drorzel | August 10, 2015I was staring out the diner window, watching it rain, when Jimmy the werewolf slid into the booth behind me. “We got trouble, boss,” he said, and I spilled coffee over the back of my hand.
“Asshole,” I said, not turning around. “How about a little warning next time?”
“Don’t want to let on I know you. Because of the trouble.”
“How can we be in trouble? We haven’t done anything yet. What kind of trouble?” I probably sounded a little petulant, but I was annoyed about the coffee.
“Wizard trouble.” That’s a whole lot worse than spilled coffee.
“Where?”
“Across the street, bus stop.” I did my best…
drorzel | August 7, 2015Today is SteelyKid's seventh birthday, which she's been counting down to for a good while. It's a little hard to believe it's seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy.
She's become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from photosynthesis (since she hardly eats anything), and intense interests in Minecraft and Pokemon, math and taekwondo. She's a red belt now, which is only a few short of black, and this summer has started doing the "Elite Team" sparring classes. I'm pretty sure that if she really wanted to, she could kick my…
drorzel | August 7, 2015There's a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent-- with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the background would be helpful. Since I ended up doing a back-of-the-envelope estimate for that, though, I thought I would reproduce some of the reasoning here.
The basic proposal idea here is to do an atom interferometer inside a Ramsey interferometer for making an atomic clock. That is, before sending the…
drorzel | August 6, 2015Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one poet. The goal was to provide a basic grounding in quantum physics and a look at current research in hopes of informing and inspiring new stories that will, in turn, inspire the audience for those stories to look more deeply into the…
drorzel | July 22, 2015Having mentioned in yesterday's post that I'll be on sabbatical for the next academic year, this would probably be a good time to point out that this means I'm somewhat more flexible than usual in terms of going places and giving talks. And I enjoy going places and giving talks. About lots of different things.
So, if you're at a place that might be interested in a science-y speaker on quantum physics, relativity, science communication, science in general, or something related to those, drop me a line. I'd be happy to talk about the possibility of visiting new places and talking to people…
drorzel | July 21, 2015This past academic year was my 14th as a professor at Union, and my last as department chair. I'm on sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, doing my very best to avoid setting foot in an academic building, so it will be September 2016 before I'm teaching a class again. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on my experiences to this point, which in turn is a good excuse for a blog post. So, here are some things I've found out over the last 14 years of being a college professor:
-- Teaching is really hard. My first year, when colleagues from other schools asked how I was…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…
drorzel | July 10, 2015The big development of the week is that I bought a new car, as seen in the featured image. This ate up most of Tuesday, but I still got some quality physics blogging in over at Forbes:
-- The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors: A look at two quantum-mechanical phenomena and one quirk of biology that can be used to make people see colors.
-- Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics: An update of an old post here, Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics. You can see from the titles that, in the intervening five-and-a-half years, I've managed to simplify quantum mechanics by…
drorzel | July 4, 2015Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever":
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth.
I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it's what I…
drorzel | July 3, 2015Another busy week of physics-y blogging over at Forbes. I'm pretty bad about remembering to post pointers to individual posts here, but I can probably just about manage to do a weekly links dump of what I've been posting.
-- What's The Point Of Science Without "Eureka!" Moments? Picking up on a conversation I had at Convergence, about whether there's any point in doing experiments whose outcome won't be a surprise.
-- Should We Have An Institute For Low-Energy Fundamental Physics Picking up a bit from one of the Convergence talks, where Savas Dimopoulos suggested forming an institute to…
drorzel | June 29, 2015I've been doing a bunch of conferencing recently, what with DAMOP a few weeks ago and then Convergence last week. This prompted me to write up a couple of posts about conference-related things, which I posted over at Forbes. These were apparently a pretty bad fit for the folks reading over there, as they've gotten very little traffic relative to, well, everything else I've posted during that span. Live and learn.
Anyway, I'm fairly happy with how both of those turned out, and on the off chance that they'll do better with the ScienceBlogs crowd, let me link them here:
-- What Are Academic…
drorzel | June 28, 2015This went around a different corner of my social-media universe while I was off in Waterloo, away from my iTunes. I was curious about it, though, so looked at the contents of the "25 Most Played" playlist, and having done that, I might as well post them here (the number in parentheses is the number of times it's been played according to iTunes):
Beautiful Wreck," Shawn Mullins, (280)
"In The Mood," Glenn Miller And His Orchestra, (279)
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," Darlene Love, (278)
"Almost Saturday Night," John Fogerty, (277)
"Shake It Up," The Cars, (275)
"Sunblock," Emmet…
drorzel | June 27, 2015I've been pretty quiet about educational matters of late, for the simple reason that I was too busy teaching to say much. The dust having settled a bit, though, I thought I would put some notes here about what I did this past term, and what worked.
I had two sections of the introductory Newtonian mechanics course in the Spring term; this was off the normal sequence for engineering majors (the engineers mostly take this in the Winter term of their first year), but this year we had yet another larger-than-expected engineering class, and needed to open another section. I picked up both of these…
drorzel | June 25, 2015I spent the last few days in Ontario, attending the Convergence meeting at the Perimeter Institute. This brought a bunch of Perimeter alumni and other big names together for a series of talks and discussions about the current state and future course of physics.
My role at this was basically to impersonate a journalist, and I had a MEDIA credential to prove it. I did a series of posts at Forbes about different aspects of the meeting:
-- The Laser Cavity was Flooded: a revisiting of the idea of True Lab Stories, which was a loose series of funny disaster tales from the early days of…
drorzel | June 21, 2015Act I:
STEELYKID and THE PIP: Happy Father's Day, Daddy!
DADDY: Aww, that's sweet. So, what are you going to make me for breakfast?
STEELYKID and THE PIP: What?
DADDY: It's father's day, right? So you guys should be cooking breakfast for me.
STEELYKID and THE PIP: No!!!!
THE PIP: We can't cook breakfast for you. We're not tall enough to bake stuff. And, also, we're not allowed to cook.
DADDY: Well, I'm your father, so I can give you permission to cook breakfast.
STEELYKID: Yeah, but we don't know how to cook.
THE PIP: Yeah, so you have to cook pancakes for us!
DADDY: Oh, all right. I guess I…
drorzel | June 19, 2015I've been really busy with year-end wrap-up stuff, but have also posted a bunch of stuff at Forbes. which I've fallen down on my obligation to promote here... So, somewhat belatedly, here's a collection of physics-y stuff that I've written recently:
-- Using Atoms To Measure Tiny Forces: A post reporting on some very cool atom interferometry experiments, one working to measure the very tiny (but known to exist) force of gravity, the other searching for a possible "fifth force" sort of thing.
-- Making And Shaking New Materials With Ultracold Atoms: A post reporting on a couple more DAMOP…
drorzel | June 16, 2015Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion:
From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the most high-achieving, “desirable” district we can afford is open-and-shut. TB and TG are wildly smart kids who will rise to the expected level; I want the level to be high. That strategy also has the benefit of higher resale value for a house, since other parents make the same calculation…
drorzel | June 14, 2015Commencement was today, the 14th of those that I've been to as a faculty member. As usual, the procession was led in and out by the Schenectady Pipe Band; I realized that after many years of this, I'm coming to associate "Scotland the Brave" with graduation...
This was a really unpleasant year for me in a lot of respects; happily, our students had nothing to do with that. They've been consistently terrific, and this was a good class. Not having them around the department will be pretty weird, at least for a while.
So, congratulations to Salina, Alex, Stephen, Will, Caleb, and Eason, the…
drorzel | June 9, 2015I'm at DAMOP this week, though it took longer to get here than it should've-- severe storms yesterday canceled the flight I was supposed to take from Baltimore to Columbus, so I had to rebook to the 6am departure this morning, whee. I think this is the first time I've ever had a flight canceled while I was at the airport, though which is kind of amazing.
Anyway, I missed most of the morning session, and I'm short on sleep, but I saw some cool talks already, and expect to write about some of them tomorrow. For the moment, though, here's a post I wrote for Forbes yesterday talking about why…
drorzel | June 7, 2015Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it's not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn't have anything all that concrete to say beyond "Huh. That's interesting." So it languished in one of the many, many open tabs cluttering up Chrome, too interesting to just close but not anything I could see a clear angle to comment on. And eventually it was sort of forgotten until I set about paring down open tabs before an out-of-…