My graduate alma mater made some news this week, with a new quantum teleportation experiment in which they “teleport” the state of one ytterbium ion to another ytterbium ion about a meter away. That may not sound like much, but it’s the first time anybody has done this with ions in two completely separate traps,… Continue reading The Prestige for Ytterbium: Quantum Teleportation with Separated Atoms
Category: Physics
Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don’t Agree
This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it’s a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics– Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field… Continue reading Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don’t Agree
Course Report: Modern Physics
Back in the “Uncomfortable Questions” thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I’m teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend’s bout with norovirus kind of got in the way… I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on… Continue reading Course Report: Modern Physics
Why I Won’t Make It as a Philosopher
I think I missed this the first time around, but this weekend, I watched the bloggingheads conversation about quantum mechanics between Sean Carroll and David Albert. In it, David makes an extended argument against the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (starting about 40:00 into the conversation). The problem is, I can’t quite figure out what… Continue reading Why I Won’t Make It as a Philosopher
Closed Notebook Science
Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him: My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica’s notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important “working” details of my day are recorded on… Continue reading Closed Notebook Science
Pros and Cons of Interactive Classes
A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT: At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.… Continue reading Pros and Cons of Interactive Classes
Pop-Science Book Racing
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean writes: You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you’ll agree that one more really good one is called for. So I’m writing one. From Eternity to… Continue reading Pop-Science Book Racing
Why Teach “Modern Physics?”
The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish “Modern Physics” classes like the one I’m teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week’s post about what “Modern Physics” is as a… Continue reading Why Teach “Modern Physics?”
Subtracting Photons from Arbitrary Light Fields
There’s been a fair bit of press for the article Subtracting photons from arbitrary light fields: experimental test of coherent state invariance by single-photon annihilation, published last month in the New Journal of Physics, much of it in roughly the same form as the news story in Physics World (which is published by the same… Continue reading Subtracting Photons from Arbitrary Light Fields
Textbook Prices: Highway Robbery, or High-Seas Piracy?
There was a mix-up in textbook ordering for this term (entirely my fault), and the books for my modern physics course were not in the bookstore when the term started. I made a spare copy available in the interim, and also half-jokingly suggested buying it from Amazon rather than waiting for the bookstore to get… Continue reading Textbook Prices: Highway Robbery, or High-Seas Piracy?