nanoscale views

A new paper  (published online in Science) with experimental work from Zahid Hasan 's group at Princeton has made a splash this week.  I...

One of the most profound concepts to come out of condensed matter physics is the idea of emergent properties - nontrivial properties of a ...

As I'd mentioned earlier in the week, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy had issued a call for "Grand Challenges...

The new issue of Nature contains this article , discussing the active learning approach to teaching.  Actually, "discussing" is t...

Last month the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a call for suggestions for "nanotechnology-inspired grand ch...

Two days ago IBM and their consortium partners made a big splash by announcing that they had successfully manufactured prototype chips on t...

A couple of weeks ago this blog passed through its tenth anniversary (!).  That makes me about 70 in blog-years .  At the time, science blo...

One of the most important achievements in 20th century physics and chemistry is density functional theory (DFT).  In 1964,   Walter Kohn a...

A new cool result showed up in Science this week, implying that we may be able to increase the information-carrying capacity of fiber optic...

Often when people write about the "weirdness" of quantum mechanics, they talk about the difference between the interesting, often...

In the wake of travel, I wanted to point readers to a few things that might have been missed: Physics Today asks " Has science 't...

More than 40 years ago, this paper was published, articulating clearly from a physical chemistry point of view the possibility that it migh...

We all learn in high school chemistry or earlier that atoms can bind together to form molecules, and like a " highly sophisticated inte...

Back when I was finishing up my doctoral work, I made a trip to New Jersey to interview in two places for possible postdoc positions.  As yo...

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...