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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 [...]
It was the summer of 2008. I was 22 years old, and it was my second week working in the crude oil and natural gas options pit at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX.) My head was throbbing after two consecutive weeks of disorientation. It was like being born into a new world, but without [...]
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 [...]
I am a theoretical physicist at University of California, Berkeley. Last month, I attended a very interesting conference organized by Foundamental Questions Institute (FQXi) in Puerto Rico, and presented a talk about making predictions in cosmology, especially in the eternally inflating multiverse. I very much enjoyed discussions with people at the conference, where I was invited [...]
The elementary school I attended hosted an annual book fair, and every year I went with my mother to browse. I would check out the sports books first, to see whether there were any books about baseball I had not already read (typically, no). There was also a small table of science books, and in [...]
This year marks the 50th anniversary of my first publication. In 1964, when we were eleven-year-old fifth graders, my best friend Mace Rosenstein and I launched The Pres-stein Gazette, a not-for-profit monthly. Though the first issue sold well, the second issue never appeared. Front page of the inaugural issue of the Pres-stein Gazette. Faded [...]
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 [...]
Five years ago, I was staring out one of the few windowed cubicles in a cluttered office full of overambitious salespeople willing to throw their own father under a bus, if it meant a couple more dollars in commission and maybe a few more brownie points from the sweaty, beer-bellied sales manager. What was going [...]