Condensed concepts

I just finished preparing my undergraduate lecture on the Debye model for solids.

Last week I enjoyed following the Nobel Prize announcements in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry.

This week Nobel Prizes will be announced.

Science makes assumptions about the nature of the world and the nature of humanity.

I occasionally look at Google Analytics for my blog in the slim hope it might tell me something about the level and nature of interest (or lack thereof) from my audience.

Here are the slides for an undergraduate lecture I gave today.

I just finished preparing my undergraduate lecture on ideal Fermi gases at zero temperature.

I have been dabbling a little with using AI (at a very basic level) to help me with some research problems.

In two weeks, I am giving two lectures about degenerate Fermi gases in a third-year undergraduate course on statistical mechanics.

My collaborators and I recently posted a preprint Exact mapping from short-ranged harmonic elastic models of spin crossover materials to Ising models with interactions at all length scales Nadeem Natt, Gian Ruzzi, Jace Cruddas, Ross H.

I am retired but still have some involvement with the School of Mathematics at the University of Queensland, in sunny Brisbane, Australia.

Last night, my wife and I watched the movie, Wit.

This semester, I am giving four lectures in a third-year undergraduate course on statistical mechanics.

I am a slow adopter of new technologies.

And why is it so amazing?

A characteristic of emergent phenomena is how novel and complex properties can emerge from apparently simple laws.

Topology is the field of mathematics describing the properties of geometric objects that do not change when they are smoothly deformed.

I continue to enjoy reading my hard copy of The Economist every week.

Quantisation of magnetic flux in a superconductor Magnets and electrical currents produce magnetic fields, regions of space where other magnets and electrical wires experience a mechanical force.

Rudolph Marcus died last week.

In philosophical discussions of emergence and reductionism in chemistry, molecular structure has received significant attention and debate.

On the arXiv, I have posted a new version of my review article, Emergence: from physics to biology, sociology, and computer science.

An example of emergent entities in condensed matter physics are quasiparticles.

The theory of evolution explains the origin of biological diversity and levels of similarity between species.

Every person is unique.

In computational quantum chemistry, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (BOA) is used to determine potential energy surfaces (PES) for electronic states of molecules.

Adventures in Flatland In everyday life we think of most objects as having three dimensions.

Most philosophical debates about the emergence of molecular structure centre around the issue of irreducibility.

The order of things Life and the world around us sometimes appears chaotic and random.

Most debates about the emergence of molecular structure centre around the issue of irreducibility.

Snowflakes form incredibly diverse structures, seen when they condense onto a plate of glass.

In discussions of emergence, particularly in chemistry, isomers are often given as an example of an emergent phenomenon.