About
Christopher Smallwood is a Graduate Student in Physics at UC Berkeley. He is interested in the nexus between the basic research community and society at large. Originally from the Bavarian-themed tourist town of Leavenworth, WA (yes, real people actually do live there!), he graduated with an A.B. in Physics from Harvard College in 2005, taught fifth grade at Leo Elementary School in South Texas, and has been pursuing his Ph.D. in the Bay Area since the fall of 2007. Currently, he studies experimental condensed matter in the Lanzara Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His past research interests have included Bose-Einstein condensation, rubidium-based atomic clocks, hydrogen masers, lenses and mirrors, mayflies, mousetrap cars, toothpick bridges, fawn lilies, the slinky, Legos, vinegar and baking soda volcanoes, wolves, choo-choo trains, and the word "moon."
Website: http://physics.berkeley.edu/research/lanzara/
All Contributions by Christopher:
Introducing the Higgs Boson
The Bay Area has a big community of physicists involved with the Higgs boson project, and the Physics Department at UC Berkeley has scheduled a special seminar on the topic this coming Friday.
Post on Jul 11, 2012
Racetrack Memory On the Move
Racetrack Memory is a new idea that could compete with some of the most popular memory devices in use today.
Post on Jan 05, 2011
Computer Memory Poised to Get Shock Therapy?
In recent years, scientists have been playing around with more exotic forms of data storage. It turns out that some very specialized materials are not only like to be magnetically ordered, but are also naturally charged.
Post on Jul 29, 2010
Try These At Home 2: Exploring Buoyancy
Buoyancy is the force that decides whether an object will sink or float, and has had a long and colorful history.
Post on Feb 08, 2010
Welcome to the Year of the Laser
Perhaps no single development of the last century has been more influential or more important than the laser.
Post on Jan 26, 2010
Dark Matter Tests Positive (Sort of)
Dark matter – think of matter as a fancy word for stuff – is one of the most exciting but also potentially frustrating phenomena in cosmology today.
Post on Dec 28, 2009
Climate Talks in Copenhagen: No Silver Bullet?
Between the aquarium of drowning-delegate sea-level rise protesters, the chicken flock of animal rights protesters, and the cocktail party of fur-coated protest protesters, there will certainly have been a lot to see these past two weeks in Copenhagen during the latest United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Post on Dec 17, 2009
Unlocking the Mysteries of Graphene
Researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley have endeavored recently to isolate suspended membranes of graphene for study and image them at Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope (TEM).
Post on Nov 16, 2009
50 Years Later, Still Plenty of Room at the Bottom
50 years ago, eminent physicist Richard Feynman gave a gave a prophetic speech at Caltech entitled, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." The speech described a rich world of possibilities that could arise if we only applied ourselves toward controlling matter on smaller and smaller scales.
Post on Nov 02, 2009
The Large Hadron Collider Gets Ready to Spin Again
.In about one month the world’s biggest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will once again fire up.
Post on Oct 19, 2009
Toward Greener Biofuels and Greener Cars
For all the excitement, selling the American public on biofuels feels a little like feeding methadone to a heroin addict.
Post on Oct 05, 2009
Try These at Home: 2 Sure-fire Science Demo Classics
Quick how-to's to make your own non-newtonian matter; float a ball in mid-air indefinitely; pronounce "Bernoulli."
Post on Sep 08, 2009
Are Power Towers the Future of Solar Energy?
Southern California's Antelope Valley is famous for its desert blooms of California poppies, but has recently become the home of one of the most aesthetically striking new designs in alternative energy.
Post on Aug 24, 2009
The Tantalizing Physics of Invisibility Cloaks
The prospect of such technology dazzles the imagination. Could we use such a cloak to hide spy planes? Ugly buildings? UFO landing sites?
Post on Aug 05, 2009
3-D is Quidditch, but Much More, Too
Whether here to stay in film this time or another passing fad, 3-D technology will remain both a fascinating technology and valuable tool in science.
Post on Jul 13, 2009
New Nanoparticles Shed Light on Cell Behavior
Happily, while Michael Crichton's nanoparticles coordinate an attack on a your vital organs, these new bright, stable particles behave more like benign light bulbs in your cells.
Post on Jun 29, 2009
The National Ignition Facility: An Energetic Defense
For all of the laser's exciting aspirations and promise of new technology, the press' reaction to NIF throughout the twelve years of its construction has been often lukewarm, and at worst scornful.
Post on Jun 01, 2009
An Ode to Enrico Fermi
The concept of the "Fermi Problem"–a hard question made readily accessible by back-of-the-envelope calculations and familiar knowledge–is still powerful in physics and beyond. Science teachers routinely use these types of questions as brain teasers.
Post on May 14, 2009
Superconductivity: an Arsenic-Laced Future?
In February of last year scientists discovered a new champion in their quest for a better superconductor, a material based on iron and, curiously enough, arsenic.
Post on Apr 28, 2009
