nanoscale views

Once again the Breakthrough Prize and New Horizons Prize in fundamental physics are seeking nominations.  See here .  I have very mixed feel...

I've spent the last two days at a fun " Physics at the Falls " workshop at the University of Buffalo.  It's been cool lear...

The end of our academic year + travel + some major writing has cramped my blogging of late.  Things should pick back up to a more regular pa...

Let me pose a puzzle.  Suppose you are in a completely dark room.  You know that at some point in the future, someone will turn on a light i...

I wrote before about the saga of the NNIN and how painful the outcome was this year - no awards made, after thousands of person-hours inves...

Very often in condensed matter (or atomic) physics we are interested in trying to calculate the rate of some quantum process - this could be...

I was absolutely horrified to read about this story , about how more than 200 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria by a radical Islamic group bec...

Coincident with the annual US graduate school admission season, I've had a few conversations in recent days where the topic of departmen...

A defining characteristic of crystalline solids is that their constituent atoms are arranged in a spatially periodic way.  In fancy lingo, t...

As long as we're talking about the (alleged) end of science, look at this picture (courtesy of Don Monroe ).  This is demolition work be...

John Horgan writes about science for National Geographic.  You may remember him from his book, The End of Science .   His thesis, 17 years a...

Two of my colleagues ( Dan Mittleman and Vicki Colvin ) put together a Coursera class this past year, " Nanotechnology:  The Basics ...

Suppose I have two identical systems, such as two copies of a mass attached to a spring (anchored to an immovable wall).  Each system by its...

Readers - For a long time now I have been working on a very large LaTeX document (actually built out of a number of sub-documents) that I wi...

This is the first in a series of posts about tropes that recur in (condensed matter/nano) physics.  I put that qualifier in parentheses beca...

This article from the NY Times discusses the funding of science research by wealthy individuals and, by extension, philanthropic foundation...

Last post for a few days.  I want to make a suggestion, though.  Hey large tech companies, like Intel or Google , or for that matter Semate...

Sorry for the brief post, but I could not pass this up. Check this out:  http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211 I bow down before the awesomenes...

I've been slow about writing a day 3/4/wrapup of the APS meeting because of general busy-ness.  I saw fewer general interest talks over ...

The National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network is, as their page says, "an integrated networked partnership of user facilities, su...