Category: Physics

Caltech, Saturday night, grad student pizza. The conversation turns to a famous general relativity puzzle: does an electric charge at rest in a gravitational field radiate? According to Einstein’s equivalence principle, a static homogeneous gravitational field is indistinguishable from constant acceleration in empty space, and as is well known, accelerating charges radiate. Does that mean…

After the conference in Switzerland, I stopped in Tübingen, Germany to visit Otto Rössler. Nearly everyone who learned about nonlinear systems knows the nowadays named Rössler attractor and his work in chaos theory in the 1970s. For the last four years we were in contact for my science history project and this year, I finally…

Due to the pandemic, the summer of 2019 was regrettably and unexpectedly my last Wooster summer research program, but the team was amazing. Niklas Manz and I obtained Sherman-Fairchild funding to work with Margaret McGuire ’20, Yang (Fish) Yu ’21, and Chase Fuller ’19 to computationally study reaction-diffusion phenomena.  All three of their projects have…

I hired Kiyomi from Hawai’i for our NSF REU summer program in spring 2020 amidst fears of the pandemic that eventually postponed the program two years. When she finally arrived in summer 2022, I had already retired from Wooster, where my last year was completely remote, classes via Teams, but several of those included Daniel.…

When I bought my house, I knew I would soon need to replace its heat pump, which was almost 20 years old. Earlier this month, with my old pump laboring under a cold snap, I upgraded to a new version, which boasts a history of elegant inventions. Powered by electricity, heat pumps circulate a low-boiling-point…

For the last two years, the Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab and I have labored to incorporate diversity in machine learning. Diversity conveys advantages in nature, yet homogeneous neurons typically comprise the layers of artificial neural networks. In software, we constructed neural networks from neurons that learn their own activation functions (relating inputs to outputs), quickly…

A particle confined to an impassable box is a paradigmatic and exactly solvable one-dimensional quantum system modeled by an infinite square well potential. Working with Bill Ditto, Elliott Holliday and I recently explored some of its infinitely many generalizations to two dimensions, including particles confined to regions that exhibit integrable, ergodic, or chaotic classical billiard…