nanoscale views

I will write more about actual physics soon, but it has been a very busy period with other commitments.  In the meantime.... Princeton did s...

 It's a very busy time, so no lengthy content, but here are a few neat things I came across this week.  A new PRL came out this week th...

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague last week about the challenges of writing a broadly appealing, popular book about condens...

 I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Andy Zangwill 's recent biography of Phil Anderson , A Mind Over Matter:  Philip Anderson a...

The US News rankings of graduate programs have a surprisingly out-sized influence.  Prospective graduate students seem to pay a lot of atten...

This week this paper appeared on the arxiv, claiming to have entangled a tardigrade with a superconducting transmon qubit system.  My re...

(Sorry about the slow pace of posting.  The end of the semester has been very intense, including a faculty retreat for our department last w...

I'd written two years ago about the pervasiveness of light emitting diodes for holiday decorations.  While revising some notes for my ...

You would think that, by now, we would have figured out basically all there is to know about comparatively simple metals conduct electricity...

For the vast majority, there is no formal training process that professors go through before-hand to become chair or head of a department.  ...

 I am about to attend a gathering of some physics department chairs/heads from around the US, and I'll write some about that after the m...

One thing that the new Dune  film captures extremely well is the idea that the primary small-capacity air transportation mode on Arrakis is...

 Here are several items of interest: I was saddened to learn of the passing of Myriam Sarachik , a great experimental physicist and a gener...

The Purcell effect is named after E. M. Purcell , a Nobel-winning physicist who also was a tremendous communicator, author of one of the gr...

The Nobel Prize in physics this year was a bit of a surprise, at least to me.  As one friend described it, it's a bit of a Frankenprize...

Once more, the annual tradition:  Who do people think will win the Nobel this year in physics or chemistry?  I have repeately and incorrectl...

I've watched the first two episodes of the new adaptation of Foundation .  It surely looks gorgeous, though there are some script chall...

Here are some tidbits from the last day of this year's meeting.  (I didn't really get to see the other posters in my own poster sess...

 More highlights from the meeting.  Office hours for my class conflicted with a couple of the talks, so these are briefer than I would'v...

Somehow I found the first day of the virtual meeting more exhausting than when we do these things in person, probably because I had to go te...