nanoscale views

I've had a number of people ask me why I haven't written anything about the recent news and resulting kerfuffle ( here , here , and ...

I've written in the past (say here and here ) about how we think about the electrons in a conventional metals as forming a Fermi Liqui...

There has been quite a bit of media attention given to this paper , which looks at whether sound waves involve the transport of mass (and t...

A reminder to my condensed matter colleagues who go to the APS March Meeting:  We know the quality of the meeting depends strongly on gettin...

This post is an indirect follow-on from here , and was spawned by a request that I discuss the "modern theory of polarization".  I...

Ever since I learned about them, I thought that hydraulic jumps were cool.  As I wrote here , a hydraulic jump is an analog of a standing s...

Faculty Position in Experimental Atomic/Molecular/Optical Physics at Rice University The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice Univ...

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...