David Thouless

Credit: blickpixel/pixabay

How Machine-Learning Helps Us Understand Strange Materials and Their Stranger Physics

The surface of a natural graphite crystal. The graphene derived from such crystals exhibit interesting and unique topological properties. Credit: University of Exeter/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Scientists Shouldn’t Always Look for Utility in the Beauty of Shapes

A cup filled with superfluid helium. Because of quantum mechanical effects, the helium will crawl up the sides of the cup in a thin film and collect as a droplet on the outside, and drip below. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

How the Physics Laureates Used Geometry to Tame the Very Weird of the Very Small

David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, the winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics. Credit: nobelprize.org

Physics Nobel Goes to Three Scientists for Work on Exotic Forms of Matter