A physicist at FEDSM2026

Every once in a while I blog about some conferences that I attended, such as the 2018 Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego, the 2023 American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting in Las Vegas, and the 2024 APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) Meeting in Salt Lake City.  I'm now adding to this series by discussing my attendance at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Fluids Engineering Division (FED) summer meeting (FEDSM) in Bellevue, WA.  FEDSM2026 also celebrates the centennial of the FED, an anniversary I mentioned earlier this year.  For most of the year I wasn't sure if I would be able to attend, but I finally registered in late June.  The conference ran from July 26-29, 2026, and met concurrently with ASME's Summer Heat Transfer Conference (SHTC) and its Energy and Sustainability (ES) Conference.  Attendees were allowed to cross-attend most events in all three meetings, and the reception and two of the lunches were communal among all three.

Bellevue is on the other side of Lake Washington from Seattle, and I flew into SEA-TAC airport on Sunday July 26.  I had been to Bellevue once before, to visit Bellevue Square for dinner with friends.  Bellevue Square was within walking distance of the conference venue.  I had a chance to take a walk through Bellevue's Downtown Park, and nearby Meydenbauer Bay Park that afternoon, before returning to the conference venue (the Hyatt Regency) for the evening reception.  Tragically there was a mass shooting over in Seattle that occurred during the Bite of Seattle event at Seattle Center that very evening.  Those of us at the reception were blissfully unaware of the tragic events that unfolded that evening.

The first regular day of the meeting, Monday the 27th, was the day I was most looking forward to.  It began with an outstanding plenary talk by Prof. Alfred Soldati (TU Wien), on "Bubble and Drop Breakup in Turbulence."  He was also the recipient of this year's ASME Fluids Engineering Award, the division's highest award.  I'll skip ahead and mention the final plenary talk of the meeting, on Wednesday morning the 29th, on "Particles in Liquids:  Collisions, Stress, and the Legacy of R. A. Bagnold" by Prof. Melany Hunt of CalTech. Both of these talks focused on multiphase flows, and were outstanding.  Not only was the research presented extremely interesting, it was presented very well by both speakers.  Unlike some of the routine technical talks, these plenary talks were well organized and easy to follow -- I would even say riveting.  I could imagine either talk being presented at APS-DFD, as they addressed fundamental issues.  My complements to FED for selecting these plenary speakers.

Returning to the first day, Prof. Soldati's keynote was followed by the FEDSM town hall, a sort of annual report on the division.  As this was my first attendance at FEDSM (and only second at an ASME-only conference), I found it very informative.  FEDSM is an annual event, but every four years (including 2027) instead of co-meeting with SHTC and ES, they co-meet with the Japanese and Korean mechanical engineering societies in Asia, at an event known as AJK.  However, FEDSM does sponsor tracks in the SHTC/ES joint meeting back in the states. Finally FEDSM sponsors tracks at the annual international ASME meeting, called the IMECE (International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition).  I also learned that FED sponsors two journals, the Journal of Fluids Engineering and the Journal of Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification.  The current lead editor of JFE is D. Keith Walters of the University of Arkansas, and the current lead editor of VVUQ is Aaron Koskelo of Los Alamos National Labs (who could not attend the conference).  There were at least 260 registrants of the conference, though there were certainly a lot more than that number present, due to the co-meeting with SHTC and ES.  Even so, the combined conference still felt smaller than APS-DFD.  Another sign of this is that there were hardly any exhibitors at this meeting, and no separate exhibit hall.  Rather, the large open space in front of the ballrooms served as the exhibit space (I counted only 3-4 exhibitors) as well as the reception area and the registration area.  The above photo looks down the hall through this space.  The photo below shows part of the hotel lobby, with the ballroom area visible on the second floor.

I was eager to attend the two sessions on Fluids Education, one scheduled before lunch, and one after.  They did not disappoint.  One of the speakers, Prof. Ivana Milanovic of U. Hartford, gave an informative talk on the history of fluids education in the U.S., during the afternoon session. There was also a memorable joint presentation by Profs. Aarthi Sekaran (SUNY Poly) and Sarah Beetham (Oakland U.) on a very crafty experimental flow visualization project they incorporated in their classes.  The morning session had a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that came up in nearly every side-conversation I had, whether at lunch or at the reception.  The morning session keynote by Prof. Ganesh Raman (California State University's assistant vice chancellor for research) described how his university system was implementing AI at university-scale.  The afternoon session ended with a presentation by a very precocious high school student.

Later that afternoon, I attended a memorial session for Frank White, a major figure within the FED (for example, he was once lead editor of JFE), as well as the University of Rhode Island.  He is known worldwide as the author of acclaimed textbooks in fluids and heat transfer.  Finally, I ended the day by attending the Energy and Sustainability Power Hour, which was kind of like a networking/focus group session.  It was quite fun.  Indeed, the networking opportunities here, at the reception, and all three lunches, were an unexpected highlight of the meeting. Because of its smaller size, I interacted with far more attendees on a personal level than I usually do at APS-DFD.

I ended the evening with a very late dinner at Din Tai Fung, which was right across the street from the hotel (shown above), sampling (among other dishes) their famed Xiaolongbao, shown below.

There were so many tempting restaurants in the immediate area, that I felt as if I were missing out on all the places I didn't have the time to try!  This Din Tai Fung was the third I have eaten in, having previously visited the ones in Santa Monica, CA, and Taipei, Taiwan (in the 101 Taipei skyscraper).

I allowed myself to sleep in on the morning of Day 2, having been severely sleep deprived for the previous two nights in a row.  Thus I missed that morning's keynote, which I did not regret, as I observed the speaker take a phone call during someone else's talk later that day.  How rude!  On Day 2, I began flitting in and out of the regular technical sessions, which I continued to do in the late morning of Day 3.  The awards lunch was held on Day 2, and I even got to have a small slice of the FED centennial birthday cake!

Based on the photo of the uncut cake that FED posted on LinkedIn, it appears that my piece captured part of the "E" in ASME, under which was written "Setting the Standard".  So the "AR" is from the end of "Standard".

I attended an afternoon plenary talk by Joseph Katz (Johns Hopkins), like Frank White, a former lead editor of JFE and textbook author.  His talk was titled "Turbulent Boundary Layers over Complex Surfaces" (see below).

I ended Day 2 by attending a panel session at the SHTC on "Modern Insights into Computational Fluid Dynamics".   Unfortunately I could not make much sense of it, as I had missed the panelists' individual presentations because I was at the Katz plenary.  I managed to catch the end of the panel discussion, but it was less useful to me than I had hoped.  That evening I had dinner at Fogo de Chao, the Brazilian steakhouse, within walking distance of the hotel.  On the way there I observed what appeared to be a pro-Ukraine protest on a street corner.  The concierge at my hotel gave me a coupon for a free dessert at Fogo de Chao; here is a shot of my key lime pie:

On Day 3, the day began with a panel session on the "Past, Present, and Future of Fluid Mechanics".  The panelists and their focus were, in order, Professors Ted Heindel (Iowa State University) on experimental fluid mechanics, Zhonquan Zheng (Utah State University) on computational fluid dynamics, and Francine Battaglia (U. of Buffalo) on fluids education.  The moderator was the conference chair, Prof. Ning Zhang (McNeese State U.).

Here are the panelists, conveniently sitting in the order in which they spoke:

The panel session was followed by Prof. Melany Hunt's plenary, which I discussed above.  I then attended a technical session, and joined the third and final lunch.  Unfortunately I had to catch a plane, so I headed back to the airport and missed the Rising Stars plenary session that ended Day 3.  It was perhaps regrettable that I was so busy chatting to folks at my table at the lunches, that I completely missed out on the poster sessions.

Conference papers are already posted on the ASME website, and there is supposed to be a special issue of JFE next August (yes, a year from now) with papers from this year's conference.  However, the division promises to have special centenary articles in forthcoming issues of JFE and Mechanical Engineer magazine later this year.  Finally, unlike with the 2023 APS March Meeting, I used the ASME meeting app without any difficulties at FEDSM2026.  

I would like to add that the meeting hotel, the Hyatt Regency, was very impressive.  Every staff member I interacted with was unfailingly nice and helpful.  They even made special hotel room keys for the conference, which I kept as souvenirs:

This was the first time I've seen a hotel make themed room keys, but I'm sure it won't be the last.  My stay was only marred on the last day by a partial power outage in my tower.

So, what did this physicist think?  I was glad to have attended the once-in-a-lifetime centenary meeting of the FED.  It nourished my soul.  I doubt I will have the means and opportunity to attend either the FEDSM or DFD annual meetings for a very long time, so it was particularly fortunate that I did have the ability to attend this year's centennial FEDSM (being in the western U.S. helps).  As I mentioned in my post on the 2024 DFD, the fluids specialty meetings are probably of lesser interest to me at this stage of my career than a larger meeting like the APS Global Physics Summit (formed form the merger of the March and April meetings).  There was definitely more of a focus on engineering research at FEDSM than I have seen at DFD.  On the other hand, this being a smaller meeting (even accounting for the fact that three different conferences were meeting together) allowed me far more face-to-face networking than I usually do at either APS DFD or the March Meeting.  This, despite that I did not meet a single person that I knew from beforehand.  In summary, I had a great time at FEDSM and in Bellevue, but it's unlikely I'll be able to go to another FEDSM (or DFD) for a very long time.

 

Physicists on US postage stamps: Robert Goddard

Here I am continuing the series of posts on physicists and astronomers on US postage stamps, including the first, second, and third posts, plus one on chemists.  (I have also covered mathematicians in this series.)

In the very first post I mentioned some aviation pioneers also depicted on US postage stamps; among them was Robert Goddard, who appears on an 8 cent airmail stamp issued in 1964.  I just discovered that his Ph.D. was in physics, so he can officially be considered among the physicists so honored!

 

What about chemists on US postage stamps?

In my last post, I mentioned I couldn't think of any chemists on US postage stamps at the time, though I mentioned discovering a stamp for Harvey Washington Wiley.  This was due to ignorance on my part.  To set the record straight, in addition to Wiley:

• In 1940, Charles W. Eliot appeared on a 3 cent stamp in the Famous Americans series. 
• In 1947, Thomas A. Edison appeared on a 3 cent stamp, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.  (His first lamp had been celebrated earlier, on a 2 cent stamp in 1929.) 
• In 1948, George Washington Carver appeared on a 3 cent stamp, in the same format as the 1940 Famous American Scientists issue (which originally featured no physicists, astronomers, chemists, or mathematicians).  He later appeared on a 32 cent stamp issued in 1998, part of the Celebrate the Century - 1910s series.  I believe this gives him the honor of being the only chemist to have appeared on 2 different US postage stamps.
• In 1954, George Eastman appeared on a 3 cent stamp, celebrating his 100th birthday. 
• In 1983, Joseph Priestley appeared on a 20 cent stamp, celebrating his 250th birthday.
• In 1993, Percy Lavon Julian appeared on a 29 cent stamp, in the Black Heritage series. 
• In 2009, Linus Pauling (Nobel laureate in both chemistry and peace) and biochemist Gerti Cori (Nobel laureate in physiology/medicine) both appeared on 41 cent stamps in the American Scientists issue of that year, its second such issue.
• In 2011, Melvin Calvin and biochemist Severo Ochoa, both Nobel laureates (in chemistry and medicine/phyisology, respectively), appeared on Forever stamps in the third and final American Scientists issue. 

Finally, in 1988 a physicist associated with Xerox, Chester Carlson, appeared on a 21 cent stamp in the Great Americans series. I should have mentioned him earlier.

Once again, I'm grateful to the website of the Mystic Stamp Company, as well as stampworld.com, and finally this article:

L. R. Caswell, 1990:  American chemists and physicists on postage stamps.  Journal of Chemical Education, 67 (10):  842-847.

 

 

Physicists and astronomers honored on US postage stamps: another update.

I previously blogged (2021) about physicists and astronomers honored on U.S. postage stamps, with an update last year here.  It's time for another update, not because any new stamps of interest have been issued, but because I have learned of two other stamps that I should have mentioned in my original post, along with a few other notable finds.

First, in 1973, the 500th anniversary year of his birth, Polish astronomer Copernicus appeared on an 8 cent stamp.  He is a major figure in the history of science, and the only one of those mentioned in this series of posts that did not live in the United States at some point during their life.

Second, in 1988, aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley (along with his Aerodrome #5) appeared on a 45 cent airmail stamp.  He was an astronomer, mathematician, and physicist.

While I find it odd that I couldn't think of a single chemist honored on a postage stamp (but see below), the American Chemical Society has twice been so honored:  in a 1951 three-cent stamp celebrating the ACS's diamond jubilee, and a 1976 thirteen-cent stamp celebrating their centenary.  Similarly, the American Society of Civil Engineers was honored on the centenary of its founding with a 3-cent stamp in 1952.  This was preceded by another 3-cent stamp in 1950 honoring the Railroad Engineers of America.  This stamp features "Casey" Jones, and was issued on the 50th anniversary of his death. 

"The Sciences" were honored on a 5-cent stamp in 1963, celebrating the centenary of the founding of the National Academy of Sciences, whose first president was a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin.  In 1983, "Science and Industry" was honored on a 20-cent stamp, issued on the 50th anniversary of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.

In 2018, a set of four Forever stamps were issued in honor of STEM education.  They honored Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Since I've spent time in the pharmaceutical industry, I will also note that in 1956, a 3-cent stamp honoring the 50th anniversary of the Pure Food and Drug Act was issued, which features Harvey Washington Wiley, a major driving force in the passage of that law, and an official at the USDA agency that was a predecessor to the modern Food and Drug Administration.  So, I found at least one chemist after all!

At some point, I hope to find and scrutinize a history of every postage stamp issued by the United States Postal Service, to see if I can find any others of note.

Once again I'm grateful to the website of the Mystic Stamp Company.

On the history of the AMS AOFD conference

In an earlier post celebrating the 100th anniversary of the ASME Fluids Engineering Division, I expressed some confusion about the history of the American Meteorological Society's Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics Conference.  I wondered if it had not always been called by that name.

Indeed, the first Conference on Atmospheric and Oceanic Waves and Stability was held in 1976 in Seattle, WA; with the second in 1978, held in Boston, MA.  The 10th was held in Big Sky, Montana in 1995. For the 11th conference in 1997 in Tacoma, WA, the name changed to the Conference on Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics, a name that has stuck ever since.  I'm not sure at what point the meeting became annual rather than every 2 years.

Anyway, the conference is 50 years old this year, another celebration worthy of note!

 

 

Another note on scientist biography series

Previously I blogged about some biography book series featuring scientists, notably here and here.  The latter post mentioned the Blackwell Science Biographies series that migrated to Cambridge University Press, as well as a more general biography series at Oxford University Press (OUP) called Lives and Legacies, that has featured two physicists, Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin. 

Somehow I neglected to mention in my post on the Cambridge Companions series, that Oxford University Press has an Oxford Handbook of Newton currently in development.  Some of the chapters have been published online, and they look quite promising.

I recently learned of another Blackwell series, Blackwell Great Minds, that currently resides at the publisher Wiley.  Like OUP's Lives and Legacies, it is a very general series not focused on scientists.  However, I know of two scientists who have volumes dedicated to them:  Darwin and Newton.  (There is also a volume on Descartes.)  So it seems among the larger intellectual history culture, Darwin and Newton may be the most consequential scientists.  Both of them are represented in the following series:

• Cambridge Companions.
• Very Short Introductions (OUP).
• Cambridge Science Biographies.
• Oxford Portraits in Science.
• Blackwell Science Biographies (Wiley).

In addition, Newton is represented in the Oxford Handbooks series and the OUP's Lives and Legacies series.  He is even represented in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series!  (So are Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish.)  However the Bloomsbury Handbooks series features only one scientist I know of, Emilie du Chatelet (forthcoming later this month).

The women cited in Lamb's Hydrodynamics

I was skimming through the index of the sixth (and final) edition of Horace Lamb's Hydrodynamics (Cambridge University Press,1932), when I stumbled upon the name of "Miss Fawcett".  Later was a "Miss Swain".  And I also found Sophie Kowalewski, a famous female mathematician (better known as Sofya Kovalevskaya, 1850-1891).  These were the only obviously female names I could find in the index.

Let's start with Kovalevskaya.  I knew she had worked in mathematical physics, primarily because of her work on rigid body dynamics and the "Kovalevskaya top", well discussed in Roger Cooke's book about her mathematics (Springer, 1984, Ch. 7).  However Cooke also discusses (Ch. 4) her reformulation of Laplace's model of the rings of Saturn, a self-gravitating liquid annulus.  It is this 1885 paper that Lamb cites in his Art. 376.  It was published in the Astronomische Nachrichten, 111 (3):  38-48.  The first page is reproduced here:

  

Now, who are Miss Fawcett and Miss Swain?  Both were British mathematicians.

Philippa Garrett Fawcett  (1868-1948) was the first woman to achieve the top score at Cambridge University's Mathematical Tripos examinations.  In 1893 she published "Note on the motion of solids in a liquid" in the Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, 26:  231-258.  Here is the first page:

 

This is the paper cited by Lamb in his Art. 130.

Finally Lorna Mary Swain (1891-1936) is another Cambridge grad, who has two papers cited in Lamb's Hydrodynamics.  The first is a 1915  joint paper with Lamb himself, "On a tidal problem", The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, series 6, 29 (174):  737-744.  (Lamb did not insert his own name into his book's name index.)  Here is the first page of the Lamb and Swain paper:

 

The second is a 1923 paper with Arthur Berry, "On the steady motion of a cylinder through infinite viscous fluid", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A,102 (719):  776-778.  Lamb cites this in his Art. 339.  Here is what the first page looks like.

 

I find it interesting that both Miss Fawcett and Miss Swain are referred to as such in both the journal articles themselves, and Lamb's book.  

Lamb's monograph is probably the oldest of the "classic" fluid mechanics texts that can still be found on researchers' bookshelves today, thanks to a Cambridge Mathematical Library reprint edition. So it is notable that at least 4 papers by at least 3 female authors/coauthors were cited even in the venerable Lamb.  I also found Ben Franklin in the index as well!

 

 

 

Physicists and astronomers honored on US postage stamps - Update!

Continuing the theme of my last post, let me call back a post from 2021, where I blogged about physicists and astronomers depicted on US postage stamps.  Back then I counted about a dozen such, and I conjectured about possible future honorees.  Top of my list among the latter was Nikola Tesla.  Well, this was an oversight on my part, as Tesla was indeed depicted on a 20 cent stamp in the American Inventors series, issued in 1983.  Also depicted on the same stamp is his induction motor.

I am grateful to this list for helping me identify Tesla's stamp. The list has a number of notable foreign stamps as well, but it is incomplete.  For example, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, American Nobel laureates in physics, David Wineland and Daniel Schechtman (both affiliated with NIST), are depicted on foreign postage stamps.

 

Physicists honored on US currency and coinage - Update!

Back in 2022, I blogged about physicists depicted on US currency and coinage; at the time I could only identify two (Ben Franklin and Dr. Sally Ride). Further I stated that I knew of no other scientists, engineers, or mathematicians so depicted, unless we count the polymathic Thomas Jefferson.

I am pleased to see that this year (2025), the American Women Quarters series has added a quarter for Dr. Vera Rubin, a central figure in the discovery of the "dark matter" problem.  This now makes a total of 3 physicists, one male on currency, and two female on coinage.  It is noted that Dr. Ride is the first known LGBT+ person, and Dr. Rubin the first Jewish person, depicted on US money.

Regarding engineers, I should have mentioned in my earlier post that President Herbert Hoover ($1 coin issued in 2014) was a mining engineer.  President Jimmy Carter was also an engineer by training (nuclear engineer in the Navy), but no coin for him has yet been issued.  He is presently the only deceased president for whom a $1 coin has not yet been issued).

Am I missing any others?

 

Bad philosophy or just an urge for glory?

I haven't read many of Carlo Rovelli's works, but I did enjoy an essay he published this month in Nature.  "There is a healthy sense of crisis in fundamental physics" he says, but he is dismayed by commonly seen demands for physics "beyond" the standard model, conventional quantum theory, and general relativity.  He thinks this is because of "bad philosophy" or mis-readings of philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Popper, who he claims are understood to endorse radical "overthrows" of existing theories and treating all speculative theories equally seriously until they've been falsified.  He argues that previous "paradigm shifts" are actually more "conservative" than commonly understood, and that despite this, radical new theories are driven primarily by confronting data not currently understood, as well as apparent contradictions among different pieces of knowledge.

It is a good and thought-provoking essay.  I basically agree with his point that the history of science is far more methodologically valuable to study than philosophy of science.  However I surmise that he's overthought the explanation for the craze for "physics beyond the standard model" (such as supersymmetry and string theory).  I think the more radical alternatives just have greater potential for scientific glory than more "conservative" approaches (such as loop quantum gravity, a field he worked in and seems to think is a "proof of concept" for an approach more closely tied to existing quantum theory and gravitational theories, though he points out some of its "radical" features).  Thus, the appeal of following the wilder approaches is the chance to attain heroic status.

I haven't summarized Rovelli's essay very eloquently; he writes very well and I recommend reading it.  Even though his should not be the final word (I'm certainly not convinced that the wilder speculative theories should be completely abandoned) but it's a good counterpoint to much of what we read, especially in accounts of popular physics.

My reading in physics biographies

My last post mentioned that I read a biography of C.-S. Wu earlier this year.  This has been part of a larger effort to start reading the biographies of notable physicists, which I began in the summer of 2023, after watching Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film.  So far, here are the substantial biographies I've made it through, in chronological order:

• Robert Oppenheimer:  A Life Inside the Center, by Ray Monk (Doubleday, 2012).

• Galileo: Decisive Innovator, by Michael Sharratt (Blackwell, 1994).
  
• Einstein:  His Life and Universe, by Water Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
• Jean D'Alembert:  Science and the Enlightenment, by Thomas L. Hankins (Oxford University Press, 1970).
• The Man Who Changed Everything:  The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by Basil Mahon (Wiley, 2004).
• Madame Wu Chien-Shiung:  The First Lady of Physics Research, by Chiang Tsai-Chien (World Scientific, 2014).

In addition, I read the following short biographies, again in chronological order:

• Isaac Newton, by James Gleick (Pantheon, 2003).
  
• Michael Faraday:  A Very Short Introduction, by Frank James (Oxford University Press, 2010).

• Niels Bohr:  A Very Short Introduction, by J. L. Heilbron (Oxford University Press, 2020).

The Bohr book was the only one so far that I've been disappointed with.

In earlier years, I've read other biographies of physicists; the ones I can remember include:

• Degrees Kelvin:  A Tale of Genius and Invention, by David Lindley (Joseph Henry Press, 2004).
• True Genius:  The Life and Science of John Bardeen, The Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics, by Vicki Daitch and Lillian Hoddeson (Joseph Henry Press, 2002). 

I've also read the autobiographies of Max Planck and physicist-turned-quant, Emanuel Derman.

Future ambitions include tackling substantial biographies of Planck, and more on Galileo, Newton, and Maxwell.   In addition I'd like to add biographies of Leonhard Euler, A.-L. Cauchy, Lord Rayleigh, J. W. Gibbs, Lise Meitner, R.P. Feynman, and P. W. Anderson.  And ultimately I'd like to include 20th century fluid dynamicists; there exist biographies of Ludwig Prandtl, G. I. Taylor, and James Lighthill, and an autobiography of Theodore von Karman, though realistically I may only get to Prandtl and Taylor.  (I have read Iris Chang's Thread of the Silkworm, on H.S. Tsien, which I would strongly recommend.)

 

Chien-Shiung Wu

This month's issue of Physics Today features Chinese-American nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu on its cover:

I was delighted to see this cover.  The article by Kam, Zhang, and Feng inside discusses Wu's "trailblazing experiments in particle physics".  Best known is her experiment confirming parity violation, which earned the theorists who proposed it, C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, a Nobel Prize in 1957.  Many (including Yang himself) have commented that Wu should have been a co-recipient of that prize.

The authors go on to make the case that Wu's late 1949 experiment, which they say was "the first conclusive verification of photon entanglement", may also have been Nobel-worthy, given the 2022 Nobel Prize awarded to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for their work on photon entanglement and the violation of Bell's inequalities".  However, during Wu's lifetime (and well beyond, until quantum information science emerged as a viable discipline in the last decade or two) this field of physics was considered peripheral.  It is only now, in retrospect, that the importance of the work of Wu and others is being fully acknowledged.  Perhaps most unjust of all, John Stuart Bell himself should be recognized as a physicist who should have (but didn't) receive a Nobel Prize.

Earlier this year, I read a biography of Wu by Chiang Tsai-Chien, Madame Wu Chien-Shiung:  The First Lady of Physics Research (World Scientific, 2014), so Wu has been on my mind recently.  I previously blogged about her when the US Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor in 2021, and more recently in my post about the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas last year, where I attended a talk by Michelle Frank about Wu.  Frank has called attention to Wu's work on quantum entanglement in a Scientific American article in April of that year.  Wu's granddaughter, Jada Yuan, published a lovely article about her grandma in the Washington Post in 2021.  The online biographies of Frank and Yuan suggest that they are both at work on biographies of C.-S. Wu.  I think both books would be most welcome.  The Chiang biography, despite its many strengths, leaves much to be desired, and Wu deserves a more substantial biography.  She should be considered one of the titans of 20th century experimental physics.

 

Fluid Dynamics in Salt Lake City

I have blogged previously about attending the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego (2018) for the first (and so far only) time, and the APS March Meeting in Las Vegas (2023), my fourth time attending that meeting.  I don't typically blog about the conferences I attend, but it behooves me to post today about one more, the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics annual meeting, which took place last week (Nov. 24-26) in Salt Lake City.  This is because fluid dynamics has been a central part of my scientific career, as well as a cornerstone of this blog.  Indeed, the Salt Lake City meeting was my sixth DFD.  My previous five have all been after I left graduate school:

• 2003:  Meadowlands, NJ.
• 2005:  Chicago, IL
• 2009:  Minneapolis, MN
• 2012:  San Diego, CA
• 2014:  San Francisco, CA

As can be seen, I had not attended DFD in exactly a decade.  Partly this is because I decided at the 2014 meeting that the APS March Meeting was probably of greater interest to me than a conference specialized in fluid mechanics, especially since the March Meeting had plenty of fluids sessions itself.  However, the March Meeting tends to be attended by physicists who do fluids; while DFD is dominated by engineers, applied mathematicians, and various Earth & planetary scientists who do fluids -- a much better representative group of this discipline. However I have found in my latter years that my interests in fluid mechanics tends towards historical, pedagogical, and foundational issues, rather than the cutting edge of research, which is what DFD showcases.  Nonetheless, attending DFD once a decade, while attending the March Meeting more often, may be quite appropriate in order to nourish my intellectual interests in physics and fluid mechanics.

Anyhow, this year's DFD was held at the Salt Palace convention center in downtown Salt Lake City.

The West Temple entrance to the Salt Palace Convention Center

I arrived on Saturday evening Nov. 23 to pick up my badge, but through a different entrance where a cheer-leading competition was taking place!  There was glitter all over the carpet, and children practicing their routines in the hallway.  I ran into a colleague in the hallway who must have seen my utterly bewildered expression, and he kindly directed me towards the DFD registration area.  Here is a shot of that part of the convention center at a calmer moment.

The DFD registration area at the Salt Palace Convention Center, as seen from near the West Temple entrance.

The meeting got going promptly at 8am Sunday morning, while the evening reception ran well into the night.  I don't think I headed back to my hotel until around 9pm that night, despite having forgotten that I had been given two free drink tickets for the reception.  (Thus I never used those tickets.)  The second morning session on Sunday featured a new "Interact" poster session, which began with one-minute flash talks by each poster presenter, followed by time for the audience to speak with the poster presenters one-on-one.  I attended the session on Rayleigh-Benard convection, which was graced by two top figures in the field:  Robert Ecke and K. R. Sreenivasan.  Unfortunately the latter's poster consisted of printouts of a recent paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and the author did not stay very long, as I'm sure he had other people's posters in other sessions that he wanted to see.  Logistically, the flash talk portion of the session was difficult to execute gracefully, despite everyone's best efforts.  I'm not sure if this was much of an improvement over a regular poster session.

Hall C, where many of the plenary events, including the awards session, took place.

After lunch, the awards session took place in Hall C, presided over by this year's DFD chair, Peko Hosoi of MIT.  The reception, which was not a full scale banquet, took place in the exhibit hall (Hall A) at 7pm.

Entrance to Hall A, the exhibit area.

In the previous 5 DFD meetings, the reception included a real banquet.  Most memorable for me were the receptions for the 2003 and 2012 DFD meetings.  In 2003, the reception was held at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park of New York City.  Buses were provided to take us there.  I recall having conversations with Stephen W. Morris and (more briefly) Troy Shinbrot there.  At dinner I was seated with a professor and his wife, of Eastern European origin, whose names I cannot recall.  I remember the conversation turning toward the professor's son, who had pursued a non-lucrative career in avant-garde film-making.  Alas, the good professor appears to have been incredibly disappointed with his son's career choice.  He seemed to praise my contrasting choice to pursue a scientific career, albeit not one centered in academia, and not even closely related to fluid dynamics.  At the 2012 DFD reception, I befriended a French post-doc, and after dinner we went for a long walk along the marina, almost reaching the U.S.S. Midway, before turning back.  The post-doc had once worked for a technology start up, but their product, while technically quite innovative, provided only a marginal practical improvement over its existing competitors, and customers found it difficult to justify the cost (not just financial, but in requiring specialized training) to use the product.  It was a sound lesson in scientific entrepreneurship.  Eventually I began peppering him with questions about French politics and culture (this was the era of the presidencies of Monsieurs Sarkozy and Hollande).

Alas at this year's reception, I didn't have any interesting conversations at all.  I have also noticed across several conferences that I've attended this year that there are fewer exhibitors, especially book exhibitors.  Here, only SIAM and Cambridge University Press were purveying books (the latter was also promoting the Journal of Fluid Mechanics), while AIP Publishing and APS' Physical Review Fluids were hawking their journals.  I placed an order for two books with SIAM, and picked up a book (60% discount with reservation if picked up on site) from Cambridge, Joseph Powers' Mechanics of Fluids, which look to be very promising.  After returning home I placed an additional order for more Cambridge books, using the meeting 30% discount code.  I've felt for over a decade that they are the lead publisher in fluid mechanics, and I am pleased that they have not yet abandoned the conference circuit, though they may be feeling less and less competition these days.  JFM was celebrating its 1000th volume, and a commemorative brochure was distributed at the conference, which I think will be a lovely keepsake.  However, unlike the previous DFDs I've attended, there was no brochure prepared regarding the Gallery of Fluid Motion entrees.

Monday morning I mainly attended the Education and Outreach session, which featured many talks on in-class lab demos as well as alternatives to traditional textbooks.  I then attended the Fluids Education lunch, which was not clearly described ahead of time.  It turned out to be a panel discussion with lunch provided.  The table I sat at was not very talkative at all, so it wasn't a very social event, unlike the various mixers featured at other conferences I've attended this year.  Monday afternoon featured a poster session.  I zeroed in on one poster that was closely related to my graduate work from over 20 years ago, and while initially the presenters were absent, two of the authors eventually turned up, and I was able to talk to them.  There were also at least two rather controversial posters, which I will not discuss here, as they do not deserve any further attention.  (I am told that an ethics complaint was filed with APS regarding one of them.)

That evening, attendees were invited to visit the Leonardo Museum, a few blocks away, which currently has a major exhibit on flight, as well as smaller exhibits on AI, water, and a special exhibit related to the meeting, the Traveling Gallery of Fluid Motion (TGFM).  This is the second year of the TGFM, and this year's exhibit is titled "Spiraling Upwards".  For an additional $15, we could attend a private reception welcoming the TGFM, where the artists (one was a real artist, the others were DFD researchers) each gave a few words about their works.

The Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City.

The Leonardo Museum was quite an appropriate venue for this event, as Leonardo DaVinci, its namesake, was a keen observer of fluid motion, and he rediscovered what we call the hydraulic continuity equation, a precursor of the mass balance principle in modern fluid dynamics.

I attended additional sessions on Tuesday, though I took a long lunch break to enjoy pho at a busy downtown eatery called Tamarind, which I highly recommend!

I've been away from physics and fluid mechanics for over two decades, so unlike conferences in my current field, where I constantly run into people I know, I am very much an outsider at the March Meeting and DFD conferences.  Indeed, I met only 3 people that I knew from before at this year's DFD, though I intend to reach out to a few others whom I met there and have some professional interests with.

The 2024 Nobel Prizes in science

DTLR cannot resist opining on this year's Nobel science prizes laureates, especially when several of the non-physics laureates have physics connections, while one of the physics laureates does not.

One of the two laureates for physiology or medicine is Gary Ruvkun, whose bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees are in biophysics.  One of the three laureates for chemistry, David Baker, had done a postdoc in biophysics.  He currently has an adjunct appointment in the physics department at his university, along with four other departments aside from his home department.  A second chemistry laureate, John Jumper, had done a bachelor's degree in physics and math, and a master's in theoretical condensed matter physics, before earning a second master's and a Ph.D. both in theoretical chemistry.

It is perhaps also notable that David Baker's father was a physicist and his mother was a geophysicist.  One of the physics laureates, John Hopfield, also had two physicist parents.  

Artificial intelligence was the center of this year's physics and chemistry awards.  Two of the three chemistry laureates were awarded for AI-based protein structure prediction, for their work with AlphaFold, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.  There is little doubt that this achievement belongs to biological chemistry.  I was pleased to see a share of the award go to employees of a private sector company instead of a university, not something that happens often nowadays.

The physics prize, however, has been extremely controversial, in many cases sparking outrage and cynicism, among both physicists and non-physicists.

Let's start with the laureates themselves before discussing their achievements.  A number of commentators, including some who should know better (e.g., Sabine Hossenfelder) falsely claim that the award was not given to physicists, but to computer scientists.  This is only half true.  One of the laureates, Geoffrey Hinton, is not a physicist, by either education or employment.  He is a cognitive scientist and computer scientist.  (Apparently he is also a direct descendent of George Boole!)  The other, John Hopfield, has superb physics bona fides.  His education was in physics, he was a Buckley Prize winner for his contributions to condensed matter physics, and he is probably the greatest living biological physicist today.  It is true that he is also considered a neuroscientist and a molecular biologist.  In fact, his last academic position before retirement was on the Princeton University molecular biology faculty.  He is a titan of both physics and interdisciplinary science, though the Nobel committee focused on his work on Hopfield Networks, a model of associative memory based on statistical physics (specifically, spin glasses).  He has served as President of the APS.

Unlike many, I celebrate Hopfield's Nobel award.  Geoffrey Hinton is really the puzzle here.  The Nobel committee zeroed in on his stochastic versions of Hopfield Networks, which are called Boltzmann machines.  However, his contributions to neural networks go well beyond that:  he introduced the backpropagation algorithm and later was one of the founders of deep learning methodology.  He is just as much a titan in the neural net community as Hopfield is in the biological physics community.

The history of neural networks is long, and boasts key contributions by a number of individuals.  While Hinton in undoubtedly a key figure in this history, others have also been recognized (including by the Turing award).  Perhaps the key point for the Nobel committee was Hinton's use of statistical physics ideas for the Boltzmann machine. 

There is no doubt that neural networks are used in physics, as in so many other fields of science and engineering.  There is also no doubt that ideas from physics have influenced neural network technology, and machine learning more generally.  But are Hopfield Networks and Boltzmann machines worthy of a Nobel Prize in physics?  This is a question that was hotly debated in the days after the awards were announced.  It seems though, the debate has been lopsided, at least in the sources I've read, with few commentators being willing to defend the Nobel commitee's choice this year.  This award was a huge surprise to nearly everyone who follows the Nobel Prize news every October, including me.  I was even more shocked when the host of the Physics World podcast admitted he had never heard of John Hopfield until the announcement of the prize.

The American Physical Society, in its official new release, decided to get behind the award, but notably emphasized Hopfield as a longtime member of the APS community.  This could be read as a veiled critique of Hinton's award; as far as I know, Hinton's one contribution to the physics literature is a co-authored paper that was published in a physics conference proceedings.

In principle there are several APS units that might choose to celebrate the award to either Hopfield or both Hopfield and Hinton:  the Division of Biological Physics, the Division on Computational Physics, the Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, the Topical Group on Data Science, and the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics.  However, I have seen and heard of few who have actually embraced this year's award.

This is regrettable.  I think Hopfield is deserving of the honor in the sense that James Peebles was in 2019 - a kind of lifetime career recognition.  I'm not ready to render an opinion on Geoffrey Hinton's Nobel Prize in Physics.  We need to take a step back from the knee-jerk, immediate, and highly emotional reactions.  I'm hoping some thoughtful commentators will, in the coming year, weigh in with well considered opinions.  As a physicist who has worked in machine learning (there are now many, many of us), I may choose to view this award as recognition of those working in this interdisciplinary space who actually use physics ideas, regardless of our formal education or employment in physics.

Galileo's Assayer and Torricelli's barometer

A couple months ago, Science magazine had a retrospective by Alex Gomez-Marin on Galileo's The Assayer, which was published 400 years ago this year.  Part of a series of scientific disputes regarding the nature of comets, this particular piece lays out Galileo's methodological perspective on how science should be done.  I've only read selected excerpts in translation, but I do know that others (e.g., Flemish contemporary Simon Stevin) held similar views.

Meanwhile the December issue of Physics Today features a Backscatter item on Torricelli's barometer, by Karina Cooper.  Torricelli was Galileo's last "student", and his work with the barometer was an important step in the understanding of hydrostatic pressure.  Together with Torricelli's efflux law, this achievement ranks him as a major founder of 17th century fluid mechanics, along with Stevin and Galileo's older student, Benedetto Castelli.

My interest in these matters, and the history of classical physics more generaly, has grown noticeably in the last year or so, particularly in the arena of fluid mechanics, which is an interdisciplinary field involving physics, mathematics, and engineering.  Seeing these items in Science and Physics Today is a great way to wind down the year of 2023.  

 As a bonus I praise Physics Today for featuring a cover story in November on research in contemporary fluid mechanics, namely the piece by Detlef Lohse and Olga Shishkina on "Ultimate turbulent thermal convection".  However, the authors' insistence on the relevance of the reported work for real world situations, such as atmospheric and photospheric convection, seems to me insincere when they focus on results for "classical regime" aspect ratios between 0.5 and 1.0.  The atmospheric and photospheric examples involve large aspect ratios.

Nonetheless, the cover is worth reproducing here.  We don't get to see fluid mechanics featured on the front cover of Physics Today all that often!

If I don't write again this year, may you all have a wonderful holiday season and a blessed new year.  See you in 2024!

Scientist Biography Series, some notes

Almost two years ago, I had a post on some scientist biography series published by various university presses.  I'd like to provide a few miscellaneous notes on that post.  

First, the Cambridge University Press series, Cambridge Science Biographies, was originally published by Blackwell and called the Blackwell Science Biographies.  I recently acquired used copies of the volumes on Galileo and Newton, two of the three in the series devoted to physicists (I am missing the volume for Ampere).  My copy of the Galileo volume (by the late Father Michael Sharratt) is from the Blackwell era, while my copy of the Newton volume (by the late A. Rupert Hall) is from the Cambridge era.

Turning to their rival, Oxford University Press, I discovered a more general biography series of theirs called Lives and Legacies.  I see that there are ten volumes in the series, only two of which are dedicated to scientists.  One is Isaac Newton, and the other is Ben Franklin.  To the extent that Franklin was a scientist, he was a physicist, so it is notable that the only 2 scientists in the series are physicists.

The 2023 Nobel Prizes

Following the announcements of the Nobel Prizes this past week has been quite thrilling.  While I won't comment on the literature and economics prizes, one surprise (to me) is that this year's Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned, was a physics major in college, and onetime professional engineer.  She has previously been awarded the Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society.  Physics World notes that she is the third physicist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after Andrei Sakharov himself, and Joseph Rotblat.

The physiology or medicine prize to K. Kariko and D. Weissman for "nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19" was particularly delightful.  Reading of Kariko's professional struggles and marginalization, while managing to raise an Olympic Gold-Medalist daughter, provides yet another critique of conventional academic culture, groupthink, and incentive structures.  Both laureates labeled in the scientific wilderness for many, many years, before seeing one fruition of their work take on global significance, arguably changing the course of history.

The prize for physics to P. Agostini, F. Krausz, and A. L'Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" is for an accomplishment less familiar to me, and learning of its details has been very instructive.  As I started reading about this work, I immediately thought of 1999 Chemistry laureate Ahmed Zewail, who I found is indeed mentioned in the scientific information packet released by the Nobel Foundation.  It was interesting to see AMO (atomic, molecular, and optical) physics honored again after the 2018 prize; indeed both the 2018 and 2023 prizes have done much to address the historical imbalance against female laureates.  There are now three living female Nobel laureates in physics at the same time, something unprecedented.  (And if you include this year's Peace laureate, there are four living women physicist Nobel laureates!)

Finally I am always pleased when a chemistry prize is awarded (as in Zewail's case) for a physics-related achievement - in this year's case, quantum dots.  Like many, I'd heard of quantum dots without knowing the names of the scientists who pioneered them, including those honored this year:  M. G. Bawendi, L. E. Brus, and A. I. Ekimov.

This has been a good batch of laureates to honor industrial scientists, as Katalin Kariko was, for some time, primarily employed by BioNTech, while Alexei Ekimov was still affiliated with a company called Nanocrystals Technology, Inc., at the time of receiving the award. 

The Nobel Prizes are justly criticized in many quarters, and should not be the only mark of high prestige that scientists and the general public focus on.  Having said that, the Nobel Committee did a fine job with this year's selections, doing much to maintain credibility for their efforts.

The 2023 Abel Prize

Additional news this week includes the awarding of this year's Abel Prize in Mathematics to Luis A. Caffarelli, for his work in nonlinear partial differential equations.  Of interest to DTLR is his 1982 work, with Robert Kohn and 2015 Abel Laureate Louis Nirenberg, on singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations, work directly relevant to the topic of the (still unsolved) Clay Millenium Prize problem related to the Navier-Stokes equations.

The Abel Prize was begun a few years after I left graduate school, so I consider it a recent phenomenon.  It is intended to be considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.  In reading the list of past laureates, I realized that I've attended lectures by several.  I attended a lecture by 2015 laureate John Nash at New York University, likely in 2008 or 2009.  Unfortunately Dr. Nash and his wife were killed while traveling home from the Abel Prize ceremony.  Also around the same era (Dec. 2008), I attended the 100th Statistical Mechanics conference of Rutgers University.  There were many notable speakers there, and as I reread the speaker list, I am amazed.  The 2007 Abel laureate, Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan, and future 2014 Abel laureate Yakov G. Sinai, both spoke there.  I honestly can't recall watching their lectures, nor those of many other luminaries on the list (including names I did not come to fully appreciate until over a decade later).  I do recollect sitting next to Juan Maldacena at the conference dinner, where I couldn't resist bringing up Lee Smolin's argument against string theory (see Smolin's book, The Trouble with Physics).  Dr. Maldacena's response (I'm paraphrasing) was that many smart people work on string theory, and they wouldn't be doing that if it were as hopeless as Smolin seems to think.

I have only met one Abel laureate in person, and only briefly, Peter D. Lax (2005), during a visit to the Courant Institute in the mid-2000s. Similarly, while I have attended lectures by dozens of Nobel laureates (too many to attempt to list here), I only met one in person, and again only briefly:  the late Paul C. Lauterbur, 2003 laureate in physiology or medicine.  I met him at a book signing of his at the San Francisco IEEE EMBS annual meeting in 2004.

Gordon Moore (1929-2023)

DTLR joins the physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science communities in mourning Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who sadly passed on March 24, just a few days ago.  While I did not work in the areas that he did, his contributions to our civilization have affected all of mankind.

Physicists descend upon Las Vegas (March 2023)

For the first time since 1986, the American Physical Society (APS) held its annual March Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Yep, I was there!

The main lobby at Caesar's Forum, March 8, 2023.

I attended in-person, arriving Sunday afternoon, March 5, 2023, and staying through late morning Friday, March 20.  Most of the events took place in and around Caesar's Forum.  (The virtual sessions have been running this week, ending tomorrow March 22.)  I heard there were about 12,000 physicists registered for the event, but I don't know how that breaks down between the in-person and virtual attendees.

Exterior of Caesar's forum, Las Vegas, NV, 9 March 2023.

I'll just mention some of the highlights for me.  First, being such a large event post-COVID, I noticed that some attendees were wearing masks, but I would say the majority were not.  Lanyards were color coded based on the wearer's comfort level:

Lanyard comfort level guide, 6 March 2023.

This would have been difficult to enforce because of the venue.  The regular session rooms were often too small, resulting in packed rooms with standing room only at the back.  (Some of the larger rooms hosted sparsely attended sessions, in contrast.)  The hallways were packed during breaks between sessions, and lines were long and convoluted (with several merging lines) at the food/drink-serving events, like the Monday evening reception, and the Industry Day reception thursday night.  The catered food was not of great quality, and the food-for-purchase at the exhibit hall was exorbitantly priced.   Continuing with complaints about the venue, there were a number of audio/visual technical glitches throughout the week.  I had trouble using the APS Meetings app on my phone (I was able to use it before the meeting, but never got it to work while I was actually there).  Not the organizers' fault, but it was very cold the night of the Monday evening reception, which was an ourdoor event, and all the food I ate was mostly cold by the time I ate it there.

Nonetheless, I had a great time.  This was only the fourth March Meeting I've attended - the first scientific talk I ever gave was at the 1999 Centennial Meeting in Atlanta, and I also spoke at the 2002 Indianapolis March Meeting.  Both of those were during my graduate student days.  Much later, I attended the 2014 March Meeting in Denver at my own expense.  I did so again this year.  I remember taking some time to explore Atlanta and Denver (even spending part of a day at Boulder) during the 1999 and 2014 meetings, but Indianapolis and Las Vegas are cities I know fairly well (though I did do some off-meeting things in Vegas).

The view from my hotel room at the Flamingo, 5 March 2023.  The "High Roller" is an iconic part of the Las Vegas skyline, and I got to ride on it Monday night after the conference reception!

 

The highlight Sunday evening was the Kavli Foundation Symposium, "Frontier Physics from Atomic to Astronomical Scales".  The first speaker was Monika Aidelsburger (Ludwig-Maximilians University) on using optically trapped cold atoms to simulate other quantum systems.  I especially enjoyed learning about "twistronics" from the second speaker, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (MIT):  placing two or more graphene sheets on top of each other, but at an angle so that their crystal structures were out of alignment.  These types of systems are known as "moire quantum matter".  Next was Brad Marston (Brown University) who spoke about large scale waves in the Earth's atmosphere. The last speaker, Gabriela Gonzalez of Louisiana State University, is always worth going to hear (I've seen her speak elsewhere) talk about gravitational wave astronomy.  The session was followed by a unique, but very Nevada-ish, entertainment, a delightful performance by Le PeTiT CiRqUe (a children's cirque group actually based in the Los Angeles area), titled "Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps".  Hopefully the troupe can give a repeat performance for other physics events in the southern California/Nevada area in the future.

Monday's highlights include the session "Physics Outside the Lab:  Government, Policy, and Diplomacy, Outreach, Journalism and Entrepreneurship".  I missed the first talk as I was attending another session (a common occurrence throughout the week - there were so many interesting-looking talks that I missed due to conflicts). I enjoyed all of the remaining speakers though.  Joseph Niemela of ICTP spoke about supporting young physicists throughout the developing world.  Amy Flatten of APS outlined a very interesting career crossing over from government, tech companies, and now the APS itself.  The third speaker Surya Raghu, spoke about working in industry and Pasteur's quadrant (a concept introduced by David Stokes), while the last speaker, Matteo Rini, who had spent a year working at the European parliament, is now editor-in-chief of APS' Physics Magazine.

Monday afternoon featured a talk by Michelle Frank, a student at CUNY's Biography and Memoir program.  She spoke about the life of physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, particularly the early part of her career.  This was an incredibly good and informative talk.  The speaker incidentally has an article in the April issue of Scientific American, about Wu's involvement in quantum entanglement.  If Ms. Frank has more work on C.-S. Wu on the way, I will be eager to read it.

Another view of the Caesar's Forum, March 9.  The earlier Monday evening reception was held on this patio, but it was really cold that night!

Tuesday was the first day of the Exhibits, and I usually make sure to spend time at the exhibits whenever I attend a conference, usually shopping for books and occasionally speaking with software companies.  This time was no exception, and I ended up hauling back four books in my luggage, and purchasing 9 more after I got home, using the conference discounts. But I began the day attending a very interesting talk on maximum entropy-based statistical inference, a topic I've always wanted to learn more about.  The presentation by Ying-Jen Yang, a post-doc at Stony Brook, based on his graduate work at the U. of Washington under applied mathematician Hong Qian, was titled "Statistical Thermodynamics and Data Ad Infinitum".  There is an ArXiv preprint by the authors available as well.

Another highlight of the day was a talk by Rob Phillips of CalTech, an award-winning teacher.  He was assigned the title "More is Still Different", celebrating 50 (and a half) years since P. W. Anderson's famous and still influential essay, "More is Different".  As a fluid dynamicist, my absolute favorite slide of the whole meeting was this one of Phillips':

An exemplary slide from Rob Phillips' talk "More is Still Different", March 7, 2023.  The lower left corner is titled "Elasticity" and the lower right "Hydrodynamics".

The one time I was able to get food and drink in a reasonable manner was at the Meet the Physical Review Editors reception Tuesday late afternoon, which was also held outdoors.  I spoke with an editor of PRL and one for PRB, but I did not see the editors of Physical Review Fluids there.  I was able to be more social and talk to more new people there than at the actual reception the previous night.  However, DTLR readers should know that I questioned the editors I met about the efficacy of peer review.  I have come to be very sympathetic to the skeptical views of Adam Mastroianni on peer review.

Speaking of editors, throughout the week I popped in and out of the rolling session on Fluids, which began first thing Monday morning and continued until the end of the conference on Friday:

Placard in front of Room 210, where the Fluids sessions ran (March 8, 2023).

The editor of Physics of Fluids, Jeff Giacomin, was often sitting in the front row of the session.  I was able to speak with him very briefly, and noticed him chatting with the AIP Publishing representative at the exhibits at another point during the week.

On Wednesday I hurried to have a quick lunch (this was the one day I used the caterer at the exhibit hall) so that I could make it to the Art Meets Science session.  I was not disappointed.  I was able to attend the first three talks:

• James Kakalios (U. Minnesota) on "The Art and Science of Superheroes";
• Jessamyn Fairfield (U. Galway) on "Comedy as a Tool for Democratization of Knowledge";
• Julia Ruth (physicist turned cirque performer) on "Finding Center:  A Balancing Act Between Circus and Science".
  

I'm not sure I'll ever seen such a fascinating group of physicists in one place and time again.  All of these speakers gave riveting presentations, and ought to be in high demand on the speaking circuit in my opinion!

On thursday, one of the fluids sessions featured this enthralling talk on "Dancing Raisins" by Severio Spagnolie (U. Wisconsin-Madison).  All I can say is get a bottle of sparkling water, open it and pour into a glass, place some raisins in it, and watch what happens!  He said the first 20 minutes after opening the bottle were the best, but you could watch the raisins continuously aquire, then lose, buoyancy by bubble formation and destruction, for about 2 hours.  The roughness of the raisin surface and their rotational motion turn out to be keys to understanding the effect.

The afternoon featured a session on the history and philosophy of physics.  It began with a philosophical talk by Lena Zuchowski (U. Bristol) on the arrow of time, and ways to formulate a concept of entropy and a second law of thermodynamics in order to understand that arrow.  Astronomer Virgnia Trimble (UC Irvine) gave a general talk about physics anniversaries (the theme of the session).  Chad Orzel (Union College) then gave a phenomenal presentation about the 75th anniversary of quantum electrodynamics.  The session ended with Donnell Walton (Corning) who spoke about Willie Hobbs Moore, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics in the U.S.  A surprising aspect of her career is that after doing physics she moved into quality management at the Ford Motor Company.  Three people asked or commented about this aspect of her career during the Q&A.

The day ended with a special session featuring two of last year's three Nobel laureates in physics.  The session was introduced by David Haviland (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), a member of the Nobel committee, who explained the history of the Nobel Prizes.  We then heard from John F. Clauser, followed by Anton Zeilinger (U. Vienna) about their work on quantum entanglement.  These talks were outstanding, and very inspirational!!!   I took the opportunity to take a quick photo before I left the room.

Anton Zeilinger, John F. Clauser, and David Haviland, after the speical Nobel laureate session, 9 March 2023.

I started my Friday with a talk by the son and grandson of Nobel laureates, Tomas Bohr (Technical U. of Denmark), who spoke about "Sap Flow and Sugar Transport in a Pine Needle".  I've been influenced by his work since my undergraduate years, and was delighted to see him speak about a topic related to one I had a chance to think about (circa 2008) for reasons now lost to time.

Tomas Bohr's talk on plant physics, 10 March 2023.

Having pursued a career away from physics for over 20 years, it was soul-nourishing for me to be back in the company of physicsts, attending the world's largest physics conference.  I should try to come back to this conference more often in future years.