” series highlighting what papers/results researchers are excited about in general relativity, astrophysics, cosmology and high energy physics, “Bad Physics” posts discussing either papers or popular articles that are propagating misconceptions about physics (specifically, relativity) or are just plain wrong, and finally “Language” posts talking about how we use terminology in science, sometimes incorrectly.  Occasionally when something exciting or important comes along in general relativity that I feel deserves more of a write up than an inclusion in the weekly happenings, I’ll also be writing about that.

From the old home:

This Week in the Universe

• This Week in the Universe: August 17th – August 23rd
• This Week in the Universe: August 10th – August 16th
• This Week in the Universe: August 3rd – August 9th
• This Week in the Universe: July 27th – August 2nd
• This Week in the Universe: July 20th – July 26th
• This Week in the Universe: July 13th – July 19th
• This Week in the Universe: July 6th – July 12th
• This Week in the Universe: June 29th – July 5th
• This Week in the Universe: June 22nd – June 28th
• This Week in the Universe: June 15th – June 21st
• This Week in the Universe: June 8th – June 14th
• This Week in the Universe: June 1st – June 7th, 2010

The Bad Physics Side

• “Cosmological Models with No Big Bang” by Wun-Yi Shu
• Experiments in Non-Relativistic Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)
• “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” by Erik Verlinde
• Objections to Kaku and Liu’s “How to Time Travel?”
• “Black Holes – a Simplified Theory for Quantum Gravity Non-Specialists”
• “Test of relativistic gravity for propulsion at the Large Hadron Collider”

The Language Side

• Bad Language: “I see it now, so it happened now”
• The Language of Science – “in general”
• The Language of Science – it’s “just a theory”
• Bad Language: “Gravitational Force”
• Bad Language: Metric vs Metric Tensor vs Matrix Form vs Line Element
• Bad Language: “Riemannian Manifold”

*I say living “on the Blogosphere” as opposed to “in the Blogosphere” because you live on a sphere, not in one.  That is because I’m anal and make clear distinction between a sphere (a two-dimensional spherical surface embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space) and a ball (a three-dimensional shape consisting of a sphere and its interior).

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

- E. Dijkstra