The Problem Peer review is a highly contentious topic in academia. This is because papers are published (always) and funds are granted...

Clocks play an incredibly important role in our lives. This post is about a recent development, based on nuclear physics , which promises...

The Problem A question I receive very frequently from students is: what do I need to know or what courses do I need to take, to join your...

What is fashion? Many human beings seem to love what is new and get bored of whatever is old. New and old are of course relative terms....

This post is about a book I stumbled upon while cleaning my room: Physics and Music by Gleb Anfilov, translated from the Russian by Boris...

Many - if not most - people think that the life of a professor is relatively boring. As a counterexample, I will try to offer in this...

A statement of the problem This post is about a specific management problem that I often encounter while supervising students and...

Introduction This post is about the heavy demand, for the past few years, for popular physics books that purport to answer or tackle the...

A topic I promised to write about earlier, and a source of frequent discussion in academic circles. Specifically, I would like to address...

My last two posts have been about biographies of scientists (Roy Glauber and Srinivas Ramanujan). While writing these, I began looking...

This post is a review of Srinivasa Ramanujan by Suresh Ram, a fine introductory book of ~85 pages (as opposed to the much more...

This post is a review of the book The Last Voice: Roy Glauber and the Dawn of the Atomic Age. The book covers the two main reasons Roy...

The Topic Today is the last day of the workshop in Spain that I mentioned in last week's post. One of the interesting aspects of this...

The setting I am currently attending a workshop in Spain, in the town of Benasque. The town is in the center of the Pyrenees, a mountain...

Background Towers have an interesting connection to physics. Of course, physics is crucial to their construction (prominently in Gothic...

A few days ago I was informed that my first - hopefully not my last - scientific patent has been granted. Prehistory Some people might...

This post addresses some questions I am commonly asked by my non-academic friends. Readers working in academia may also find some...

The motivation While I am nominally a professor of physics (someone who has expertise in practicing physics), I sometimes feel like a...

Intro A famous saying, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, is that in life the only things that are certain are death and taxes. Since it...

What happened - or rather did not - in Rochester, NY The sun was out and shining the day before as well as the day after the eclipse (in...