Condensed concepts

And why is it so amazing? Surprises [about physics in two dimensions] occurred in the 1980s when it became possible to study Landau levels ...

Rudolph Marcus died last week. He was 102. There is a nice obituary in The New York Times . He was best known for his theory of electron tra...

 An example of emergent entities in condensed matter physics are quasiparticles. The concept can be described with the following analogue. W...

Tony Leggett died last week. The New York Times has a nice obituary. One measure of his influence on me is that more than 20 posts on this ...

Science provides an impressive path to certainty in some areas, particularly in physics. However, as scientists seek to describe increasingl...

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis received the prize  “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling an...

 This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w...

This friday I am giving a colloquium for the UQ Physics department. 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry: from biological physics to a...

A decade ago John Hopfield reflected on his scientific life in  Annual Reviews in Condensed Matter Physics,  Whatever Happened to Solid Stat...

 I was happy to see John Hopfield was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neural networks. The award is based on this paper ...

  John Goodenough  was an amazing scientist. He made important contributions to our understanding of strongly correlated electron materials,...

Today I am giving a seminar on emergence at the University of Philippines Los Banos, in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Physics. ...

This is ultra-condensed matter physics! In 1931,  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar published a seminal paper, for which he was awarded the Nobel ...

What are the most amazing things that we know about the physics of the universe? If you were to pick ten what would they be? I recently read...

 Here are the slides from today's talk.

 Every year the UQ Physics Department has a colloquium where someone describes the science behind the latest Nobel Prize. This year I am goi...

I was delighted to hear of the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2021 . The committee continues to surprise us. I did not make any pre...

Condensed matter physics is about the properties of real materials. Real stuff that you can see and touch and that you can use to make very ...

For the marketing plan for my Very Short Introduction , I was recently asked whether there were any significant anniversaries happening in c...