My husband taught me how to pronounce the name of the city where I’d be presenting a talk late last July: Aveiro, Portugal. Having studied Spanish, I pronounced the name as Ah-VEH-roh, with a v partway to a hard b. But my husband had studied Portuguese, so he recommended Ah-VAI-roo. His accura...
science - 5 months ago
This past summer, our quantum thermodynamics research group had the wonderful opportunity to visit the& Dibner Rare Book Library& in D.C. Located in a small corner of the Smithsonian National...
Introduction: “Once Upon a Time”…with a twist Thermodynamics problems have surprisingly many similarities with fairy tales. For example, most of them begin with a familiar opening. In thermo...
The Noncommuting-Charges World Tour (Part 1 of 4) This is the first part in a four part series covering the recent Perspectives article on noncommuting charges. I’ll be posting one part every ~...
The most ingenious invention to surprise me at CERN was a box of chocolates. CERN is a multinational particle-physics collaboration. Based in Geneva, CERN is famous for having “the world’s largest an...
When my brother and I were little, we sometimes played video games on weekend mornings, before our parents woke up. We owned a 3DO console, which ran the game Gex. Gex is named after its main character, a gecko. Stepping into Gex’s shoes—or toe pads—a player can clamber up walls and across ceilings...
