Imagine Today Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival 2026 was held, mostly indoors with driving rain outside. Imagine is the tech fair of my university, and today had more than 400 exhibits and 3000 exhibitors. On a fair weather day, there are about 10,000 attendees; I am not sure there were that many today, though I had to circle around for a quite while to get parking. Some editions (not today's) run into two days and generally I find the number of exhibits so lar

This post is a review of the quaint little (156 pages) popular science book The Periodic Kingdom by P. W. Atkins . When I was an undergraduate, I had loved the clear expository style of his textbook on quantum mechanics. Though he is a chemist (retired from Oxford) the book was very accessible for a physics student like me. Atkins is in fact an excellent pedagogue and has written about 20 books, some of which are considered market leaders (e.g. Physical Chemistry is a clas

This post is about review articles in physics. Below I will put down my philosophy about what reading and writing such articles involves. What they are : Review articles are useful but somewhat unusual objects, in that they do not represent original research, like most published papers, but rather a summary of (usually recent) developments in a field. Why they are useful to the reader : Review articles are useful to researchers looking to get into a new area of physics. This

This post is a review of the book Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms by Carlo Cercignani (329 pages), and includes a preface by Roger Penrose. Boltzmann was one of the all time great physicists, and the founder of the discipline of statistical mechanics. He showed how to quantify the second law of thermodynamics, with the equation named after him. He was the first to give a statistical definition of entropy, a formula famously inscribed on his gravestone. He was