mspringer

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Matthew Springer

I'm Matt Springer, a physics Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University. Most of my work is in ultrafast nonlinear optics, in particular the dynamics and characterization of femtosecond laser filaments. I graduated from Louisiana State University in 2007 with a B.S. in physics and a minor in mathematics.

Science in general and physics in particular are things that have fascinated me for my entire life, and I'm thrilled to be able to work in science professionally. It's even better when I have the great community of readers and writers on ScienceBlogs to be able to discuss physics with others who have similar interests.

As always, this blog is meant to be reader-focused. If there's something in physics you'd like to hear more about, or if you have some question that you've never had answered, please feel free to ask me to write about it. Doesn't even always have to be science-related, for that matter.

You can contact me in any of the following three ways:

Postal Mail:
Matthew Springer
Department of Physics and Astronomy
4242 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-4242

Email:
springer@physics.tamu.edu

Secure Email:
Use the public email address listed above, but encrypt your message to my public key listed below. Don't forget to include your own public key if you want a secure reply. If you're new to cryptography and want to learn about how to protect email from eavesdropping, this link from the Electronic Freedom Foundation is a good place to start.

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Posts by this author

Crow for Tuesday Breakfast
August 12, 2008
Sunday night I was thinking about what to write for Monday morning and settled on the moment of inertia of the tires on a vehicle. If I may say so, it's a pretty good illustration for an interesting topic. Friction was a possible hitch for my proposed experiment, but I figured that cars were…
Under (tire) Pressure
August 11, 2008
If you live on flat terrain like I do, you might not get a chance to experiment with your car coasting down hills in neutral. It's kind of dangerous even if you can. But let's say you're on the top of your driveway and beginning from a stop you coast down to the street below. If the total drop…
Sunday Function
August 10, 2008
I trust you're having a relaxing Sunday? Mathematical physics can be relaxing too, especially when you just look at it. We're just going to look at this one. In fact, this is a literal mathematical instantiation of Sunday relaxation. If you fix a wire or a rope at two points and let it hang…
Magnificent Desolation
August 9, 2008
This is K2. 11 people died this month trying to climb it. At 28,251 ft (8,611 meters), K2 is the second highest mountain on this planet, and is technically a much more difficult climb than Everest. I've never climbed anything higher than a few hundred feet. Even a passenger jet slashing through…
The Final Countdown
August 8, 2008
The Intro Physics II final exam was this week. The signs were all there. 1. It was a summer class. Therefore a fairly high proportion of the students were taking it again after having failed it previously. 2. The class switched professors two weeks before the final. The first professor is a…
The Downward Spiral
August 7, 2008
In 1909, Ernest Rutherford (actually his grad students) shot subatomic particles at gold atoms to try to probe the insides of those atoms. To his surprise, he found that instead of being one continuous glob, atoms actually had most of their mass concentrated in a small nucleus at the center of the…
More Sailing
August 6, 2008
There's an interesting question in the comments of the last solar sail post: I have a question that's been bugging me about solar sails for ages: what about the fact that light pressure falls off over distance? Every time I see the idea discussed, this is never mentioned... He's right. As the sail…
Falling Electrons
August 6, 2008
Not long ago I wrote about one of the conceptual problems between intro mechanics and intro E&M from the freshman physics standpoint: developing a sense of the size of units between the two subjects. For instance, accelerating a spacecraft to escape velocity is no easy feat, but accelerating…
The Speed of Light Rock
August 5, 2008
I spent a few hours on the interstate this weekend, and I heard a Kid Rock song on the radio called "All Summer Long". If your tastes are anything like mine you'd probably rather not hear it. The song describes Kid's life as an 18-year-old, when "it was summertime in northern Michigan".…
Defending Science
August 4, 2008
There's a long list of things that scientists do that are unpopular. The creation/evolution argument rages on, the stem cell fight still provokes legislative skirmishes, genetic research raises discrimination concerns, neuroscience questions the very sense of self, and that's just the tip of the…
Boltzmann Breakfast
August 4, 2008
A few days ago Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy wrote a beautifully clear post about why there are no green stars. If I can summarize, it's because anything that's been heated up enough to emit green light is also hot enough to emit red, yellow, and some blue as well. The combination appears to us as…
Sunday Function
August 3, 2008
The Sine Function. Calm and dignified, it sits among the royal court of the Elementary Functions, presiding with undulating grace over the trigonometric functions, partnered with the Exponential Function, and showing forth his power over the realms of physics and mathematics. On one of the less…
Sail Away
August 2, 2008
Weekend posting here is usually pretty light, but it's only the second day here so I think a little extra is a nice way to kick things off. How about a little bit of solar sailing, since it fits pretty well with what I'm teaching in my intro class? We all know light carries energy. Go outside on…
Building on ScienceBlogs!
August 1, 2008
Welcome to the new home of Built on Facts, now happily hosted at ScienceBlogs. For those of you who've been readers of this site for a while, I'm honored that you like my scribblings and I hope you enjoy this new location even better! For those of you who are curious about this new physics site…