The information on this page was kept up to date for a while, but is only sporadically updated. The last one is while I am on sabbatical through the school year 2024-2025.

I am Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Carleton College. I have previously served as Chair of our Department as well as a 3-year term as Associate Dean of the College.

I started at Carleton in the Fall of 2001, after a stint as a visiting faculty at Rice University. I have rotated through a variety of courses, including introductory classes for scientists, a first-year seminar on chaos and complexity, and one on sustainability, quantum mechanics, advanced classical mechanics, analytical and computational mechanics, a ‘physics for poets’ class, solid-state physics, statistical and thermal physics, electrodynamics, and even a first-year seminar in Cross-Cultural Studies (!), and in the new school year an occasional class on ‘Quantum mechanics for the 21st Century’.

It is really rewarding to teach here: the students are fun and challenging, and colleagues are a great inspiration and wonderful resource. Most importantly, there’s a lot of opportunity and encouragement to teach mindfully — that is, to think about and tinker with the issue of good teaching and effective learning.

Among the many reasons to aim for excellence in education is that it is vital to the long-term health of science. Of particular interest is the integration of research and education (see, for example, the Boyer report). I include references to current research in all my classes (even the introductory classes), and also like to work closely with students on projects as part of my ongoing research.

My research field is theoretical and computational non-linear dynamics, more broadly statistical physics. I have always been fasciated by entropy or the arrow of time and how that behaves and spent most of my career particularly focused on quantum non-linear dynamics including coherence and decoherence — the impact of environmental noise and coarse-graining on these dynamics — as well as the classical limit and entanglement issues. I have mostly worked on fairly abstract issues, but some has been done while working closely with experimentalists in atomic physics; other work has predictions about the behavior of fluid dynamical systems and analyses of chaotic laser dynamics.

I have also explored energy issues (renewable/non-fossil-fuel energy) broadly, including policy issues. I have recently embarked on a fun, fundamental, and deeply interesting project in trying to map the information complexity of biomarker dynamics to developmental biology using publicly available data.

Linear dynamical systems are a small subset of the set of all possible systems and we have to understand and control nonlinear dynamics to explore the great majority of all possible physical phenomena and I continue a broader interest in all nonlinear and complex dynamical systems. Nonlinear and chaotic dynamical systems promise to continue as a source of fascinating fundamental and applied physics for years to come. Nonlinear quantum systems are even more interesting, and moreover underlie future technology. Noisy nonlinear quantum systems are thus simultaneously the cutting edge of quantum technology and very crude models for biochemical phenomena, and I have found myself thinking about these issues a lot over the course of my career.

My colleague and I used to write a blog/professional journal entitled Confused At A Higher Level. It has been long dormant.

‘ It is common knowledge that theoretical physicists often start off as amateur theologians. They want to understand the whole of reality ..’ — Bryce de Witt, Physics Today, Jan 2005