The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June).

This year saw a few milestones, though not quite as many as the previous year. I got a grant, passed my third-year reappointment review (the first big hurdle on the way to tenure), and we had a visiting speaker from Yale one week who mentioned in passing an idea that became central to my research program.

Probably the most significant milestone, though it didn't necessarily seem that way at the time, was when we adopted Emmy. If you've read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, the Introduction includes a dog dialogue sitting on a bench at the Mohawk-Hudson Humane Society, which is, in fact, where I made the decision to take her home. Which has paid off far more literally than I ever would've guessed. As a bonus, this year also includes the very first conversation with Emmy on the blog, though it took a different form than the conversations that would eventually become (nerd) famous.

Other notable posts from the year include:

PHYSICS:

It's interesting to me that already, only a year into the blog's existence, there's a dramatic drop-off in the number of meaty physics posts, particularly during the academic year. I had thought that I was a little more consistent back in the day, and only started to feel a major crunch more recently. That's not the case, though-- I was posting apologetic notes about not having time to do physics posts all the way back in 2003.

There were a couple of notable spurts of physics activity, the first surrounding a now discredited claim to have detected a "pentaquark" particle at Jefferson Lab. Our newly hired department chair was part of one of the JLab collaborations, so we talked about it a bit, and I wrote up the experiment over a series of posts spanning a month. The specific result is no longer valid, but I think the description of how things work in particle physics experiments is still pretty decent.

The other protracted series of posts was a long discussion of space flight issues, which shades toward politics in a bunch of places. Again, while some of the details are no longer relevant, I still broadly agree with the general ideas.

The other particularly notable physics item that I had nearly forgotten about was the Afshar experiment, which claimed to be able to detect both which slit a photon went through and the double-slit interference pattern produced in the process. This generated a good deal of discussion at the time, but has since sunk with little trace. It did eventually lead to a research article, but its bolder claims haven't really held up.

Other odds and ends about physics: some thoughts about inertial frames, some stuff about quantum interpretations, some quantum misconceptions, and some thoughts about narrative. It's interesting to see that these contain bits and pieces that I would end up using in my two books, without consciously remembering that I had written about this stuff before. It's a little easier to understand some of the high-profile academics caught self-plagiarizing their own books, now...

The rest is here:

Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004 [Uncertain Principles]