Partially Coherent

Maybe some people still remember the infamous statement made by the late Republican Senator Ted Stevens during the net neutrality debates in 2006, that the Internet is " a series of tubes ." He used this statement to criticize the bill on net neutrality , because according to him, the Internet is not a "big truck" and tubes can get clogged. After the statement he was met with ridicule, because of a very limited understanding of the Internet, even though he was in charge of its regulation. To me, the extreme criticism that Stevens got for the tube statement is a little weird, because let's face it, the Internet is, in all actuality, a series of tubes. And no, I don't mean in a metaphorical sense. Although, with the word tube, I don't mean plumbing pipes or whatever. I have no idea what Stevens meant with tubes , and I don't think that he made a good argument against net neutrality. The argument was just ridiculed for all the wrong reasons. I mea...

Hello to you and welcome to my blog! This is my first (actual) post here and I would like to start by telling you why I want to write about this particular topic. Like it says in the title, this blog is about physics and math, with an emphasis on photonics, so I will be writing about a large variety of things but keep coming back to that one special topic. I will not be talking (at least not too much) about the topics that are the most popular (and maybe the most controversial) in science, such as string theory, quantizing gravity or about the search for a theory of everything. Why, then, do I want to tell people about photonics? As you may have guessed, it is because I actually am qualified to talk about it, since it is my main area of expertise and I happen to have a formal education in it. The arXiv universe! The white dots are papers on optics, notice where they are centered? ( paperscape.org ) The way I came to do this line of work is rather unconventional. When I wa...