Condensed concepts

Temperature is NOT the average kinetic energy. When I taught thermodynamics to second year undergraduates one of the preconceived notions th...

I recently reread Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat by Hans Christian von Baeyer As a popular book, it provides a beaut...

The Ising model is a paradigm in both statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. Today for most theorists it is so familiar that so...

Computer simulations can provide significant insight into different physical phenomena. Two decades ago the best one could do in a class or ...

Suppose a motivated and intelligent high school student or first year undergraduate comes to you and says, ``Condensed matter physics sounds...

I like "collecting" interesting phase diagrams, partly because they are fun to show students when teaching introductory thermodyna...

One of the greatest joys of teaching is having students ask questions that you do not know the answer to. In the last week of the course PHY...

I am currently helping teach a second year undergraduate course Thermodynamics and Condensed Matter Physics. For the first time I am helping...

I watched the first episode of  The Forces of Nature  narrated by Brian Cox, The Universe in a Snowflake . [Unfortunately, I don't thin...

Following up on my previous post , below are some selected comments I got from students in my thermodynamics class last semester.  A coup...

Tomorrow I am giving a summary lecture for the end of an undergraduate course PHYS2020 Thermodynamics and Condensed Matter . I taught the se...

I used to find the concept of the chemical potential rather confusing. Hence, it is not surprising that students struggle too. I could say...

I love the phase diagram below and like to show it to students because it is so cute. However, in terms of understanding, I always foun...

How might you achieve some of the following desirable teaching goals? Get students to read the text book Find out what students are enjoy...

A few years ago I decided I wanted to include brief biographies of relevant great scientists in my undergraduate lectures. I posted (5 years...

There is an interesting article Entropy: Order or information by Arieh Ben-Naim in the Journal of Chemical Education. He points out two r...

Following the example of some of my colleagues this semester I have started doing pre-lecture reading quizzes for my second year undergradua...

Today I gave a  lecture on first-order phase transitions to undergraduates. Again I find the students love the videos I show.  I mostly us...

I am slowly learning that many students think that because of the second law of thermodynamics that the entropy of a system must increase in...

Before introducing the Gibbs free energy in my thermodynamics class I asked the students to say which variables they thought were generally ...