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The Adventures of My Pet Hamster

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What the Heck’s on Goodreads?

Pop on over to Goodreads’s Science Book Club, where “Reality in the Shadows (or) What the Heck’s the Higgs?” is the book of the month for discussion in the forum! Frank Blitzer, Jim Gates, and I are available to chat about the book, about the science behind the book, and […]

What the Heck’s on Goodreads?

I’ve run silent for months. Why? I had the time and energy for only a finite number of things, and none of them were writing. This semester hit like a freight train. In addition to trying to maintain something resembling a home life, there was a fragmented faculty life with […]

Classy

By the end of 2016, I was running 10 miles at my longest stretch. Then I injured my hamstring. Then 2017 came. I was on sabbatical, which sounds like “academic vacation”  but isn’t. My exercise schedule was disrupted. My teaching schedule in the fall of 2017 was a mess that […]

Re-Running

Bombogenesis. Noreaster. Bomb cyclone. Polar vortex. These are none of the words you can use to describe the first day of our return trip to Texas. After a wonderful 5 days of play and rest wtlith family in northern Wisconsin, Jodi and I loaded up the car with bags and […]

Road diary, day 3

This is the second and last day of our trip north to Wisconsin. As we have continued north into the cold Arctic air parked over the middle and Northeast of the United States, the temperature had only declined even as the day grows later and the sun higher in the […]

Road Diary, Day 2

Jodi and I are on our annual road trip to Wisconsin. It has a new element this year: the cats went with us. We had a hard time finding a consistent cat sitter over the break, so we decided to take advantage of our cats’ youth and hit the road […]

Road diary, day 1

When I joined the existing co-authors of “Reality in the Shadows” to contribute to the book, I hesitated. It had nothing to do with them. Jim Gates is renowned in my field for his intellectual prowess, considered a founder of key ideas in the theory of supersymmetry. Frank Blitzer is […]

A View from the Shadows: Confessions of a practicing physicist

In our book, “Reality in the Shadows,” we devote an entire chapter to the phenomenon of the black hole (“A Shadow Where No Light Shines“). We dealt in things that are known – for instance, that black holes exist and that they can be detected using their effects on the […]

A View from the Shadows: Tune That Dial to Black …

Sometimes, scientific fields move fast. They move so fast, even three authors working with a really responsive and excellent publisher who has fully embraced “print-on-demand” as a business model cannot keep up. Such is the reality of the new astronomy, gravitational wave astronomy. The LIGO, and then the VIRGO, instruments […]

A View from the Shadows: The New Astronomy

In our book, “Reality in the Shadows,” Jim Gates, Frank Blitzer, and I take a look at the history of the Higgs particle, see the day the discovery was announced through the eyes of one of the co-authors (me), and explore what the Higgs might be besides being just another […]

A View from the Shadows: The Truth and Beauty of …

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” could almost, taken at face value, be the plot of a movie in the “Saw” series [1]. Prisoners in a cave, born into chains and forced forever to face a single wall, know nothing of the reality of what lives behind them. A fire somewhere […]

A View from the Shadows: The Allegory of the Cave

Final Update: What Became Law Dec. 22, 2017 You can love or hate the tax overhaul that Congress passed and the President just signed into law, but there is one thing to celebrate in the bill. More specifically, there is something NOT in the bill worth celebrating: changes to qualified […]

What now for U.S. Graduate STEM Education?

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  • (no title)
    October 20, 2025
    Refreshing.“Prof. Yaghi’s advice to young people is simple: pursue that which brings you passion, ponder deeply about the natural world, experiment, and don’t be […]
  • (no title)
    October 20, 2025
    #Astronomy and a shared love of the sky has a way of bringing people together. SHARED SPACE (The Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition)), Oct […]

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