Blog post: swansont: Combing the Sky ... for a Good Explanation

Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers

The hard is what makes it great.

Anyway, I agree — glossing over some interesting physics because it's outside your area of expertise is one thing, but passing it off as magical gizmos is just lazy. I am biased, though — I'm an atomic physics guy, I'ver seen talks by both Ron Walsworth and Dave Phillips on the Astro-Comb and it's pretty cool, and frequency combs are why I am of Nobel blood (via Ted Hänsch).

And even if you don't want to (or can't) write up something less awful than this hand-waving, here's a radical idea: it's the internet, so link to someone with a better explanation! I know, that's blasphemy for a commercial publication — thou shalt not link outside your own ecosystem — but this is the Planetary Society (it's a "dot org" not a "dot com") so I'd think they'd be more concerned with getting good info out and less about external links at the tail end of an article.

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