I spent the last few days in Ontario, attending the Convergence meeting at the Perimeter Institute. This brought a bunch of Perimeter alumni and other big names together for a series of talks and discussions about the current state and future course of physics. My role at this was basically to impersonate a journalist, and… Continue reading My Week in Waterloo
Category: Lab Stories
The Making of a Sign Error
One thing I left out of the making-of story about the squeezed state BEC paper last week happened a while after publication– a few months to a year later. I don’t quite recall when it was– I vaguely think I was still at Yale, but I could be misremembering. It’s kind of amusing, in an… Continue reading The Making of a Sign Error
The Making of “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
Yesterday’s write-up of my Science paper ended with a vague promise to deal some inside information about the experiment. So, here are some anecdotes that you would need to have been at Yale in 1999-2000 to pick up. We’ll stick with the Q&A format for this, because why not? Why don’t we start with some… Continue reading The Making of “Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate”
Murphy Violation in Science
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau proposes an an experimental test of Murphy’s Law using the lottery. While amusing, it’s ultimately flawed– Murphy’s Law is something of the form: Anything that can go wrong, will. Accordingly, it can only properly be applied to situations in which there is a reasonable expectation of success, unless something goes… Continue reading Murphy Violation in Science
Eucatastrophe in Physics
Before leaving Austin on Friday, I had lunch with a former student who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas, working in an experimental AMO physics lab. I got the tour before lunch– I’m a sucker for lab tours– and things were pretty quiet, as they had recently suffered a catastrophic failure… Continue reading Eucatastrophe in Physics
What Keeps Me Up at Night
One of my pet peeves about physics as perceived by the public and presented in the media is the way that everyone assumes that all physicists are theoretical particle physicists. Matt Springer points out another example of this, in this New Scientist article about the opening panel at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival. The panel… Continue reading What Keeps Me Up at Night
My Doomsday Weapon
In the time that I’ve been at Union, I have suffered a number of lab disasters. I’ve had lasers killed in freak power outages. I’ve had lasers die because of odd electrical issues. My lab has flooded not once, not twice, but three different times. I’ve had equipment damaged by idiot contractors, and I’ve had… Continue reading My Doomsday Weapon
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges, But We Do Have Some
Dave Ng has recently upgraded the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique site, which provides a variety of achievement badges for members to claim and post. I’m not a big one for extra graphics on the blog (they delay the loading of the cute baby pictures), but if you’re… Continue reading We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges, But We Do Have Some
The Metastable Xenon Project
Over the past several weeks, I’ve written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a “Making of” article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can… Continue reading The Metastable Xenon Project
The Making of “Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma”
As mentioned in the previous post, the cold plasma experiment was the last of the metastable xenon papers that I’m an author on. My role in these experiments was pretty limited, as I was wrapping things up and writing my thesis when the experiments were going on. The main authors on this were Tom Killian,… Continue reading The Making of “Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma”