Condensed concepts

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 ...

Two years ago, I wrote a post about a paper by Wei et al,  Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models Then last year, I posted about a pap...

Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...

 One of the most important ideas in condensed matter physics is that different states of matter are associated with different symmetries. Th...

Will there be big new discoveries? Will old problems be solved?   I have finished my draft of, "An endless frontier"  the last cha...

One way to answer this question is to look at the reports prepared every decade by the National Academies in the USA. I have recently been l...

There are several things that I used to find very puzzling about electrical noise measurements on the metallic phase of organic charge trans...

One helpful way to think about condensed matter is in terms of relative energy scales. This can help one decide what is important and what i...

At the NORDITA water meeting Charusita Chakravarty gave a nice talk that featured the phase diagram below. The figure is taken from a n...

We don't know anything about .... water, high-Tc superconductors, glasses, photosynthesis, enzymes, protein folding .... We don't u...

A recent b ook  Dynamical heterogeneities in glasses, colloids, and granular media   contains a fascinating chapter where four experts [Jorg...

The Stokes-Einstein equation relates the diffusion constant D of a macroscopic particle of radius r undergoing a Brownian motion to the v...

The figure below introduces the idea of an "entropy crisis" and the Kauzmann temperature in glasses. It also leads to profound and...

In 1995 a group of distinguished scientists were asked by Science magazine about outstanding problems that should receive attention in the f...

One of the exciting things about condensed matter physics is that we are continually discovering exotic new phenomena. Many are unanticipate...

Walter Kauzmann was a pioneer in understanding condensed phases of matter. Two of his most important contributions to science (the hydrophob...