I felt like a gum ball trying to squeeze my way out of a gum-ball machine.& I was one of 50-ish physicists crammed into the lobby—and in the doorway, down the stairs, and onto the sidewalk—of a Manhattan hotel last December. Everyone had received a COVID vaccine, and the omicron variant had...
science - 5 months ago
Shortly after becoming a Fellow of QuICS, the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, I received an email from a university communications office. The office wanted to take profess...
So much to do, so little time. Tending to one task is inevitably at the cost of another, so how does one decide how to spend their time? In the first few years of my PhD, I balanced problem sets, lit...
Three-and-a-quarter years ago, I was on a subway train juddering along the tracks. I gripped my suitcase tightly and—knowing myself—likely gripped a physics paper, too, so that I could read during th...
Tourism websites proclaim, “There’s beautiful…and then there’s Santa Barbara.” I can’t accuse them of hyperbole, after living in Santa Barbara for several months. Santa Barbara’s beauty manifests in...
Queen Elizabeth II celebrated the 60th year of her reign in 2012. I was working as a research assistant at Lancaster University, in northern England. The university threw a tea party, which I attended with a friend. She wrangled me into donning a party hat decorated with the Union Jack. Sixtieth an...
