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Game theory of vaccination
How unreasonable is it to not vaccinate your children? I ask this not as a rhetorical question, but as a mathematical one. How do we describe, mathematically, the benefits and risks of vaccination?...
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surveyor
There used to exist a really wonderful webcomic called Pictures for Sad Children. A few years ago its creator, John Campbell, grew tired of the project and removed all of it from the internet. But...
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Good enough for me
Today, April 16, is the one day in the year when I use this blog for very personal purposes. In particular, I reserve the day for remembering Virginia Tech and my time there. (Past years’ writings...
View ArticleToward a culture of tolerating ignorance
Lately I have seen an increasingly honest, and increasingly public discussion about the feelings of inadequacy that come with trying to be a scientist. For example, here Anshul Kogar writes about the...
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Squiggle reasoning: the skydiving animals problem
There is a common conception that physics is a business of writing and solving exact equations. This idea is not untrue, in the sense that physicists generally prefer to produce exact solutions when...
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More people should know about Lagrange multipliers
One of the most useful concepts I learned during my first year of graduate school was the method of Lagrange multipliers. This is something that can seem at first like an obscure or technical piece of...
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How thick is the atmosphere? A derivation of the Boltzmann distribution
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can you go in...
View ArticleWhat it means, and doesn’t mean, to get a job in physics
I have some reasonably momentous personal news: I got a job. And I don’t just mean that I got a job, in the same sense that I’ve been employed doing research ever since getting my PhD. I got the job:...
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The Physics Olympiad, and finding community
When I was in high school I spent about 2 hours after school every day running track. This was, on the face of it, an unpleasant thing to do. Running is literally painful, and I devoted something like...
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How can electrons be “topological”?
The following text is an excerpt from a draft of an article that I co-wrote for the magazine Physics Today, together with Prof. Art Ramirez at UC Santa Cruz. The article will appear (edited, and with...
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