This post is a review of the book Antimatter: What it is and why is it important in Physics and Everyday life by Beatriz Gato-Rivera. I had been looking for a book on the topic for a while and I found it displayed at the workshop I am attending in Spain. Then I was able to access it online. Before I start the review, some photos I took of the village of Benasque. A road in the village From across the river At the conference This is

Tony Leggett This post commemorates Sir Anthony 'Tony' Leggett, who was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 2003 (along with V. L. Ginzburg and A. A. Abrikosov), for making pioneering advances in our understanding of physics at low temperatures, and who passed away recently (1938-2026). Leggett's major contributions included explaining the superfluidity of Helium 3 (an outstanding problem in physics), and pioneering the study of macroscopic phenomena (he was among the firs

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

Imagine Today Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival 2026 was held, mostly indoors with driving rain outside. Imagine is the tech fair of my university, and today had more than 400 exhibits and 3000 exhibitors. On a fair weather day, there are about 10,000 attendees; I am not sure there were that many today, though I had to circle around for a quite while to get parking. Some editions (not today's) run into two days and generally I find the number of exhibits so lar

This post is a review of the quaint little (156 pages) popular science book The Periodic Kingdom by P. W. Atkins . When I was an undergraduate, I had loved the clear expository style of his textbook on quantum mechanics. Though he is a chemist (retired from Oxford) the book was very accessible for a physics student like me. Atkins is in fact an excellent pedagogue and has written about 20 books, some of which are considered market leaders (e.g. Physical Chemistry is a clas

This post is about review articles in physics. Below I will put down my philosophy about what reading and writing such articles involves. What they are : Review articles are useful but somewhat unusual objects, in that they do not represent original research, like most published papers, but rather a summary of (usually recent) developments in a field. Why they are useful to the reader : Review articles are useful to researchers looking to get into a new area of physics. This

This post is a review of the book Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms by Carlo Cercignani (329 pages), and includes a preface by Roger Penrose. Boltzmann was one of the all time great physicists, and the founder of the discipline of statistical mechanics. He showed how to quantify the second law of thermodynamics, with the equation named after him. He was the first to give a statistical definition of entropy, a formula famously inscribed on his gravestone. He was

This post is about one of my favorite topics: academic peer review. I have written about it before, comparing different fields , and suggesting alternatives . Today I will state my analysis of some classic characteristics that I think most reviews of low quality share. I am writing this in the hope that it will be helpful to people just entering the process. It is often not until much later in their careers that they begin to analyze the defects and recognize them and acquire

This post is a review of the book Lise Meitner: A Life in Science by Ruth Lewin Sime. Meitner was the first woman to be a full professor in Germany, a post she later lost due to being Jewish, and was also unjustly denied a Nobel prize in chemistry for her work on nuclear fission. The book is quite substantial, at 417 pages. It divides naturally into three parts. The first part deals with her birth and childhood in Vienna. The author does a great job of describing the milieu

This is a post about my spring break trip to Dublin, where I was visiting the physics department at Trinity College. My first time in Ireland, and though I did not get to see the beautiful countryside, I was most impressed by Dublin city itself. There's a lot to see, the culture is preserved well and proudly, and the people are very friendly. My tourism could be categorized into three classes: Science : The great mathematician Hamilton was Irish and he is commemorated in seve

This is a review of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. This book was forwarded to me by a friend. It is about a thousand pages long, so not a quick read, and in fact perhaps a book to be dipped into only occasionally (the book claims the original aim was to provide bedtime reading). The writing is highly accessible. Most of the material should be clear to high school graduates, some of it might require a college education. The book is divided into eight chapters. The mai

This is a review of Henri Poincare: A Scientific Biography , written by Jeremy Gray and published by Princeton University Press (592 pages). Poincare was a great mathematician and physicist. He invented the theory of automorphic functions and the field of algebraic topology, and made distinguished contributions to partial differential equations, celestial mechanics (chaos), special relativity (Lorentz and Poincare groups), number theory, and the famous conjecture in geomet

This post is a review of a biography of Marie Curie, written by her youngest daughter, Eve. Translated from the French by Vincent Shean, it won the American National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1937, became a bestseller, and was first adapted into a movie in 1943 (later there were more films, the latest being Radioactive ) . The biography is written by someone who not only knew Marie Curie well, but was a family member. The book reads true and intimately. Issues are consid

Physics presents to us a towering intellectual edifice of knowledge and insight, an immensely deep and powerful way of looking at the world. It may not come as a surprise that human reactions to the structure, organization, nature, demands and implications of this eminent system of thought may sometimes be somewhat off-kilter. As a practitioner of physics, I find these reactions interesting and sometimes revealing of the way non-physicists regards physics. I will consider thr

This post is a review of the book ABCs of Science by Giuseppe Mussardo . General review : The author exposes the reader to some of the great concepts and discoveries of science through the lens of personality and history. This is not a bad idea, in my opinion, as it gives the book coherence and the material the fascination and immediacy of story. As may be expected, there are 26 chapters, arranged in alphabetical order of name or topic: the chapters deal with Abel, Boltzmann

Organized contests in physics and mathematics have been around for a while: probably the most famous ones are the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge; the Westinghouse and the Putnam in the United States; and the International Physics and Mathematics Olympiads. This post is about the correlation - or the lack thereof - between the winners list of these contests and the ranks of top scientists (e.g. signified by the Nobel prize or the Fields Medal). International Physics Olympiad

This post is a review of the book Sociobiology by the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson. It was originally published in 1975, to acclaim and controversy, and is considered a landmark work which established the biological and evolutionary basis of behavior in animals (including humans). It is about 700 pages long, and in spite of not being an expert in biology, I found it remarkably accessible. The book lays out in great detail, and with an abundance of examples, the author's