Condensed concepts

  The order of things Life and the world around us sometimes appears chaotic and random. We may feel this way about traffic, weather, econom...

 Snowflakes form incredibly diverse structures, seen when they condense onto a plate of glass. Every snowflake is different. On the other ha...

We are surrounded by scientific knowledge and have become so used to it that we often take science for granted. We may rarely reflect on the...

How is mental illness defined? What causes mental illness? How can a person be healed? Answering these questions will be influenced by our a...

In honour of International Women's Day, I bring to your attention a fascinating recent piece in The Conversation , Who was Amelia Frank?...

In February 1986, Bednorz and Müller made a stunning discovery: superconductivity at a temperature of 35 K in a doped copper oxide (cuprate)...

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...

It all about values! Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime. Australian universities are receiving increasing...

In 1925, Ising published his paper on the solution of the model in one dimension. An English translation is here. https://www.hs-augsburg.de...

Due to emergence, reality is stratified. This is reflected in the existence of semi-autonomous scientific disciplines and subdisciplines. A ...

Memorial plaque in the Great Court of the University of Queensland today.

Adventures of a Bystander , by Peter Drucker , contains the following account. Drucker was a faculty member at Frankfurt University in 1933....

Superconductivity beautifully illustrates the characteristics of emergent properties. Novelty.  Distinct properties of the superconducting s...

 The quantum theory of solids developed in the 1920s provided a theoretical estimate of the ideal strength of crystals. The problem was that...

Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7 . It is...

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

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

The Netflix series, 3-body Problem , features physics and physicists throughout. I am not a big fan of science fiction, but watched the firs...

 Over the last hundred years, there has been a fruitful cross-fertilisation of concepts and techniques between the theory of condensed matte...