Condensed concepts

Every now and then I have to review a lot of CVs. What is increasingly striking is the sheer quantity of "line items": papers, grants, citations, talks, seminars, Ph.Ds supervised, public outreach activities, referee activities, committee service, conference organisation, ..... Sometimes teaching, particularly of undergraduates, is almost an afterthought. One concern is the difficulty of evaluating the quality of this hyperactivity. This is why metrics are so seductive , particularly to the non-expert. But even if you want to give some weight to numbers of papers, journal "quality", total research funding, ... I think they are quite hard to interpret. In some research areas,  papers often have ten authors, and so it is very difficult to know an individual's contribution, even if they are first or last author. I increasingly encounter statements such as "Since I became a faculty member ten years ago I have attracted $7M of external funding". Thi

Some of my colleagues and I have started an interesting discussion about how to teach quantum theory to undergraduates. We have courses in the second, third, and fourth years. The three courses have independently evolved, depending on who teaches each. Some material gets repeated and other "important" topics get left out. One concern is that students seem to not "learn" what is in the curriculum for the previous year. The goal is to have a cohesive curriculum. This might be facilitated by using the same text for both the second and third-year courses. This has stimulated me to raise some questions and give my tentative answers. I hope the post will stimulate lots of comments. The problem that students don’t seem to learn what they should have in pre-requisite courses is true not just for quantum. I encounter second-year students who can’t do calculus and fourth-year (honours) students who can’t sketch a graph of a function or put numbers in a formula and get the

Like most faculty I have to evaluate the scientific "performance" and "potential" of applicants for jobs, promotion, prizes, and grants. This is a difficult task because we are often asked to evaluate people who we don't know, are unfamiliar with their work in our (somewhat related) field of expertise, or are working in completely different fields we know nothing about. For example, I have been on a committee where I had the ridiculous task of evaluating people in fields such as veterinary medicine, geography, and agriculture! This is one reason why metrics are so seductive and deceptive. Here I want to focus on evaluating applicants who work in an area that is close enough to my own expertise, according to the following criteria. I can read one of their papers and make a reasonably informed assessment of its value, significance, and validity. This is important because it is easy to loose sight of the fact that there is only ONE measure that really matters : t

Trump's election win surprised many, including me. Most people underestimated the level of resentment towards "elites" and the "establishment", particularly among working class white voters. This was also a factor in Brexit. This post is about how scientists and university faculty might engage more effectively with such groups. Some of the concerns I have are similar to those I have about Marching for Science. Over the past six months I have read some articles and had some interesting conversations with people in both the USA and Australia, who either voted for Trump or would have. What surprised and shocked me was, even among some ``well educated'' people, was the level of distrust and resentment towards the "elites" ? [``You should not believe anything in the New York Times... Trump is telling the truth about crime statistics... We aren't safe.. All these liberals had it coming....''] I also found helpful the book,  Hillbilly

I struggle to set good exam questions. One wants to test knowledge and understanding in a way that is realistic within the constraints of students abilities and backgrounds. I do not have a well-defined philosophy or approach, except for often recycling my old questions... I think I do have a prejudice towards two goals. A. Testing higher level skills [e.g. relating theory to experiment, putting things in context, ...] as much as specific technical knowledge [e.g. state Bloch's theorem or solve the Schrodinger equation for a charged particle in constant magnetic field]. B. Testing general and useful knowledge. For basic undergraduate courses [e.g. years 1 to 3] the question should be one that another faculty member could do, even if they have not taught the course. Sometimes, colleagues write questions that I cannot do. You have to have done the problem before, e.g. in a tutorial. We seeming to be testing whether someone has done this course, not "essential" knowle

At UQ there is a great  student physics club, PAIN . Today they are having a session on "crackpot" theories in science. Rather than picking on sincere but misguided amateurs I thought I would have a go at "mainstream" scientists who should know better. Here are my slides on quantum biology. A more detailed and serious talk is a colloquium that I gave six years ago . I regret that the skepticism I expressed then seems to have been justified. Postscript. I really enjoyed this session with the students. Several gave interesting and stimulating talks, covering topics such as flat earth, last thursdayism , and The Final Theory of gravity [objects don't fall to the earth but rather the earth rises up to them...]. There were good discussions about falsifiability, Occam's razor, Newton's flaming laser sword , ... There was an interesting mixture of history, philosophy, humour, and real physics. I always find to encouraging to encounter students who a

My recent post, Computational Quantum Chemistry in a nutshell , was quite popular. There are two distinct approaches to computational approaches: those based on calculating the wavefunction, which I described in that post, and those based on calculating the local charge density [one particle density matrix of the many-body system]. Here I describe the latter which is based on density functional theory (DFT). Here are the steps and choices one makes. First, as for wave-function based methods, one assumes the Born-Oppenheimer approximation , where the atomic nuclei are treated classically and the electrons quantum mechanically. Next, one makes use of the famous (and profound) Hohenberg-Kohn theorem which says that the total energy of the ground state of a many-body system is a unique functional of the local electronic charge density, E[n(r)]. This means that if one can calculate the local density n(r) one can calculate the total energy of the ground state of the system. Although th