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The countdown had begun. In ten days, I’d move from Florida, where I’d spent the summer with family, to Caltech. Unfolded boxes leaned against my dresser, and suitcases yawned on the floor. I was working on a paper. Even if I’d turned around from my desk, I wouldn’t have seen the stacked books and folded [...]
Physicists are not known for finesse. “Even if it cost us our funding,” I’ve heard a physicist declare, “we’d tell you what we think.” Little wonder I irked the porter who directed me toward central Cambridge. The University of Cambridge consists of colleges as the US consists of states. Each college has a porter’s lodge, [...]
Faculty Lunch and Discussion Date Speaker Location June 3 Xie Chen 114 East Bridge May 13 Dave Hsieh 114 East Bridge April 29 Jason Alicea 114 East Bridge April 15 Daniel Silevitch B157 West Bridge February 26 Alexei Kitaev 114 East Bridge February 12 Rana Adhikari 114 East Bridge January 29 Linda Ye 114 [...]
The night before defending my Masters thesis, I ran out of shampoo. I ran out late enough that I wouldn’t defend from beneath a mop like Jack Sparrow’s; but, belonging to the Luxuriant Flowing-Hair Club for Scientists (technically, if not officially), I’d have to visit Shopper’s Drug Mart. The author’s unofficially Luxuriant [...]
Damn, it sure takes a long time for light to travel to the Pegasus galaxy. If only quantum teleportation enabled FTL Stargates… I was hoping to post this earlier, but a heavy dose of writer’s block set in (I met a girl, and no, this blog didn’t help — but [...]
Transforming the STEM Pipeline into a River The traditional metaphor of the “leaky pipeline” tracks the number of students entering the educational system and emphasizes points at which women and minority students leave the system. IQIM is working to increase diversity on our campus and more broadly in STEM by encouraging a [...]
Research Highlights and Key Outcomes 2020 Annual Report – IQIM Year 3 IQIM spans Caltech's departments of physics, applied physics, computer science, electrical engineering, materials science and chemistry. Our program comprises three Major Activities (MAs), organized according to distinct scientific themes rather than experimental platforms, with each MA striking a balance between [...]
A few weeks ago, my friend Amanda, an elementary school teacher who runs a children’s camp during the summer break, suggested that it could be fun for me to come into the camp one day and do some science demonstrations for the kids. I jumped at the opportunity, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact [...]
The benefits of Caltech's proximity to Hollywood don't usually trickle down to measly grad students like myself, except in the rare occasions when we befriend the industry's technical contingent. One of my friends is a computer animator for Disney, which means that she designs algorithms enabling luxuriously flowing hair or trees with realistic lighting or [...]
Faculty, Topological Quantum Physics