Dr. T. H. Maiman (7/11/27 - 5/5/07)

I’m currently attending the CLEO/QELS conference in San Jose, CA. Yesterday there was a symposium honoring the late Ted Maiman, who was the first person to successfully build and operate a Laser. After the symposium, I was doing some follow-up reading on Wikipedia and discovered that the timing of this memorial session was very coincidental. Ted passed away a year ago today, and his famous invention, according to his notebook, took place almost exactly 48 years ago (May 16, 1960). For the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics to take place between these dates is highly appropriate, and it has been interesting to consider the conference within the context of the historical origins of the laser. Hopefully Ted would be impressed with what we have all come up with using his invention.

SVN and LaTeX

For anyone curious about the process of managing a LaTeX document with the Subversion (SVN) version control system, I have to highly recommend it. Now that my dissertation is officially finished, I have a bit of time to explain the process I used to back-up, archive, and otherwise manage the beast.

Dissertation - link

It’s finally done. I submitted the final version of my dissertation[PDF] to the Graduate School. Naturally, that means I’ll be headed to the beach tomorrow for a weekend of camping in the sand.

Not that I expect anyone to, but you’re welcome to read it, just as long as you don’t tell me about any typos… at least not until next week sometime

DrDawes.wordpress.com

It’s official. I successfully defended my dissertation today. The process was surprisingly enjoyable. After very little sleep, I still managed to give a good presentation and field a bunch of good questions. My committee was genuinely interested in my work and gave me lots of new ideas on where I can take the research.

I have some corrections to make in my thesis, but otherwise I can relax a little bit. I’m glad I’ll have a chance to write up some of my newest results and maybe get another paper out. That should make the transition to a new career at Pacific a little more productive. I’ll post once my thesis is finalized and available online.

-Dr. Dawes

Thesis… check

I’ve made my last revisions prior to handing my dissertation over to my committee members tomorrow (ok, technically that’s just later today). My defense is scheduled for 9am on April 11th so I’ve got just over a week to put together my presentation. After writing 160 pages on my research, I think 20 slides will be straightforward. And no, I won’t just put 8 pages of information on each slide, that would be science-talk suicide.

Why I love python

As you can imagine, during the depths of my thesis-writing experience, I don’t have a whole lot of time for anything except… well, writing my thesis. Sometimes, especially in the sciences, as you are writing the paper, the data is still coming in and ideally still getting better. Lucky for me that was the case today. The new data meant new analysis, which for my project means more python code.

It’s never happened to me before, but today was a notable day in my evolution as a programmer: I wrote my first non-trivial program, from an empty file, to working code, in one iteration. Now, of course, I can write a “hello world” program in fortran or c++ without debugging (I might have to change linker flags, but that doesn’t count), but today it was a real program, doing real things… things that were non-trivial in a programming sense.

Officially employed

I am excited to announce that I will be joining the faculty at Pacific University this fall. I have accepted an offer for a tenure-track position that is a joint appointment between the Department of Physics and the School of Optometry. I am looking forward to teaching physics in a liberal arts setting, and also to have the opportunity to teach optics to the next generation of optometrists.

I will also continue my research in nonlinear optics and atom trapping, and will mentor undergraduates in summer research and senior capstone projects. In the meantime, I am still hard at work writing my dissertation and getting ready to defend in April. I don’t imagine I’ll be posting much between now and then, but I hope to be back at it again soon.

Math fonts in LaTeX

Tired of Computer Modern or Times when you turn to LaTeX to document your hard work? This post outlines the relatively simple process of using another font that adds a bit more style to your documents. The general challenge is to find a font for the math that matches the text font. This is solved with the mathdesign package for LaTeX.

Job Search: he shoots, he scores!

Well you may have noticed a lack of new posts for a few weeks. Chalk it up to me entering the initial thesis-writing phase, combined with job applications, interviews, and the general associated chaos.

The good news, of course, is that the job search process has gone well. After two enjoyable interviews, I have received my first offer (let’s say it’s from from Liberal Arts College A). I’m trying to find out as much as I can from Liberal Arts College B before too long, in order to make the decision as informed as possible. This is the funny gray area that everyone always talks about. I have been leaning towards A, and I’m very excited to have an offer from them… but it a lot of ways it’s like “deal or no deal”… I wonder what is in case B.

NOVA | Absolute Zero | PBS

Part II of a very cool NOVA series airs on PBS stations tonight. Pun absolutely intended. Second pun not as intended, but still amusing.

Many all-star players from the Atomic, Molecular and Optical physics world, several of which are Nobel Laureates, make appearances on this second part of the program. The first part aired last week and covered many interesting aspects of early thermodynamics. One great piece of trivia was about the original Celsius scale, and the fact that it was originally reversed, with zero for the boiling point of water, and 100 for the freezing point. This is really too bad, since he was very close to getting the right sense of temperature. Many argue that the thermodynamic beta is a more direct representation of temperature. Since Beta scales as the inverse of T, Celsius’ original scale at least went the right direction, even if the degree sizes weren’t right.

NOVA | Absolute Zero | PBS