I’ll get to the much-delayed Friday summary shortly. But first, the Nerds of the Purple Cow: That picture (courtesy of Justin Brown) shows twelve of the thirteen Williams graduates attending this year’s DAMOP, in order of class year, from Paul Hess ’08 on the left (who technically only graduated yesterday) to Tom Gallagher of UVA […]
Category: Meetings
DAMOP Day 2
I spent a whole bunch of time running around between talks on Thursday, and at one point was grumbling to myself about the way the organizers had scheduled all the good stuff at one time. Only later did I realize that it really wasn’t their fault– it’s all good stuff, and there are only a […]
DAMOP Day 1
A very quick run-down of physics topics at DAMOP, before I go to bed: I skipped the prize session at 8am, so I started my day with Bill Phillips’s talk in the recent developments in optical lattices session. Oddly, his talk really didn’t have much to do with lattices, but it’s always a pleasure to […]
DAMOP Day 0
I made it to Happy Valley without incident, though it is Orange Cone Season in Pennsylvania, and I spent a lot of time dodging construction. Happily, there really wasn’t anything important at the meeting last night. So I skipped out on the welcome reception to have dinner and a few beers with Kevin and RPM […]
Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
I’m off to the 39th meeting of DAMOP, the division of the American Physical Society for people who do the really cool stuff involving whole atoms and lasers. I’ve queued up a few things so that the site won’t go dark, and the hotel web page promises high-speed Internet, so I may even do a […]
Nerd Famous
Most of my reaction to this weekend’s Emily Gould article in the Times was “Gosh, who knew that writing for Gawker might have a corrosive effect on your personal life…,” but there were some interesting bits. She did a nice job explaining how blogging can be sort of addictive, and also had some good bits […]
Lab Visit Report: Unusual Lattices
In one of his March Meeting posts, Doug Natelson writes about laser cooling experiments that explore condensed matter phenomena: While the ultracold gases provide an exquisitely clean, tunable environment for studying some physics problems, it’s increasingly clear to me that they also have some significant restrictions; for example, while optical lattices enable simulations of some […]
Physics Comes Marching In
The annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week in New Orleans. This is the biggest physics conference of the year, by far, with close to 7,000 attendees– despite what you might think from the Internet, the Condensed Matter crowd who attend the March Meeting significantly outnumber particle physicists and high-energy […]
Maldacena on the Beach
As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently attending the Simons Workshop in Mathematics and Physics at Stony Brook University. The weather finally warmed up today, and we relocated to Smith Point Beach to hear Juan Maldacena tell us a bit about AdS/CFT and gluon scattering. If you’re looking for a precis of the talk, I’m afraid […]
Frequency Combs and Astrophysics
Clifford Johnson is pointing to a pair of stories about extrasolar planets. One is a news piece about the “flood” of new discoveries, and the other is a Top 10 list from space.com (warning: irritating web design). This provides a good excuse to roll out a blog suggestion from Ron Walsworth, who pointed out a […]