Welcome to this short tour of our Christmas tree. This bulb is from our first Christmas as spouses. We got it on our honeymoon in Door County, Wisconsin.
Yearly Archives: 2019
29 posts
It is a difficult time. I hope that, in this season of birth, rebirth, and salvation, the people of this world can put aside their many grievances and find light, hope, and peace.
Fall in Texas is beautiful, but fleeting. This fall has been sandwiched between two freezes, the next one about to begin tonight. It is hard to recognize seasons any more, in the long sunrise of climate change. But there are still fleeting moments of a recognizable autumn.
Modern Physics is an origin story of extremes. Extreme speed. Extreme smallness. It was in these corners of reality that old notions found their limits and new ideas could rise to solve mysteries. A hot cup of coffee and a cold cup of ice water, observed over hours, teach us […]
It never fails. An optical recording disc, with its numerous small grooves, causes light from a hydrogen discharge tube to spread out in a rainbow. Except this rainbow is incomplete, with only a red, a cyan, a blue, and a violet line. Where are all the other colors? Hydrogen cannot […]
Four of us stood in the lobby of the La Fonda Hotel. The beautiful space sits just off the main square in Santa Fe. You could almost feel the ghosts of the Manhattan Project walk past as people now sat, perhaps unaware, reading papers, waiting for friends, eating in the […]
Before I wanted to be a physicist – I mean, really wanted to become a physicist – I learned the joy of tinkering. I am sure it started earlier than when I remember it actually happening (memory is funny that way), the first first recollection I have of fully losing […]
The conference, Rencontres de Blois, takes place annually in the Chateau de Blois. This year was the 30th anniversary of the conference and the 31st such edition of the conference. The conference is a synthesis of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology – a perfect match to the strengths of our […]
Any person with a minimum sufficient experience in life has been rewarded with failure. A subset of those people, with sufficient practice, will come to recognize failure, not as a friend, but as a teacher. A recent useful (and ultimately harmless) failure in my class became a key teaching moment, […]