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Dear Physic Community, 

I read a very interesting article on glass today in Quanta Magazine.  Noise from the glass itself is a limiting factor in the performance of the LIGO interferometers and the thinking is the noise comes from impurities forming two-state systems in the glass itself.  Thermal activation causes the systems to flop back and forth – absorbing thermal energy and re-emitting it as thermal energy.  The challenge is to reduce the number of two-state systems in the glass.  However, doing so requires laying the molecules that makeup glass down one at a time…

Physics Department Events

  • Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduate Students with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
  • Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
  • Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
  • Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri

Physics Department

Our colleague David Kaiser has a book, “Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World” dropping today.  Here is an interview he did with Sean Carroll.

Academic Continuity Meeting

Advisories

Zoom cheat sheets from Donna Behmer – quick zoom intros you can send to those who might need it (like your yoga instructor):

MIT Medical – is beginning voluntary testing of students to learn how to monitor a cohort of students at MIT.  A description is here. The Broad will do the analysis.

Next things – working groups are beginning to think about how major declarations and subject evaluations will be handled in this new world we are in.

Revised “Last Supper” – from Ernie Ihloff’s uncle.

Peter

P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here and I have been accumulating useful links that have gone by here. In particular, I am trying to keep a list of MIT policy communications.

Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.