Monthly Archives: October 2011

Quasicrystals!

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Wow! WOW!

As you can tell, I am very pleased about the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize announcement. I’d love to tell you a bit more about why, but I’m supposed to be working on something urgently right mow, and so will try to do so later. The key thing is that I think the discovery of quasicrystals is fantastic and very visual example of how we can dream up a mathematical structure just because it is interesting and beautiful (Penrose tilings, independently discovered by Roger Penrose as the answer to a mathematical puzzle, (see two dimensional version on left) but also showing up in Islamic tiling patterns from much earlier) and then find later that Nature has exploited that same pattern to make something- a new form of matter (the quasicrystals themselves… The subject of today’s prize to Dan Shechtman – image below on right is of a silver and aluminium quasicrystal compound. Both images here are from wikimedia commons.).

I was in love with these things when I was an undergraduate, not long after their discovery, […] Click to continue reading this post →

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

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Ok. So who was surprised by this one? My hand is not up… is yours? (That’s a screen shot from the Nobel Prize site to the left. More here. Cheeky of me, but it’s early in the morning and I’ve got to pack, shower, and cycle like mad to the subway to get to my train to Santa Barbara, so time is of the essence.)

I was pretty sure that this would be the prize sometime very soon, although I’ll not say that I knew it would be this year’s for sure. It is well deserved, since this was a genuinely major change in how everyone in the field thinks about the universe, and we’re still trying to get to grips with it today. The acceleration of the universe that they […] Click to continue reading this post →

Markets and Musings

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I’m back in Los Angeles from my visit to the workshop (see earlier), have a bit of a cold, and am tired. I’ve been thinking a lot about various issues in quantum field theory, surrounding quantum entanglement, non-equilibrium processes, Fermi surfaces, and a lot more like that. I’ve also been teaching about real QED processes in the class today – they are now able (I hope) to compute real cross-sections for things like electron-electron scattering, and electron-positron scattering! Very rewarding actually.

Anyway, I’m tired, so I decided to spend a little time relaxing by experimenting with watercolours of a sort. The digital kind. This is a sketch I did in my little square notebook at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market last week, and back then I’d started to use colour pencils to do some colour on it and got a bit bored… So I did a bit more […] Click to continue reading this post →