The time since the APS meeting has been very busy, hence the lack of posting. A few items of interest:
- The present issue of Nature Physics has several articles about physics education that I really want to read.
- This past week we hosted N. Peter Armitage for a really fun colloquium "On Ising's Model of Magnetism" (a title that he acknowledged borrowing from Peierls). In addition to some excellent science about spin chains, the talk included a lot of history of science about Ising that I hadn't known. An interesting yet trivial tidbit: when he was in Germany and later Luxembourg, the pronunciation was "eeesing", while after emigrating to the US, he changed it to "eye-sing", so however you've been saying it to yourself, you're not wrong. The fact that the Isings survived the war in Europe is amazing, given that he was a Jew in an occupied country. Someone should write a biography....
- When I participated in a DOD-related program 13 years ago, I had the privilege to meet General Al Gray, former commandant of the US Marine Corps. He just passed away this week, and people had collected Grayisms (pdf), his takes on leadership and management. I'm generally not a big fan of leadership guides and advice books, but this is good stuff, told concisely.
- It took a while, but a Scientific American article that I wrote is now out in the April issue.
- Integrating nitrogen-vacancy centers for magnetic field sensing directly into the diamond anvils seems like a great way to make progress on characterizing possible superconductivity in hydrides at high pressures.
- Congratulations to Peter Woit on 20 (!!) years of blogging at Not Even Wrong.
8 comments:
I particularly enjoyed the Nature Physics comment by Cochran, et al, on racial equity in physics education. I am sure it will upset some people, but it is something that needs to be said, and on a primetime prominent venue.
Yes, that was particularly enjoyable drivel. Monty Python would be proud. We are all eagerly standing by for the decolonization of physics through the banning of racist quantum physics as it is inherently discriminatory against those unable to master mathematical operations beyond the basic four. It's sad that Nature Physics feel compelled to print such utter garbage.
This response is exactly what the problem is.
That's what you and the rest of the self-appointed sanctimonious problem pointer-outers think. Disagreement will not be censored and silenced because you don't like it. If that's what you're after, kindly go back to Twitter with the rest of the cancel mob.
It’s ironic that you are accusing me of censorship and cancel culture, while telling me to “go back to Twitter”.
Anonymous, please knock it off. There's no need to be aggressive and rude. I don't want to have to enable comment moderation to keep this civil.
Thank you, Doug.
Really impressed by the DAC nv center work. Really simple and powerful idea in principle, pretty amazed it hadn't been tried before.
Moreover, the PI is an (ex-?) theorist?
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