Condensed concepts

Yin-Zhe Ma gave a nice physics colloquium at UQ last week, A Golden Age for Cosmology I learnt a lot. Too often, colloquia are too speciali...

A definitive experimental signature of the crossover from a Fermi liquid metal to a bad metal is the disappearance of a Drude peak in the op...

Update. 14 Jan. 2026. I just learned that the paper discussed in this post was retracted last year. "following concerns raised about th...

A spin liquid is a state of matter where there is no magnetic order (spontaneous breaking of spin rotational symmetry) at zero temperature....

Previously, I highlighted the important but basic skill of being skeptical.  Here I expand on the idea. An experimental paper may make a c...

At UQ we just had an interesting colloquium from Signe Riemer-Sorensen about Dark matter emission - seeing the invisible . Central to the t...

In a previous post I discussed the problem of extracting reliable parameters for tight-binding (and Hubbard) models from ab initio band st...

Cherry picking data is not just done by scientific "denialists" but also some "respected" theorists who are seeking sup...

I wish to highlight some common issues that occur in the construction, justification and parametrisation of effective Hamiltonians in both t...

There is an interesting preprint Breakdown of Fermi liquid description for strongly interacting fermions  Yoav Sagi, Tara E. Drake, Rabin ...

It continues to amaze and frustrate me how some people will do the following. Take experimental data for a specific quantity [e.g. resistiv...

I really enjoyed this week's meeting Water: the most anomalous liquid  at NORDITA. This is the first time I have ever been to a workshop...

Over the past few years I have advocated a simple diabatic state model to describe hydrogen bonding in a diverse range of molecular complexe...

I fear that may be the case. Previous cases of premature announcements include cold fusion, "life on mars" [really dead germs on ...

An interesting question is: to what extent does the local institutional environment and the status of an institution affect the quality of t...

It is a fallible human tendency to want to include in a paper the most favourable comparison between your pet theory and experiment. My coll...

Earlier I posted about a basic skill: take initiative! Don't wait for someone else to tell you what to do. Try stuff. It is exciting w...

Enrico Fermi told Freeman Dyson  " with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk". P...

Discovering power laws is an important thing in physics. Often people claim they have evidence for one. My question is: Over how many or...

I have been looking at some books about better writing since next year I am going to be giving a couple of workshops on this.  I was reall...