Months ago, during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I offered to answer questions from people who donated to the Challenge. I then promptly forgot to respond to the questions sent in. Mea maxima culpa. Here’s a way-too-late response to a good question from “tcmJOE”: I’ve spent the past few years trying to explore physics and figure out… Continue reading DonorsChoose Payoff: Why AMO Physics?
Category: Condensed Matter
Room Temperature Kook Signifiers
I was surprised to see Tom linking to a site claiming a superconductor at 254K. Not because the figure isn’t newsworthy, but because somebody sent me this about a week ago, and I decided not to link to it. It’s absolutely dripping with kook signifiers. The two biggest things tripping my kook alarm are: 1)… Continue reading Room Temperature Kook Signifiers
Macroscopic Quantum Behavior in SeedMagazine.com
The Corporate Masters have launched a “featured blogger” program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today. The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling… Continue reading Macroscopic Quantum Behavior in SeedMagazine.com
…For Some Definition of Physical Reality
There’s a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined “Physical reality of string theory demonstrated,” in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit’s head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in… Continue reading …For Some Definition of Physical Reality
Making Materials Cool
Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction. The first is last week’s NOVA ScienceNOW segment on… Continue reading Making Materials Cool
All Physics Is Not Particle Physics
A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead “For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.” In the body of the article, we find: While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly… Continue reading All Physics Is Not Particle Physics
DAMOP Day Two
Thursday at DAMOP was a little more broken up than usual for me at one of these meetings, because the nagging cold I have was bugging me more, and also because I needed to check my email a few times. There was still some neat stuff, though. The early-morning session was the toughest call of… Continue reading DAMOP Day Two
DAMOP Day One
Technically, the meeting started Tuesday, but all that happened was a welcome reception, which I missed due to travel. The real beginning of the meeting was Wednesday morning, with the traditional unscheduled half-hour welcome from local dignitaries. That was followed by the Prize Session, featuring the frighteningly smart Misha Lukin, who was awarded the I.I.… Continue reading DAMOP Day One
Dorky Poll: How Do You Like Your Waves?
I made it to Charlottesville, and am all checked in to the Econo Lodge, which is a little more Econo than I was expecting. It’s an old-school motel, with rooms that open right into the parking lot, the sort of place where the towels are tiny and scratchy, the pillows and mattresses are thin, and… Continue reading Dorky Poll: How Do You Like Your Waves?
Less Is Also Difficult
I’m an experimentalists through and through, and have always known better than to attempt real theory. On two occasions, though, I’ve been forced to do a little bit of computer simulation work in order to interpret my results. One of these was for the time-resolved collisions experiment, and worked out well. The other was when… Continue reading Less Is Also Difficult