In the spirit of the previous post, I thought I would provide a short list of the reasons why I am happy to be a physicist in the area of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics. Like nearly anyone who hung on long enough to get a Ph.D. in some field, I think the area… Continue reading What’s Interesting About AMO Physics
Category: Physics
What’s So Interesting About Condensed Matter Physics?
If you go by physics-related stories in the mass media, you’d probably get the impression that about 90% of physicists work at the Large Hadron Collider or some other big accelerator lab. The other 10% would be dominated by people working on foundational questions in quantum mechanics– Bell tests, teleportation, quantum information processing– with a… Continue reading What’s So Interesting About Condensed Matter Physics?
Science Blogging: What Is It Good For?
I got some interesting comments on last week’s post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things): But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by format an emphasis on novelty,… Continue reading Science Blogging: What Is It Good For?
What’s the Matter With Biologists?
Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current… Continue reading What’s the Matter With Biologists?
Physics Nobel to Particle Theory
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Half will go to Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,” with the other half split between Makoto Kobayahi and Toshihide Maskawa, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at… Continue reading Physics Nobel to Particle Theory
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”
Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
This is the last of the papers I was an author on while I was in grad school, and in some ways, it’s the coolest. It’s rare that you get to be one of the first people to do an entirely new class of experiment, but that’s what this was. It kicked off a new… Continue reading Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
Adopted Physicist
I signed up for the Adopt-a-Physicist program run by the APS, and I’ve been “adopted” by three high school classes. The program pairs professional physicists with high school classes, and provides a web forum both groups can access. The students ask questions, and I answer them. I’d love to be able to link directly to… Continue reading Adopted Physicist
Marketing Science
Via FriendFeed, I came across an article by Deepak Singh on attention and science, which spins off a long rant by Kevin Kelly on the idea that Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Deepak writes: Attention can be driven by many mechanisms, marketing being the most effective one. The key is gaining sufficient mindshare,… Continue reading Marketing Science