Condensed concepts

I asked yesterday How would you respond to this email? I read it carefully and did not reply. The most striking thing was how generic it was. Although praising me and my work it never mentioned any specifics. Sometimes when I get student inquiries I send them an email similar to that below. Thanks for your interest. Please send me a copy of your CV and grade transcript. I suggest you look at my blog under the label “hydrogen bonds” or "strongly correlated electrons" to get some idea of my current interests. Also look at  “undergrads” and/or “Ph.D” to get some idea of my views and philosophy on supervision. I suggest after looking at the blog you then write and send me two paragraphs: one on why the science interests you and one on your perspective as to my philosophy. After that, if you are still interested I suggest we then meet in person. However, I did not send such an email for several reasons. I usually delete generic inquiries . If the student has not bothered t

On monday, I received the following email. Subject:  Meeting: Prospective Doctoral Student Dear Professor McKenzie, My name is M... W.... I have recently finished my honours degree and I am interested in undertaking doctoral study. The project I have in mind is closely related to your research. I became very familiar with your work while writing my thesis, and am eager to learn as much as I can about research opportunities with you.  I was wondering if you might have 10 minutes when you would be willing to meet with me to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities for me to get involved in your research. I will be on campus today, and will also be available for the rest of the week. Any time would be fine with me. Meeting with you is among my highest priorities as I prepare to apply for doctoral studies. Thank you in advance for your consideration. Sincerely, M.... W... Tomorrow, I will reveal how I responded and the ensuing firestorm... It is a fascinat

I am not a big fan of the peer review process. Too often it is a superficial ritual that adds little scientific value. Nevertheless, when it does work I think it can be very valuable. Here are some of my recent experiences that I thought were rather positive, and may be marginally interesting to readers. I was sent a paper by JCP to review. Overall, I liked it but I thought it would benefit from some significant revisions. In a weird coincidence, I was visiting the same institution as some of the authors. I have been recently challenged about whether peer review really should be anonymous [see this discussion of SciPost ] and so I took a risk. I signed my report and sent a copy to all the authors and told them I would be happy to meet to discuss the paper. We met and had a nice discussion. However, it was interesting that JCP told me that they had deleted my self-identification as it was against their policy. I was sent a paper by PRL to review that I (and other referees) took a st

On the one hand to make progress in science you need to focus, work hard, and build your expertise. This leads some to think that it best that they not pursue outside interests and hobbies such as art, music, craft, puzzles, games, ... However, scientific discoveries, particularly big ones, often involve creativity, serendipity, or thinking outside the box. I noticed two examples of this recently. The first was how fascination with a cheap child's toy led to the key idea behind the development of extremely cheap centrifuge [ paperfuge] for health diagnostics in the Majority World. The second example was a New York Times article about a recent paper that argues that key to Pasteur's discovery of molecular chirality was his interest in art . Another example, is Harry Kroto  who shared The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of buckyballs. He credited playing with Meccano as a child as very important in his scientific development. Can you think of other exampl

This is a small rant. I want to stress that it is not because of anything directly involving me. Rather it comes from things that come across my desk and frustrations that friends and colleagues vent to me. Here is a sample situation. Professor A in Department B at University C wants to apply to funding agency D for a joint multi-million dollar research grant with Professor E in Department F at University G. There is also an industrial partner, company H. Obviously, if the application is successful then A to H will all benefit. But now comes the rub. All parties need to commit to contributing something : whether it is time, lab space, matching funds, intellectual property rights, reduced teaching or admin. responsibilities, hiring new people, giving someone a permanent job, equipment, infrastructure, ..... and they need to divide up the grant if they get it. My frustration and concern are that I encounter cases where one or more of the parties are completely unreasonable about how

Four important goals to me are to teach students: 1. To think. 2. To think like a physicist. 3. To think like a condensed matter physicist. 4. The specific technical content of the course. The last one is arguably easier than the others. I also think it is the least important. Others will disagree. We don't reflect enough on how we might achieve the other goals. The biggest challenge of improving education in the Majority World is not lack of material resources but changing the culture of rote learning and teaching critical thinking. [This is highlighted in a  NYTimes piece about China  and a very funny video about India ITs]. Last week the UQ School of Maths and Physics Teaching Seminar was given by Peter Ellerton who works for the UQ Critical Thinking project . The slides from a similar talk are here. In the talk he mostly walked us through the three graphics shown here. [If you click on the image you can see a high resolution .pdf] The main value of all this i

At the weekly condensed matter theory cake meeting today we watched a video of a KITP blackboard talk given by Piers Coleman in 2015. Superconducting Surprises: five decades of discovery, in both temperature and time! It is a very nice exposition of the history and some of the key physics. A couple of minor comments. Organic superconductors were discovered in 1980 not 1973. Piers claims that the difference between the thermodynamic entropy of the superconducting and metallic states (determined from integrating the temperature dependent specific heat) is related to the quantum entanglement entropy of the superconducting ground state. The relationship between entanglement entropy (defined on a pure quantum state (at zero temperature) which is divided in two) and thermal entropies (defined for a bulk system in a mixed state at finite temperature) is an incredibly subtle and complex issue that I don't think is resolved. See for example the discussion in this paper.

Last friday we were fortunate to have David Sholl give a physics colloquium at UQ, ``What Does Quantum Mechanics Have To Do With The Chemical Industry? Reflections On A Journey From Pure To Applied Research.'' Here are the slides. David has a background in theoretical physics and has been particularly successful at using atomistic simulations to study problems that chemical engineers care about. He is co-author of a book, Density Functional Theory: A Practical Introduction His three main points in the talk were Applied research is worth doing and is intellectually satisfying Applied research relies on fundamental insights  How to waste time and money doing applied research The piece of science I found most interesting was the figure below which shows how the calculated self-diffusion constant D of small hydrocarbons in a zeolitic imidazolate framework varies with the size of the hydrocarbon molecule. Note how D varies over 14 orders of magnitude. Some of the

This past semester I have been supervising two undergraduate research projects. One student is doing a one semester course (1/4 of the students load) for a third year student. The second student has a year long project for a fourth year student (1/2 of their load). I am very happy with how both have gone in terms of their educational value. The amount of research results is of secondary importance to me. Previously, I posted about possible ingredients for a good undergrad project.  Both students are working on a simple model for hydrogen bonds. I recommend this because it has an "easy" learning curve and so they can start "doing science" quick. It also has a nice mix of theory and experiment, chemistry and physics. Things that struck me as particularly valuable include the following very basic things. Some of which relate to basic but important skills. Seeing calculations to completion.  In an undergrad problem set or exam the student has limited time and gets