Yes, cold-atom condensates are interesting and useful
When Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman made the first Bose–Einstein condensate from a gas of cold rubidium-87 atoms in 1995, I was excited and impressed. Conceptually, BECs are simple enough to have been...
View ArticleThe hunt for supersolidity
Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 when Heike Kamerlingh Onnes chilled a piece of solid mercury to 4.2 K and witnessed the resistivity of his sample vanish. Superfluidity was discovered in 1937...
View ArticleFrom basic to applied in 83 years
In June 1929 a paper by the 23-year-old Nevill Mott appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. As Mott noted in his introduction, theoretical arguments and empirical evidence supported...
View ArticleNot enough peasants, not enough economics
Many years ago I read an essay in which the author—I think it might have been Frederik Pohl—complained about historical inaccuracies in sword-and-sorcery novels. Of course, it’s hardly “wrong” in such...
View ArticleMy Nobel wish list
My record for predicting the winners of Nobel prizes is mixed. The last time I made a public prediction was two years ago. I correctly picked Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim as winners, but I...
View ArticleZapping zircons
Fans of Physics Today's Facebook page occasionally send me messages, most of which are requests for more information about something to do with physics. The one I received on Monday was no exception. A...
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