Black holes as quantum-information mirrors
This is the tale of Alice, Bob and a black hole. Alice and Bob are a couple with a big communication problem — they only talk using quantum information systems. Usually this involves sending enc...
Comparisons
Being at the APS meeting last year in Denver, I can’t help but think about some comparisons. Although I was at the march meeting last year in a different capacity (as a researcher, giving my 10+...
Physicists and climate change
How physicists are contributing to the study of climate change
Read article: Physicists and climate change
Hurricanes and extreme weather systems
Now for a topic that is close to the heart for many inhabitants of New Orleans – hurricanes. The devastation caused by the events in 2005 by hurricane Katrina led to most of the inhabitants of N...
Cats and dogs with their tails tied together
Yesterday I went to a news conference given by five physicists who believe that materials called “block copolymers” could help the electronics industry continue its relentless drive toward...
Baseball and steroids
How much do drugs affect the performance of athletes and more interestingly how can we quantify such enhanced performance? That was the question that Roger Tobin, a condensed matter physicist from Tuf...
Stingy Uncle Sam
Here I am doing my bit to persuade the US government that it should give a little more money to the nation’s physicists. The photo was taken by the APS’s Tawanda Johnson, who was trying to...
Annealing at 1K
My first session was on supersolid He-4, up bright and early for the 8am start. The paper under discussion for the first talk appeared in Nature last year by Xi Lin and colleagues from Penn State Univ...
Cold Fusion as Policy Posterboy
The March Meeting has everything, including a session on cold fusion. It is almost 20 years since Pons and Fleischmann told the world that they had seen nuclear fusion in what is essentially an electr...
Streetcar to the Garden District
It’s a lovely day in New Orleans and I managed to get a sunburn walking around the French Quarter this morning….I suppose I’m a real redneck now! Our hotel is right across the road f...
