nanoscale views

We usually think of shock waves as exotic - something that happens when a huge explosion goes off, or when a supersonic plane flies by.  A ...

Storms are incredibly powerful (on human scales) heat engines - driven by the sun, the fluxes of mass and energy are simply enormous.  To se...

One of the commenters on my previous post asked how I could explain band theory to a nonscientist, an artist in particular.  Here's a sh...

I've lamented the lack of good popularizations of condensed matter/solid state physics.  I do, however, have recommendations for two rel...

Gravity remains an enduring challenge in physics.  Newton had the insight that he could understand many phenomena (e.g., the falling of an a...

If you ask the average person to name a physicist, chances are they'll mention Einstein, Hawking, and possibly Sheldon Cooper .  Maybe R...

No, NASA has not discovered warp drive.  There is a huge amount of media attention ( here , here , here , for examples of relatively mainstr...

I know this will come as a shock to many of you (ahem), but when I was a kid I watched a lot of Star Trek reruns.  Even in middle school one...

A key aspect of a good graduate education is realizing, more than ever, that to be competitive you'll have to raise your game. My coh...

I've been thinking about what a more general audience likes to read in terms of science writing beyond descriptions of cool science.  In...

There are a number of interesting physicsy science stories out there right now: SpaceX came very very close to successfully landing and ...

The transfer of heat, the energy content of materials tied to the disorganized motion of their constituents, is big business.  A typical car...

Fear not, a new post is coming soon, but for now I'm trying to finish off a proposal.

I'm late to the party about Fareed Zakaria's piece in the Washington Post titled " Why America's Obsession with STEM Educat...

We've all been there:  You wash your hands after using the restroom facilities, and turn away from the sink only to find one of those sa...

Cleanrooms - basically climate-controlled, dust-mitigated environments filled with equipment useful for micro/nanoscale fabrication and asso...

Here are a couple of interesting things I've come across in terms of public science outreach lately: I generally f-ing love " I ...

Most people who aren't experts in the field don't really appreciate how amazing our electronic device capabilities are in integrated...

Back in the ancient mists of time, I did my doctoral work studying tunneling two-level systems (TLS) in disordered solids.  What do these wo...

We had a great colloquium here today by Dave DeMille from Yale University.   He spoke about his group's collaborative measurements (wo...