Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
Feb 11th, 2011
So it turns out there is an asteroid coming our way in 2029. No worries, though. There is practically zero chance that the asteroid will actually hit Earth. That should be comforting. The problem is, these things eventually come back around, and in 2036 …
Jan 4th, 2011
If I told you that there are giant metal towers in the middle of the desert manipulating the weather to produce rain, then you would ask what science fiction novel was I currently reading. Or, you would wonder whether I had gotten sucked into one of those weird History Channel shows about alien technology. Nope. [...]
Jun 30th, 2008
Uhhgg! The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August. But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists’ wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles [...]
Jun 25th, 2008
Our PR people here at Longwood are pretty good. A few days ago, I mentioned the short blurb about our NSF grant in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. On Monday, the Lynchburg News & Advance listed me among the “Movers and Shakers” in the central Virginia area. My colleagues will probably not be too happy [...]
Jun 17th, 2008
It appears that the press release issued by Longwood concerning the grant I was recently awarded was picked up by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Farmville A Longwood University physics professor and two colleagues from Virginia Commonwealth University recently received a National Science Foundation grant for a research project that could help improve technology for high-density optical [...]
Oct 4th, 2006
John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics for depicting the universe as it was 380,000 years after its birth in the Big Bang. Mather and Smoot were the architects of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer [...]
Jan 14th, 2005
A research team based out of the physics department here at Virginia Commonwealth University (where I call home) has discovered clusters of Aluminum atoms that have chemical properties similar to single atoms of metallic and nonmetallic elements when they react with iodine. This is the first indication of what is being called “Superatom Chemistry.” Rather [...]
Nov 14th, 2004
This week I’m attending the American Vacuum Society’s (AVS) annual conference. More about what that is tommorrow. I just got off the plane. Normally, I would write an interesting article about flight and the Bernoulli Principle, but I’m too tired. Maybe another day. The high point of the flight: on the plane, I sat next [...]