This post is a report on my visit this week to the city of Valencia in Spain. I was invited to give a talk at the Nanophotonics Technology Center which is part of the Polytechnical University in Valencia. Some highlights from the visit, which concludes tomorrow: The Center: The NTC is a center for telecom research, with advanced facilities, but also has two functioning companies situated in its building. These companies grew out of the research at the Center. I gave my talk i

This post is about the recent observation of entanglement of quarks at the Large Hadron Collider, published in Nature. This is the detection of entanglement at the most fundamental level in the universe ever probed by human beings (quarks are, as far as we know, the smallest constituents of matter), and at the highest energies. Entanglement Entanglement is the existence of correlations (between two or more physical systems) which cannot be explained using classical physics, a

This post is a review of Sisters in Science by Olivia Campbell. It is a book about 4 women physicists who were able to escape the Nazi regime in Germany and (re)build successful careers in other countries. These were Hedwig Kohn (a spectroscopist), Lise Meitner (nuclear pioneer), Hildegard Stucklen (spectroscopist) and Hertha Sponer (physical chemist). The first two had to flee because they were Jewish and all of them had to flee because they were women (Nazi rule opposed aca

This post is about the following, perhaps radical, conjecture: that, without education, human beings would essentially be animals of some type. Education, for the purpose of this post, is not just degrees, but any kind of systematic training. My views on this - and I have no qualifications in biology, behavioral science, psychology, etc. - are based solely on my experience as an educator. This is in fact, a vast topic, but I thought I should make a beginning at some point in