I’m still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it’s going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell’s Theorem at the end of the class, but then I’ve been holding them late… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Definition of Insanity
Category: Physics
Poetry About Physicists
Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site,… Continue reading Poetry About Physicists
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
The String Theory Diet
Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you’re carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here? If you answered “Yes!” to any of those questions, then you’re ready for the String Theory Diet! Each rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch… Continue reading The String Theory Diet
Double Entendres in Physics
RPM is dropping his Double Entendre Fridays, which threatens to cut off the world supply of really dorky sex jokes. But never fear, I’m here to pick it up with a physics version! Back when I was a lowly undergrad, I was the TA for an optics lab section, and was helping some students to… Continue reading Double Entendres in Physics
And the Problem is… What, Exactly?
The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow’s crack about Richard Dawkins: When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a… Continue reading And the Problem is… What, Exactly?
Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I’m not sure this will still work, but here’s a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I… Continue reading Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book
One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I’ve looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It’s sort of… Continue reading Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book
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