Archive

July 2020

• How can electrons be “topological”?

July 2019

• The Physics Olympiad, and finding community

March 2019

• What it means, and doesn’t mean, to get a job in physics

July 2018

• How thick is the atmosphere? A derivation of the Boltzmann distribution
• More people should know about Lagrange multipliers

October 2016

• Squiggle reasoning: the skydiving animals problem

June 2016

• Toward a culture of tolerating ignorance

April 2016

• Good enough for me

February 2016

• Game theory of vaccination
• surveyor

January 2016

• What we know about the theory of optimal strategy in basketball
• The value of improved offensive rebounding

December 2015

• Field theory of swords

October 2015

• A minor memory of Leo Kadanoff
• The miracle of Fermi liquid theory
• The simple way to solve that crocodile problem

September 2015

• What would you teach if you could teach absolutely anything?
• Samuel Beckett’s Guide to Particles and Antiparticles
• Draw me a picture of a Cooper pair
• Guest Post: If You Walk in a Closed Loop, Do You End Up Where You Started?

August 2015

• 1 is more important than 9: Benford’s law
• A children’s picture-book introduction to quantum field theory

June 2015

• Where do electric forces come from?

April 2015

• Where does magnetism come from?
• On Godlessness
• How big is an electron?

February 2015

• Pedestrians as interacting particles

January 2015

• How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?

August 2014

• Some equations are more equal than others

April 2014

• Boston Marathon 2014

• A letter to the donors who helped me at Virginia Tech

• The parable of the perfectly symmetric ass

• There’s nothing particularly “spooky” about avoided crossing

October 2013

• The Bohr model, Landau quantization, and “truth” in science

August 2013

• Beta decay
• Spare me the math: Raman Scattering

May 2013

• What if I were 1% charged?

• The fibonacci sequence, under duress

• The simplest derivation of the Pythagorean theorem

• How we measure our happiness

April 2013

• A plug for poetry

• On the myth of the gay-straight dichotomy

• Where the periodic table ends

• Nothing lasts forever

• Spare me the math: the Lamb shift

• Spare me the math

• The Boston Marathon, and Gratitude

• “Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off”

January 2012

• Zero Gravity (and Levity)

• On “imaginative BS”

August 2011

• Action Physics: The Adventures of the Supercapacitor
• When is a shot too good to pass up? — The shooter’s sequence

June 2011

• LeBron James and the Lottery in Babylon

May 2011

• If I wrote freshman-year kinematics exams…
• My favorite genera of ants

April 2011

• This is not a story about irony
• The fastest possible marathon

February 2011

• Who am I to say what’s quantum?

January 2011

• Problems you can solve just by looking at them: The meaning of Noether’s Theorem

December 2010

• Toward NFL brain injury “dosimeters”
• Risk is the ally of the underdog
• Feynman’s Ratchet and the perpetual motion gambling scheme

August 2010

• “Our stability is but balance” — Freeman Dyson on how to imagine quantum fields
• “So is the universe made of tiny springs, or isn’t it?”
• When F is not equal to m a: classical examples of effective mass

June 2010

• Is every generation more attractive than the last? — a conjecture
• When is an Ampere not an Ampere?

April 2010

• A story about Virginia Tech
• The global temperature is inherently unstable

March 2010

• Part 2: The electrocaloric effect

January 2010

• The Universe is a giant energy minimization machine
• Good news from the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

November 2009

• An example of Braess’s Paradox in basketball
• Bug zappers and electrostatics: the Smoluchowski diffusion rate

October 2009

• The sins of Isaac Newton
• Being pushed around by empty space: The Casimir Effect

September 2009

• A story about quasiparticles on the beach
• A story about quasiparticles

August 2009

• On the fairness of life
• The path integral: calculating the future from an unknown past

July 2009

• Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

June 2009

• The most important idea in science, and why it’s true
• Does your culture really affect the gender distribution?
• Visualizing solitary waves
• Getting hydrogen from water
• Three reasons we don’t understand traffic
• Friedel Oscillations: wherein we learn that the electron has a size

May 2009

• Braess’s Paradox and “The Ewing Theory”
• Rush hour traffic and the price of anarchy
• When group velocity is an optical illusion
• The equivalence of mass and energy: the “center of energy”
• Yao Ming and the froghopper
• Surfing and the double-slit experiment
• When Nature plays Skee-ball: the meaning of free energy

April 2009

• The most awesome 26 seconds of my day
• Finding the hot (and cold) hand at a local gym
• The fastest possible mile
• A word on Virginia Tech
• The “where did the energy come from?” game
• Force and energy: which is more real?
• For anyone who likes the sun
• Why can’t I go faster than the speed of light?  Hints from electrodynamics
• Epilogue: quantum wells in 2 dimensions
• How to trap a particle: quantum wells in 1 and 3 dimensions (part 2)
• How to trap a particle: quantum wells in 1 and 3 dimensions (part 1)
• Parenting and the feeling of time: my eight lifetimes
• Entropy and Gambling

March 2009

• The Physics Game: Why I created Gravity and Levity