Condensed concepts

I occasionally look at Google Analytics for my blog in the slim hope it might tell me something about the level and nature of interest (or l...

In Australia, most Ph.D. students are fully funded by scholarships to allow them to focus on their research. This is unlike in the USA where...

The world is being run by accountants, lawyers, and marketing consultants. They work for corporations, universities, trade unions, and gover...

I wrote a post about superconductivity being central to the plot of the cult-classic movie, Joe Versus the Volcano. A commenter on the post ...

 Recently my wife and I watched the movie, Joe Versus the Volcano , starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. What I did not expect was that making s...

Three weeks ago I did a local book launch for  Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction . It was at a wonderful independent books...

  David Mermin has posted a preprint with the modest title, Autobiographical Notes of a Physicist There are many things I enjoyed and found...

 I really liked reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi . She is an amazing writer. I recently reread some of it for an extended family bo...

Best wishes for the New Year! Over the holidays my son introduced me to the humorous wonders of Philomena Cunk. Here is a short sample.

Some authors make use of  epigraphs  in their books. An epigraph is a short quotation at the beginning of a chapter that aims to set the sta...

My wife and I started watching the series  The Chair , a comedy about an English department in an affluent liberal arts university in the No...

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

There are many statements that are attributed to famous scientists that turn out to be widely wrong. A decade ago I wrote about one from Bri...

At the UQ condensed matter theory group meeting, we had an interesting discussion about this question? A Google image search produces s...

This friday I am giving a 5-10 minute talk on work-life balance to a group of postdocs and young faculty from the School of Mathematics and ...

I was sad to hear last week of the death of John Wilkins . He was a mentor to a whole generation of condensed matter physicists and a genero...

Alternative title: An exciting alternative career for Ph.Ds in condensed matter theory! There is a fascinating long article in The New Yor...

Unfortunately, like many universities, UQ has become a construction site in the rush to build shiny new buildings , particularly to accommod...

It is easy to take for granted many scientific ideas and results that seem commonplace and reasonable to us today. However, when some ideas ...

I watched Ph.D Movie 2: Still in Grad School, which is based on the legendary Ph.D comics, written by Jorge Cham. It is worth watchin...