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Walter Burke Editor's Note: Yesterday and today, Caltech is celebrating the inauguration of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. John Preskill made the following remarks at a dinner last night honoring the board of the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. This is an exciting night for me and all of us at Caltech. Tonight [...]
On last week’s “Welcome to the math olympics”, I closed with a problem from the International Math Olympiad of 1981 (a bad year for wine – I would know, I was an avid drinker back then). I would like to take some time to present a solution to this problem, because this is where all [...]
I was excited to hear that Charlie Kane, Laurens Molenkamp and Shoucheng Zhang were among the recipients of the 2013 Physics Frontiers Prize. Their seminal works both theoretically predicting and experimentally discovering the topological insulator have profoundly influenced the direction of condensed matter physics over the past few years and have shaped my own research [...]
K-12 Programs IQIM interacts broadly with K-12 students and we also include teachers. Over 1,000 students participate in programs held on the Caltech campus including Project Scientist Academy, Southern California State Science Olympiad, and InnoWorks Academy. IQIM hosts high school teachers for a Summer Research Institute; a six-week immersion in the laboratory experience working directly with [...]
Making your way to the cutting edge of any field is a daunting challenge. But especially when the edge of the field is expanding; and even harder still when the rate of expansion is accelerating. John recently helped Physics World create a special 25th anniversary issue where they identified the five biggest breakthroughs in physics [...]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2DXrs0OpHU?vq=hd720&rel=0&showinfo=0] by Jorge Cham You might think the title is a little exaggerated, but if there's one thing I've learned from Theoretical Physicists so far, it's to be bold with my conjectures about reality. Welcome to the second installment of our series of animations about Quantum Information! After an auspicious start describing doing the impossible, this [...]
Faculty, Quantum Information
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFecm9NKbM?vq=hd720&rel=0&showinfo=0] by Jorge Cham. Ok, this is where things get weird. If quantum computers, femtometer motions or laser alligators weren't enough, let's throw in fractionalized electrons, topological surfaces and strings that go to the end of time. To be honest, the idea that an electron can't be split hadn't even occurred to me before my conversation with Gil [...]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD1U1sIPQ4?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=1&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0] by Jorge Cham How do you make something that has never existed before? I often get suggestions for comics I should draw, which I welcome because A) I like to think of PHD Comics as a global collaborative effort and B) after 17 years, I'm almost out of ideas. This particular suggestion came from Chen-Lung [...]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pktWhH6m_DM?vq=hd720&rel=0&showinfo=0] by Jorge Cham What does it mean for something to be Quantum? I have to confess, I don't know. My Ph.D was in Robotics and Kinematics, so my neurons are deeply trained to think in terms of classical dynamics. I asked my siblings (two engineers and one architect) what comes to mind for them [...]