Talking about innovation with senior research officers
Last week Physics Today‘s David Kramer and I attended a roundtable that was sponsored by the Science Coalition and the Association of American Universities. Sitting around a large table (a square one,...
View ArticleFemale-friendly Physics First
A frequent feature on Physics Today‘s Facebook page is the commemoration of distinguished physicists’ birthdays. For Leon Lederman’s on 15 July, I noted the Nobel laureate’s discovery of the muon...
View ArticleAnalyzing students’ misconceptions about galaxies
Teaching entails not only imparting knowledge and understanding, but also dispelling misconceptions. Physics teachers around the world twirl evacuated glass tubes to demonstrate that the tube’s...
View ArticleMy computational education
I peaked as a computational scientist in 1986. At that time, two years from finishing my PhD, I was trying to account for an aspect of the x-ray emission from a pulsar known as Hercules X-1, the first...
View ArticleThe Elements: An Illustrated History of the Periodic Table
Even though my interest in science developed in my early teens, and even though my love of reading developed earlier, I didn’t read many books about science in my childhood. In fact, only two science...
View ArticleHumanities envy
While browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, I noticed a commentary that bears the intriguing title “The science in social science.” Although the author,...
View ArticleAre big classes the problem?
When I ran Physics Today‘s Search and Discovery department, I’d interview about 10 physicists a month. Most interviews took place on the phone, but occasionally I met physicists in their offices. I...
View ArticleUsing statistics to catch cheats and criminals
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment,” Ernest Rutherford once declared. But when you work at the frontier of detection, as astronomers and particle...
View Article“Supercomputers are awesome and why I love what I do!!!”
My title comes from a comment made on Physics Today‘s Facebook page by Fernanda Foertter, a physicist who programs high-performance computers for a biotechnology company. Although Foertter’s...
View ArticleThe optimism and ambition of this year’s Gates scholars
I did my PhD at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy. As a US-based alumnus of the university, I receive the quarterly newsletter Cambridge in America. Most of the newsletter is taken up with...
View ArticleWhat did you calculate for fun?
I earned my bachelor’s in physics at Imperial College London. In my final year there, I took the last of the three courses on quantum mechanics. Tom Kibble, one of the fathers of the Higgs boson, was...
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