Condensed concepts

One of the many beauties of condensed matter physics is that it can reveal and illuminate how two systems or phenomena that at first appear ...

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

 Exactly seventy years ago, Alan Turing published a seminal article , in which he proposed a simple reaction-diffusion model for pattern for...

 I am at the beach this week and so a lot of time is spent staring at waves, clouds, sunsets, and patterns in the sand. There is a lot of be...

Condensed matter physics and sociology are both about emergence. Phenomena in sociology that are intellectually fascinating and important fo...

I like "collecting" interesting phase diagrams, partly because they are fun to show students when teaching introductory thermodyna...

It is rather amazing that many complex systems, ranging from proteins to stock markets to cities, exhibit power laws, sometimes over many de...

Here is a helpful quote from William Bialek. It is a footnote in a nice article,  Perspectives on theory at the interface of physics and bio...

Time has a direction. Macroscopic processes are irreversible. Mixing is a simple example. The second law of thermodynamics encodes universal...

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

It is hard to believe that we really don't understand the basic issues that I am going to discuss. Resitivity occurs in a metal becaus...

I finally read most of an interesting Colloquium article in Reviews of Modern Physics Statistical mechanics of money, wealth, and income  ...

On tuesday the Telluride Science Research Center hosted a nice public lecture , "Clouds in a bowl of soup," by Graham Feingold , a...

This week I am in Telluride at the bi-annual workshop on Condensed Phase Dynamics.  I really enjoyed the talks today. A common topic was tha...

Or are you cutting butter with a chainsaw? Or using a helicopter to cross the road? Previously I posted that Green's functions are jus...

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

On monday I am giving the opening talk at the Australasian Workshop on Emergent Quantum Matter.  Since it is a broad audience with a range...

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...