nanoscale views

On the road to discussing the Modern Theory of Polarization (e.g., pdf ), it's necessary to talk about Berry phase - here, unlike many u...

There is a lot of discussion these days about the beauty of mathematics in physics , and whether some ideas about mathematical elegance have...

While trying to write a few things (some for the blog, some not), I wanted to pass along some links of interest: APS March Meeting intere...

I was going to title this post "On the emergence of spatial and temporal coherence in frying tofu", or "Frying tofu:  Time cr...

A paper was published yesterday in Nature Nanotechnology that is quite surprising, at least to me, and I thought I should point it out. T...

I recently received a copy of The Secret Life of Science:  How It Really  Works and Why  It Matters , by Jeremy Baumberg of Cambridge Unive...

In his review of Sabine Hossenfelder's new book for Scientific American, John Horgan begins by saying: Does anyone who follows physi...

How's that  for a provocative, click-bait headline? More than any other branch of physics, condensed matter physics highlights  univer...

Today, Scientific American ran this  on their blogs page.  This article calls to mind weird mysticism stuff like crystal energy, homeopathy,...

One reason the nanoscale is home to some interesting physics and chemistry is that the nanometer is a typical scale for molecules.   When th...

When first was reading chemistry papers, one piece of jargon jumped out at me:  " steric hindrance ", which is an abstruse way of ...

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...