For Fun

Don't miss James Bond's fight to determine the lowest-energy state of consolation in:

...his twenty-second film.

Between "Delta Source"s and "Wedge"-shaped regions, E&M is very Star Wars-y!

I was thinking about teaching and how a teacher generally has to have at least the next higher degree than the students will after finishing the program. The exception to this is for teaching on the doctoral level. This has bothered me for years in a vague way, since it seems very asymmetrical to have the doctoral students being taught by future peers rather than by teachers who will be a degree level above them, in contrast to how it is for all other levels of formal education. Today, I have found a way to reassure myself on this account by a physical analogy. Since pretty much everything can be expanded in a Taylor series in a small enough region, we can model education as a harmonic oscillator for small radii in conversation-space. Further education is associated with stronger binding to academia--that is to say, with a more negative binding energy. The Ph.D. is the ground state. Apply the lowering operator all you want, but you can't get a lower energy.

Yep, that's my daughter Emily, brainwashed with nuclear science at 8 months of age.

...isn't that what experimental science is all about? (Well, that and giant electrical machines.)
 

For your happy Monday morning viewing:

I love the redwings.  The lab has a large international presence and this should help fuel the friendly banter between some of the Europeans.  

I probably shouldn't be as excited about this as I am, but the new website that I designed for the physics dept is up, running, and available to the general public. I liked a different color scheme better, but apparently it was Penn State colors...boo.  MSU green is good too.