The following text is an excerpt from a draft of an article that I co-wrote for the magazine Physics Today, together with Prof. Art Ramirez at UC Santa Cruz. The article will appear (edited, and with more professional figures) in the magazine in September. The article attempts to give some intuition about the concept of […]| Gravity and Levity
When I was in high school I spent about 2 hours after school every day running track. This was, on the face of it, an unpleasant thing to do. Running is literally painful, and I devoted something like 10% of my waking life to it. So why did I do so much running? It turns […]| Gravity and Levity
I have some reasonably momentous personal news: I got a job. And I don’t just mean that I got a job, in the same sense that I’ve been employed doing research ever since getting my PhD. I got the job: the ostensibly permanent faculty position that so many of us have aspired to (and agonized […]| Gravity and Levity
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can you go in altitude before you start to have difficulty breathing, or your bag of chips explodes, or you need to wear […]| Gravity and Levity
One of the most useful concepts I learned during my first year of graduate school was the method of Lagrange multipliers. This is something that can seem at first like an obscure or technical piece of esoterica – I had never even heard of Lagrange multipliers during my undergraduate physics major, and I would guess […]| Gravity and Levity
There is a common conception that physics is a business of writing and solving exact equations. This idea is not untrue, in the sense that physicists generally prefer to produce exact solutions when they can. But precise equations can be slow: they are often cumbersome to work with and can obscure important concepts with a […]| Gravity and Levity
Lately I have seen an increasingly honest, and increasingly public discussion about the feelings of inadequacy that come with trying to be a scientist. For example, here Anshul Kogar writes about the “Crises in Confidence” that almost invariably come with trying to do a PhD. In this really terrific account, Inna Vishik tells the story […]| Gravity and Levity
Today, April 16, is the one day in the year when I use this blog for very personal purposes. In particular, I reserve the day for remembering Virginia Tech and my time there. (Past years’ writings are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). If you’re here for physics-related content, just hold on; a new post […]| Gravity and Levity
There used to exist a really wonderful webcomic called Pictures for Sad Children. A few years ago its creator, John Campbell, grew tired of the project and removed all of it from the internet. But the comic was hugely influential, and you can find most of its pieces reproduced online if you do a Google […]| Gravity and Levity
How unreasonable is it to not vaccinate your children? I ask this not as a rhetorical question, but as a mathematical one. How do we describe, mathematically, the benefits and risks of vaccination?…| Gravity and Levity
Take one moment and try to answer, for yourself, the following question: How happy are you? Try to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10. I’ll wait until you’re done. $latex \hspace{1mm}$ $l…| Gravity and Levity
