Condensed concepts

 This semester, I am giving four lectures in a third-year undergraduate course on statistical mechanics. Last year, I gave a guest lecture ...

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...

The concept and reality of absolute temperature is amazing. It tells us something fundamental about the universe, including physical limits ...

Temperature is NOT the average kinetic energy. When I taught thermodynamics to second year undergraduates one of the preconceived notions th...

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...

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 ...

A typical undergraduate course on statistical mechanics is arguably misleading because (unintentionally) it does not tell students several i...

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

Previously, I discussed how spin-crossover is a misnomer for organometallic compounds and proposed that an effective Hamiltonian to describe...

I just posted on the arXiv a long review article on emergence Emergence: from physics to biology, sociology, and computer science The abstra...

Novelty.  Temperature and entropy are emergent properties. Classically, they are defined by the zeroth and second laws of thermodynamics, re...

Patterns in space and/or time form in fluid dynamics (Rayleigh-Bénard convection and Taylor-Couette flow), laser physics, materials science ...

Attempts to develop a quantum theory of gravity continue to falter and stagnate. Given this, it is worth considering approaches that start w...

Stimulated by discussions about the physics of learning machines with Gerard Milburn, I have been wondering about biomolecular machines suc...

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...

 It is natural to assume that scientists need to probe a system at the microscopic scale to learn about what is happening at that scale. If ...

What is real? What is true? These big questions are central to philosophy and issues in the philosophy of science. Emergent properties of co...

An important question about emergent properties is whether they can be explained solely in terms of the properties of the components of the ...