nanoscale views

Here are a few items of interest.  I am planning to write a couple of posts about why solids are rigid, and in the course of thinking abou...

I first learned about  quantum tunneling  from science fiction, specifically a short story by  Larry Niven .  The idea is often tossed o...

While dark matter and quantum gravity routinely get enormous play in the media, you are surrounded every day by physics that enables near mi...

This past spring Carl Wieman came to Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence , to give us this talk , about improving science pedadogy.  ...

A couple of points of interest: Bill Gates apparently turned down an offer from the Trump administration to be presidential science advis...

When we teach basic electrical phenomena to high school or college physics students, we usually talk about Ohm's Law, in the form \(V = ...

While I have already spammed a number of faculty colleagues about this, I wanted to point out a competitive, endowed postdoctoral opportunit...

Angular momentum in classical physics is a well-defined quantity tied to the motion of mass about some axis - its value (magnitude and direc...

Yesterday, we hosted Prof. Charlie Marcus of the Niels Bohr Institute and Microsoft for our annual Chapman Lecture on Nanotechnology.   He...

Condensed matter experimentalists often need to prepare nanoscale thickness films of a variety of materials.  One approach is to use "p...

In a sure sign that I'm getting old, I find myself tempted to read some of the many articles, books, and discussions about interpretatio...

Thanks to a commenter (and ZapperZ ) for bringing to my attention that a bunch of invited talks from this year's March APS meeting are n...

An enormous amount has already been written by both journalists and scientists  ( here too ) on the passing of Stephen Hawking .  Clearly h...

Besides the graphene bilayer excitement, a three other highlights from today: David Cobden of the University of Washington gave a very ni...

As I mentioned here, the big story of this year's March Meeting is the report, in back-to-back Nature papers this week (arxiv pdf links ...

Day 2 of the meeting was even more scattered than usual for me, because several of my students were giving talks, all in different sessions ...

As I explained yesterday, my trip to the APS is even more scattered than in past years, but I'll try to give some key points.  Because o...

It's that time of year again:  The running of the physicists  annual APS March Meeting , a gathering of thousands of (mostly condensed m...

Fictional materials can be a fun starting point for thinking about and maybe teaching about material properties.  Back in 2015 I touched on ...

Last weekend while making dinner, I came across a great example of emergent physics.  What you see here are a few hundred grams of vacuum-pa...