Background: Earlier this week we had a visit from (possibly) the world expert on interstellar travel, Les Johnson . Johnson is doubly...

This post is a review of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves by Arik...

This post is about James Sylvester Gates, Jr. , who visited our campus earlier this week . Jim, as he likes to be called, is a...

Historically, students with advanced degrees in physics (i.e. a PhD) have rarely had the financial world in their sights. This changed in...

Concrete In physics-teaching we try to make the subject relatable by giving concrete examples to illustrate the principles at hand. For...

This is a review of the book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi , the...

This post is a review of the book The Science of Spin by Roland Ennos. The book is about the role played by physical rotation in the...

This post is in response to questions from various students about the typical steps in the career of an academic physicist (employed at a...

This is a review of the book DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution by James Watson with Andrew Berry and Kevin Davies. When I saw the...

Intro A few days ago I received, along with my colleagues in the physics department, an email referring to a paper posted on the...

Nowadays a scientific career is a substantial undertaking, requiring many years of training and preparation, resources from agencies, a...

This is a review of the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks . It was published in 2007, but I got to it just now. That's how long my...

'Tis the season for reviewing graduate school admission applications (to PhD programs in physics to be specific to my case). Whenever I...

There is a series of videos on YouTube labeled Nobel Minds, which involves all the Nobel laureates for a given year gathered around a...

This is a collection of observations I have made about myself over time regarding the effect of my professional habits (as a physicist)...

This post looks - for inspiration - at some cases in science where an individual picked a problem (which had been set aside by the...

( Belated Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year to all readers !!) This list is personal, and claims to be neither complete...

(This is my 100th post – thanks to all the readers who have stayed with me thus far!!). What is endsemesteritis? Endsemesteritis is a...

A phenomenon that is common in undergraduate as well as graduate physics education: a student who is quite competent comes across a...

This post is a review of the book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to be Seen by Gregory G. Gbur . (Full disclosure:...