- Total views: 8.3M
- Most views in one day, this past May 31, with 272K
- Top two most-viewed posts are this one from 2023 with a comment thread about Ranga Dias, and this one from 2009 titled "What is a plasmon?"
- Just a reminder that I have collected a bunch of condensed matter terms and concept posts here.
- I've also written some career-related posts, like a guide to faculty job searches, advice on choosing a graduate school, needs-to-be-updated advice on postdoc positions, etc.
- Some personal favorite posts, some of which I wish had gotten more notice, include the physics of drying your hands, the physics of why whiskey stones aren't as good as ice to cool your drink, materials and condensed matter in science fiction, the physics of vibranium, the physics of beskar, the physics of ornithopters, and why curving your pizza slice keeps if from flopping over. I'm also happy with why soft matter is hard, which was a well-viewed post.
- I also like to point out my essay about J. Henrik Schön, because I worry that people have forgotten about that episode.
Real life has intruded quite a bit into my writing time the last couple of years, but I hope to keep doing this for a while longer. I also still hope one day to find the right time and approach to write a popular book about the physics of materials, why they are amazing, and why our understanding of this physics, limited as it is, is still an astonishing intellectual achievement.
Two other things to read that I came across this week:
- This post about Maxwell's Demon from the Skull in the Stars blog (which has been around nearly as long as mine!) is an excellent and informative piece of writing. I'm definitely pointing my statistical and thermal physics undergraduate class to this next month.
- Ross McKenzie has a very nice looking review article up on the arXiv about emergence. I haven't read it yet, but I have no doubt that it will be well-written and thought-provoking.
10 comments:
Woooo!! As someone who has been following you since 2009, thanks for all the memories! My own scientific trajectory has been ever changing and unpredictable, but your blog and the thought provoking questions you ask have been one of my few constants as I have moved from ferroelectrics to DNA to time series to microbial communication to radiotherapy prediction to molecular imaging.
Thank you for your effort throughout all of these years. Your blog has been very informative, educational and an excellent source of science news. I forwarded the papers you mentioned to people at my university many times.
Ross MacKenzie omitted entirely one of the key contributors and developers of emergent phenomena. Here is a recent reference: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8866630/
The scope and history of the study of emergence is so vast and diverse that it's impossible for any single review to mention every person that made an important contribution.
Congratulations Doug! I've learned a lot reading your blog.
Congratulations Doug on an awesome 20 years of blogging! I will not thank you for the reminder that it has been almost 20 years since I was a post-doc at Rice :). I will thank you for your contributions, via this blog, to cutting-edge science, scientific literacy, and policy. Please keep this going as I need something informative to read when I'm avoiding doing my job. This is a great site!
Thanks for the kind words, folks!
start reminder that your blog has been a 'coming of age' for me :) as i've been reading it since my PhD days and now as a mid-career faculty, i can recall (like a fan) your writings on some of my favorite topics in physics and these are great memories! wishing you another 20 years, and more!
*Stark
I'd guess I'm not among your first five, but it does seem like I've been tracking you regularly for almost that long!
I had somehow missed your excellent reminiscences that you link about your time at Bell Labs and l'affaire Hendrik Schön. I did not remember being your internal reviewer!
Some of your readers will be happy to know that Eugenie Reich recovered the rights to her book and it is again in (on-demand) print. Those who prefer video will like this well-done three-part series that draws on the book. (Disclosure: I like both the book and the video because they mention me nicely.)
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