Condensed concepts

 Last week I enjoyed following the Nobel Prize announcements in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry. Reading the popular accounts...

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...

 In philosophical discussions of emergence and reductionism in chemistry, molecular structure has received significant attention and debate....

In discussions of emergence, particularly in chemistry, isomers are often given as an example of an emergent phenomenon. In Anderson's o...

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 ...

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

 A challenge in understanding and discussing emergence is that it means different things to different people. This is not surprising given e...

There are several independent lines of argument that are used to support the idea of a multiverse: the many-worlds interpretation of quantum...

I was sad to hear last week that Professor  Noel Hush died at age 94. Noel [also known as Prof.] was a pioneer in theoretical chemistry and ...

At UQ there is a great  student physics club, PAIN . Today they are having a session on "crackpot" theories in science. Rather tha...

Beginning in 2007 luxury journals published some experimental papers making claims that quantum coherence was essential to photosynthesis. T...

It has dubious origins. Some people are very impressed that I have a Wikipedia page. I find this a bit embarrassing because there are man...

I am skeptical of the grand and speculative claims of "quantum biology".  There is a nice paper in PNAS which systematically cons...

I am currently in Telluride for a meeting on Quantum effects in condensed phase systems . Two years ago I attended a similar meeting and in ...

Here I consider quantum many-body theory, as it spans from quantum field theory to nuclear physics to ultra cold atomic gases to solid state...

This week at UQ there was a fascinating Quantum Science Seminar by Jorg Schmiedmayer, describing some beautiful ultra cold atom experiments....

Yesterday, Matthew Woolley gave an interesting Quantum science seminar at UQ about some of his recent work on Photon assisted tunnelling wi...

Last night I was stranded at Denver airport en route to the bi-annual Condensed phase dynamics meeting at the Telluride Science Research Ce...

Someone from the company D-wave is coming to UQ [not the physics department] next week to give a seminar. Their claim of producing the first...

A basic but important and interesting question in physical chemistry concerns a chemical reaction or process that involves two steps: A to B...