Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction.<\/p>\n
The first is last week’s NOVA ScienceNOW segment on artificial diamonds<\/a> and their technological potential. It’s really cool to see time-lapse video of honkin’ big diamonds being grown through chemical vapor deposition techniques.<\/p>\n The second is this New York Times<\/cite> piece on glass<\/a> and the science of its use as a construction material. The author, Henry Fountain, does a nice job of conveying the complexity of the situation, and also its importance. It doesn’t delve all that deep into the science, but it gives a good sense of why glass is a hard problem, and why there are large numbers of people studying glass transitions in all sorts of materials.<\/p>\n Neither of these is going to make me change careers to become a materials scientist, but I think they do a good job of publicizing a branch of science that doesn’t get enough attention. More like this, please, and less of this<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction. The first is last week’s NOVA ScienceNOW segment on… Continue reading Making Materials Cool<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,33,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-condensed_matter","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}