Condensed concepts

 A characteristic of emergent phenomena is how novel and complex properties can emerge from apparently simple laws. Quantum ChromoDynamics (...

Yin-Zhe Ma gave a nice physics colloquium at UQ last week, A Golden Age for Cosmology I learnt a lot. Too often, colloquia are too speciali...

In 1986, Steven Weinberg published an article,  Superconductivity for Particular Theorists , in which he stated "No one did more than N...

When first proposed by Ken Wilson in 1974, lattice gauge theory was arguably a toy model , i.e., an oversimplification. He treated space-tim...

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

Atomic nuclei are complex quantum many-body systems. Effective theories have helped provide a better understanding of them. The best-known a...

"Structuralism as an influential intellectual movement of the twentieth century has been advocated by Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, ...

The concept of emergence is central to understanding sub-fields of physics and how they are related, and not related, to other sub-fields. T...

Nuclear physics exhibits many characteristics associated with emergent phenomena. These include a hierarchy of scales, effective interaction...

 I am not sure I have seen this before. If you watched the movie Oppenheimer, you may have noticed that a one point a student excitedly show...

Since we are surrounded by scientific knowledge. We are so used to it that we can take science for granted and not reflect on how amazing sc...

What are the most amazing things that we know about the physics of the universe? If you were to pick ten what would they be? I recently read...

If you ever write a popular book about science I suggest you spend a lot of time honing your very last paragraph. If it is eloquent, grand, ...

What shapes the emergence and influence of a specific new academic discipline or research field? How much does context matter? How is the di...

 My wife and I watched the movie, Radioactive , based on the life of Marie Sklodowska Curie.  She was an amazing scientist who showed incred...

When is a system "complex"? Even though we have intuition (e.g. complexity is associated with many interacting degrees of freedom...

I learnt today that David Pines died last week. He was a pioneer in quantum many-body theory, applying it not just to solid state physics bu...

Physicists tend to think of universality (the details don't matter)  as a physical phenomena. However, in the early days of this blog I ...

Liquid 3He is amazing stuff. Below temperatures of a few hundred milliKelvin it forms a model (and the original inspiration for) Landau Ferm...