Blog Posts

2022

2022-07-01 00:00:00 +0000
Optics in Homogeneous Coordinates, Coordinate Tranformations
Last time we added an extra row and column to our ABCD matrices. What can we do with these?
category: research, tags: optics
2022-05-20 00:00:00 +0000
Optics in Homogeneous Coordinates, Introduction
I introduce the homogeneous representation of rays and extend the ABCD matrices to include rotations and translations (properly!).
category: research, tags: optics
2022-03-15 00:00:00 +0000
Our New Master's Program
I discuss how we built our new Professional Master's in Applied Physics program at Duquesne.
category: teaching, tags: masters,planning

2019

2019-11-20 00:00:00 +0000
A student caught me studying
A student caught me studying, so I had to explain my teaching philosophy.
category: teaching, tags: preparation,philosophy
2019-03-29 00:00:00 +0000
Time Travel Lecture
I gave a fun talk to Eric Vogelstein's *Philosophy of Star Trek* class about time travel.
category: teaching, tags: relativity,quantummechanics
2019-03-19 00:00:00 +0000
New Paper! Generating quasicrystal optical potentials
We recently published a paper about how we are generating the quasicrystal optical potentials for our ultracold atom experiment.
category: news, tags: optics
2019-01-10 00:00:00 +0000
Geometric Algebra - beyond vectors
I stumbled onto the topic of Geometric Algebra (Clifford Algebra) a while back. Does it help us understand physics?
category: math, tags: reading
2019-01-03 00:00:00 +0000
Visiting the FELIX Free Electron Laser
I visited the FELIX Free Electron Laser facility at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, to do some spectroscopy experiments with Mike Van Stipdonk.
category: research, tags: irmpd

2018

2018-12-04 00:00:00 +0000
Hug a math professor!
A brief meeting with a math colleague opened both of our eyes about helping our students.
category: teaching, tags: math,collaboration
2018-11-06 00:00:00 +0000
Thoughts on the graduate admissions process
The DAMOP session on graduate admissions was enlightening and disheartening. Best practices are not being followed by schools or by students. I'll discuss a little of what I learned here.
category: teaching, tags: DAMOP,conference,grad-school
2018-05-31 00:00:00 +0000
DAMOP, Part 1 - Navigating a conference
Instead of describing the science I'm seeing this week at the DAMOP meeting, I decided to do a couple of meta posts on conferences in general. This first one discusses what happens at a science conference and what to do while you're there.
category: research, tags: DAMOP,conferences,meta
2018-05-27 00:00:00 +0000
DAMOP 2018 prelude
Preview of the 2018 DAMOP conference.
category: news, tags: conferences
2018-05-11 00:00:00 +0000
Mr. Adam Clock, please report to the ticket counter.
I'm still amazed that we can measure relativity in such a simple way as putting clocks on airplanes.
category: teaching, tags: relativity,atomicclocks
2018-04-24 00:00:00 +0000
Quantum State Guessing Game
For a couple of years I've been polishing up a classroom activity to demonstrate how quantum measurements work on a simple qubit system. Here I'd like to summarize the game in simple terms for non-experts.
category: teaching, tags: quantummechanics,quantumgame
2018-04-19 00:00:00 +0000
Lead in Drinking Water, Part 2 (Ethics)
Before I describe how we measure lead in drinking water, I want to discuss some of the new (to me) meta issues associated with this project. A lot of these things are uncommon for physics research, but will be familiar to folks in biology or medicine. I am a rank amateur on these issues, so consider this an imperfect discussion by someone still finding his way.
category: research, tags: lead,ethics,IRB
2018-04-02 00:00:00 +0000
Use a French press coffee pot backwards
I found a different way of using a french press coffee pot that keeps the coffee from getting bitter if you don't drink it right away.
category: fun, tags: coffee
2018-03-08 00:00:00 +0000
Lead in Drinking Water, Part 1 (Background)
One of my major research projects is building an inexpensive handheld device for measuring the amount of lead in drinking water. This is the first of several planned posts on the project. Today, I'd like to introduce the problem we're trying to solve and talk particularly about lead in Pittsburgh's drinking water.
category: research, tags: lead
2018-03-01 00:00:00 +0000
Reading List, March 2018
I read a lot. It's probably my biggest hobby. Here's what's sitting on my desk or in my ebook right now.
category: fun, tags: reading
2018-02-15 00:00:00 +0000
Simple eye test without fancy equipment
Most of us are familiar with the refraction exam done by optometrists to determine our eyeglass prescription. Here's a different method without the fancy equipment. The only tool we need is a tape measure and an object to look at, like a chart or point-source of light like an LED.
category: teaching, tags: optics
2018-02-13 00:00:00 +0000
Welcome
Welcome to my new website and blog.
category: news, tags: meta