Meetings
drorzel | January 14, 2009A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason for the veiled threats we got the next year.
The Corporate Masters have just published an exclusive post-election interview with Marburger. I read it with some interest, mostly to see if it would change my impression of him.
I have to say, it didn't. Not only does he…
drorzel | June 2, 2008I thought about tacking this onto the end of the previous post, but decided it deserved a space of its own. So, how was the meeting on the whole?
All in all, I thought it was a very good meeting. There wasn't anything stunning and new in the talks that I saw-- there were some very impressive results, and some excellent talks, but most of it was stuff that's clearly in line with research that's been going for a while. There was a lot of really interesting physics presented at the meeting, though, and I'm sure I missed a lot of good stuff, too, because of the highly parallel nature of the…
drorzel | June 2, 2008I'll get to the much-delayed Friday summary shortly. But first, the Nerds of the Purple Cow:
That picture (courtesy of Justin Brown) shows twelve of the thirteen Williams graduates attending this year's DAMOP, in order of class year, from Paul Hess '08 on the left (who technically only graduated yesterday) to Tom Gallagher of UVA on the far right. Dan Kleppner of MIT had left before Tiku Majumder got the picture set up, but if you include him, we spanned 55 years of graduating classes.
Given that the school only graduates 10-ish physics majors a year, that's a pretty impressive showing, and…
drorzel | May 30, 2008I spent a whole bunch of time running around between talks on Thursday, and at one point was grumbling to myself about the way the organizers had scheduled all the good stuff at one time. Only later did I realize that it really wasn't their fault-- it's all good stuff, and there are only a few sessions here and there that I have absolutely no interest in seeing.
We need more sessions with names like "Boring Inscrutable Theory II," so I don't feel like I need to be in three places at once.
Anyway, a handful of highlights from Thursday's program:
I started off at the ultracold atoms session, to…
drorzel | May 28, 2008A very quick run-down of physics topics at DAMOP, before I go to bed:
I skipped the prize session at 8am, so I started my day with Bill Phillips's talk in the recent developments in optical lattices session. Oddly, his talk really didn't have much to do with lattices, but it's always a pleasure to see Bill give a talk.
Bill was followed by Immanuel Bloch, who gave an extremely impressive talk about experiments they've done with atoms in optical lattices. This is related to, but way, way beyond the stuff I did as a post-doc. They've done some amazing things with the manipulation of quantum…
drorzel | May 28, 2008I made it to Happy Valley without incident, though it is Orange Cone Season in Pennsylvania, and I spent a lot of time dodging construction. Happily, there really wasn't anything important at the meeting last night.
So I skipped out on the welcome reception to have dinner and a few beers with Kevin and RPM and the world-famous Prof. Steve Steve. They're good guys, as stamp collectors go...
Kevin and RPM both posted pictures, but I'm too lazy to bother right now. Maybe later. I'll definitely post something about actual physics later, but for now, I need to run off to hear more talks, and look…
drorzel | May 27, 2008I'm off to the 39th meeting of DAMOP, the division of the American Physical Society for people who do the really cool stuff involving whole atoms and lasers. I've queued up a few things so that the site won't go dark, and the hotel web page promises high-speed Internet, so I may even do a bit of on-site blogging.
Or I may not. The program looks like it will keep me fairly busy. We'll see how things play out. Whether I blog it or not, the meeting is always a kick, and will be a lovely break from intro E&M.
Anyway, you all behave while I'm gone. Walk the dog, water the plants, and don't try…
drorzel | May 26, 2008Most of my reaction to this weekend's Emily Gould article in the Times was "Gosh, who knew that writing for Gawker might have a corrosive effect on your personal life...," but there were some interesting bits. She did a nice job explaining how blogging can be sort of addictive, and also had some good bits on the phenomenon of blog fame:
I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. "It's important to remember that you're not a celebrity," she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a…
drorzel | March 17, 2008In one of his March Meeting posts, Doug Natelson writes about laser cooling experiments that explore condensed matter phenomena:
While the ultracold gases provide an exquisitely clean, tunable environment for studying some physics problems, it's increasingly clear to me that they also have some significant restrictions; for example, while optical lattices enable simulations of some model potentials from solid state physics, there doesn't seem to be any nice way to model phonons or the rich variety of real-life crystal structures that can provide so much rich phenomenology.
I would dissent…
drorzel | March 11, 2008The annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week in New Orleans. This is the biggest physics conference of the year, by far, with close to 7,000 attendees-- despite what you might think from the Internet, the Condensed Matter crowd who attend the March Meeting significantly outnumber particle physicists and high-energy theorists.
I don't usually go to the March Meeting-- it's just too damn big. I went to the Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999 (and gave an invited talk, in fact), and didn't care for it all that much. I prefer DAMOP, which is much smaller-- a…
bergman | August 23, 2007As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently attending the Simons Workshop in Mathematics and Physics at Stony Brook University. The weather finally warmed up today, and we relocated to Smith Point Beach to hear Juan Maldacena tell us a bit about AdS/CFT and gluon scattering. If you're looking for a precis of the talk, I'm afraid I'm not going to give it a try, but I'll commend you to the paper if only so you can read about the beautiful wire frames.
This is actually the second workshop for me this summer. Before coming here, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks at the Aspen Center for Physics…
drorzel | June 12, 2007Clifford Johnson is pointing to a pair of stories about extrasolar planets. One is a news piece about the "flood" of new discoveries, and the other is a Top 10 list from space.com (warning: irritating web design).
This provides a good excuse to roll out a blog suggestion from Ron Walsworth, who pointed out a possible connection to the ultra-stable lasers that Jun Ye and Jim Bergquist talked about on the first day of last week's conference. He suggested that, in the future, these ultra-stable lasers may be useful not only for comparing clocks on Earth, but as a crucial reference to help detect…
drorzel | June 11, 2007One of the few glitches in the DAMOP meeting program was the way the poster sessions were run. For those from regions of academia that don't do poster sessions, it's pretty much what the name implies: rather than delivering short talks about their work, the presenters in the session prepare posters describing their work, and then stand near the poster to explain the results to people who wander by.
The problem with this specific poster session wasn't so much a program issue as a space issue-- the room the posters were in for the first two days had a large aspect ratio, being very long and…
drorzel | June 11, 2007Friday at DAMOP ended up being more about socialization than science. I went to a few talks, but there wasn't that much on the program that looked exciting, and I had to spend some time in the middle of the day grading papers and dealing with some panicky emails from students.
As a result, the highlights of the day mostly involved talking to people. I spent a little while talkinging to frequent commenter Perry Rice about his poster, and quantum optics in general. Ron Walsworth offered a couple of suggestions for blog topics, including a couple of applications of frequency combs to…
drorzel | June 7, 2007The highlight of Day 2 of DAMOP was, obviously, the special Undergraduate Research session. OK, it's possible that I'm only saying that because one of my students was talking in that session...
Mike did a really good job with his talk, though there were a couple of phrases in there that I would've preferred not to hear in the final talk... The other two talks that I heard were also excellent, and as the session chair said, if that's the future of science, the future looks good.
In the present of science, there were some really good talks in the morning sessions. Ian Spielman of NIST gave a…
drorzel | June 6, 2007With attendees still trickling in after Tuesday's storms upset pretty much every mode of travel in Alberta, the DAMOP meeting opened with the Plenary Prize Session, and the first two talks were probably the highlight of the day, as far as I was concerned. Jun Ye and Jim Bergquist both work in precision measurement, and do some astonishing things.
Jun Ye talked about experiments with ultra-stable lasers, including so-called "frequency combs" which are lasers with a huge range of evenly spaced modes. The frequencies of these modes are all multiples of a single frequency, so they can be used to…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Hamish Johnston is live-blogging like a pro, and has entries on invisibility, buckets of BEC, biophysics, and the toy show.
Travis Hime knows more than you do about superconducting qubits.
And that's it for the moment.
drorzel | March 7, 2007I forgot to post this earlier, but there are a few posts out there about the second day of the APS March Meeting:
Cocktail Party Physics has interesting comments on a bunch of biophysics.
Doug Natelson gets roped into chairing a session, and talks about some STM talks.
Matt Leifer talks about research on foundational issues in QM, without mentioning any obvious kooks.
Hamish Johnston talks about graphene, medical physics, and High Tc superconductors.
drorzel | March 5, 2007The March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week. This is one of two large multi-divisional meetings the APS has each year (the other is in April), and it's billed as the largest physics meeting of the year.
I've only gone to a March Meeting once and that was the year it was combined with the April Meeting to form one gigantic Centennial Meeting, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the APS. I didn't care for it much-- it was much too big to get a sense of what was going on, and the schedule was incredibly busy with no built-in breaks. I much prefer the annual DAMOP…
drorzel | February 2, 2007Late spring/ early summer is Conference Season in academic science, with lots of meetings scheduled during the academic break, so that everybody can attend without cutting into their teaching responsibilities (of course, our trimester calendar means we're still in session for most of these, but whatever...). The peak time for conferences in my subfield is late May and early June-- the main meeting I go to, the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics is actually later than usual this year, presumably because it's in Calgary, and they need an extra week or two to thaw out.
Of course…