The Sommerfeld-Dirac Paradox Reexamined

This talk will be presented at the APS Global Physics Summit on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 03:15 PM.

My Year in Review 2011

Some days I wonder if I ever actually accomplish anything anymore. Maybe it's time to just pack it in and become a greeter at Walmart. I know a bit about how queues work, so that should put me a few notches ahead of the competition. And I would expect the competition to be fierce because it's a pretty cushy job; but not every day, apparently.

Before taking the big leap, I decided it might be a good idea to note down some of the technical projects I've worked on this year (over and above the daily grind):

Quantum Camera Cited in HP Labs Annual Report

The joint work we published last year on quantum information processing, in New Journal of Physics and Optics Express, has been cited on p. 29 of the 2009 HP Labs Annual Report.

SPAD Quantum Camera: The Owner's Manual

For those of you following my travails in quantum information processing, our most recent work just appeared in the prestigious open-access journal Optics Express, published by the Optical Society of America, under the title: "On The Application Of A Monolithic Array For Detecting Intensity-Correlated Photons Emitted By Different Source Types." (PDF)

New Quantum Camera

Information is physical because it takes energy to create it and transform it. Instead of the digital bits that you're used to thinking about in the terrestrial computing world, quantum information technologies (QIT) involve encoding information as quantum bits or qubits. The photon has turned out to be a very amenable quantum particle for encoding qubits. For anyone following my progress in the world of QIT, here's the latest. Our invited paper: "A Quantum Imager for Intensity Correlated Photons," which describes a new type of camera has now been published in the European open-access publication New Journal of Physics.

The Woolliness of the Wild Wild Web

WWW is the acronym for World Wide Web, but it more often seems to stand for the Wild and Woolly Web.

Call me old-fashioned, but one of things the drives me up the wall about publication on the web in general, and technical expositions in particular, is the lack of both time-stamps and citations. These two things have existed in the scientific media even before formal journal publication. For example, 17th century scientists like Newton and Hooke, wrote missives to each other and it was convention then, as it is today, to commence a letter with the date. That's how we know that Hooke was very close to coming up with the law of gravitation that is now attributed to Newton (also aided by the latter meticulously eliding all reference to Hooke after the first edition of The Principia). Could we know those things today if they had been using the Web? It's not clear. It depends. And that's the problem; lack of consistency and a lack web tools to enforce consistency.