nanoscale views

Another realization I had at the Gordon Conference:  there are plenty of younger people in condensed matter physics who have never heard abo...

Because of travel constraints I'm missing the last day of the meeting, but here are some thoughts, non-science first: These meetings r...

I am going to be at the Gordon Research Conference on correlated electrons for the next few days. Should be fun, but blogging about such me...

I'd heard rumors about this for a while.  I presume that the posting of this on the arxiv means that some form of this paper is in subm...

This is the 750th post since this blog's inception.  Fun facts gleaned from google analytics: 1) Unsurprisingly, the US leads in blog ...

Chemists (and physicists) often draw molecular bonds as little lines connecting atoms, but actually imaging the bonds themselves is very har...

A colleague of mine was depressed to find, in a reasonably high impact journal, a statement that magnetic nanoparticles obey Coulomb's l...

Blatant self-promotion time:  I was grateful for the invitation to write an editorial about teaching "nano" for Nature Nanotechn...

I've been meaning to do a post on this for a long time.  Five years ago (!) I wrote a post about the meaning of temperature , where I t...

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...