Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825… Continue reading Uncertain Pop Quiz
Category: Education
Playing Dice with the Future
Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they’re coming here next year, and we’ve had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We’ve also had a couple “Open House” events, where accepted students and their families are invited to campus to… Continue reading Playing Dice with the Future
Why Are You Asking Me?
I’ve found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I’ve never met. I still don’t really feel qualified to offer… Continue reading Why Are You Asking Me?
What’s On Your Syllabus?
When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong: By… Continue reading What’s On Your Syllabus?
Lecture Notes Dump
For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here’s a bunch of lectures about photons: Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons. Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field. Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry. Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states. This material, unsurprisingly, produced… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump
Speaking of Science Education
On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is: First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom… Continue reading Speaking of Science Education
What Students Want
Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it’s really about what I’d expect: A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus… Continue reading What Students Want
Lecture Notes Dump
Since the previous batch of lecture notes were surprisingly popular, here’s the next couple of classes worth: Lecture 5: Stellar Interferometry, coherence, intensity correlation functions, Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment. Lecture 6: Non-classical light, photon anti-bunching, single-photon interference. Sadly, this exhausts the notes I had written in advance (what with one thing and another, I… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump
What I Do to Earn a Living
If you’re wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it’s because I’m spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way. I’ve mentioned before that I’m doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist’s approach to the material, but if you’d like a… Continue reading What I Do to Earn a Living
Class Notes
I realize that I’ve been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent… Continue reading Class Notes