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Articles by Dahn Ryan
Q&A: Nergis Mavalvala, MIT sciences dean and longtime LIGO physicist
“Don’t do it; it’s maverick science.” That’s how Nergis Mavalvala’s fellow graduate students at MIT in the 1990s reacted to her interest in trying to observe gravitational waves. She ignored their advice and became an early participant in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an international project started by scientists at MIT and Caltech.
Q&A: Sean Gourley applies AI to war and shopping
“We are in a crucial battle over whether the US keeps its military advantage,” says Sean Gourley. “The consequences are immense. It’s an arms race with artificial intelligence.” For his 2006 PhD in physics at the University of Oxford in the UK, the New Zealand native applied artificial intelligence to the dynamics of insurgencies. The work was “on the fringes of the physics mainstream,” Gourley says, and journals where he submitted his work told him it was political science.
Q&A: Bimla Buti on plasma physics and shrinking the gender gap
Bimla Buti’s mentors were her father, Bodh Raj, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. In India when she was growing up, her father encouraged her to pursue her interest in math and science, and in the US, Chandrasekhar, her PhD adviser—who later was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics—became a lifelong guide. Bimla Buti in the early 1980s.
Q&A: Willy Fischler, theorist and flight paramedic
Physicist and flight paramedic Willy Fischler (left) and flight nurse Andrew Branco. Credit: Mark Jones About 15 years ago, theoretical physicist Willy Fischler revisited his lifelong interest in medicine. In 2009, at age 60, he earned certification as a paramedic, and last summer he became a flight paramedic. Fischler continues to supervise graduate students and do research at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, where he has been on the physics faculty since 1983.
The year in reviews: Books and more that stood out in 2021
Credits (clockwise from top left): Netflix, Belknap Press, My Nuclear Life, U. Chicago Press, W. W. Norton, Basic Books, and Scribner Who doesn’t love sipping a hot chocolate (or a hot toddy!) while curled up with a good physics-related book over the holidays? Here are five books reviewed this year in Physics Today that would make excellent holiday gifts for friends and family—or for yourself.
Q&A: R. Shankar on the beauty of condensed-matter physics
Yale University’s R. Shankar is known among his colleagues for his contributions to field theory in both particle and condensed-matter physics. Students around the world, however, know him from his freely available Open Yale lectures on YouTube, where the energetic theorist breaks down concepts from Newton’s laws of motion to quantum mechanics with clarity and humor.
Q&A: Virginia Trimble on 50-plus years in astronomy
Virginia Trimble stumbled into astronomy. Archaeology, her field of choice, wasn’t offered to undergraduates at UCLA. She had to declare a major, she says, and “my father informed me that I’d always been interested in astronomy.” Trimble earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and physics in 1964 and then a PhD in 1968 at Caltech, where she was among the first female students. She recalls being only the second woman who was assigned observing time at Palomar Observatory, in 1965.
Q&A: Clifford Johnson on humanizing Einstein
National Geographic’s Genius, a drama about the life and work of Albert Einstein, concludes on 20 June with a two-hour finale. The last episodes of the series find Einstein living and working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Despite the bucolic setting, troubles abound for the great physicist. His wife, Elsa, is ill; his relationship with his son Hans is in tatters; and his search for a unified field theory has stalled.
Q&A: A. Zee on explaining physics to any audience
Books on group theory, the branch of mathematics dealing with the properties of sets, have long struggled to find a balance between mathematical theory and physical insight, says theoretical physicist Piet Van Isacker in the January issue of Physics Today. Luckily for physicists, there is now a book that provides both: A.
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