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| In my office, with my daughter Amanda. |
Eric Myers
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I am a physicist with a wide range of interests. My original training was in theoretical particle physics, but some of my research has overlapped with cosmology, solid state physics (superconductivity) and even the behavior of DNA molecules. Although I started out as a theorist, I believe strongly in the primacy of experiment over theory. I have been fortunate enough to have worked for a bit on several major physics experiments, including the DØ experiment at Fermilab, the ATLAS experiment at CERN, and most recently, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.
From August 2009 until the spring of 2012 I was a stay-at-home dad, taking care of our daughter Amanda, who was born 14 weeks premature. In addition to regular baby things, we had lots of doctor appointments and therapy sessions through the Early Intervention program. The good news is that she everything is fine and she's grown up to be just a regular kid who just recently started kindergarten.
I would go nuts staying at home without some kind of technical project to keep me busy, even if I can only work on it during nap time. So I taught myself how to create Apps for my iPhone and my wife's iPad. My first app, called Little Doodles, was published in the iTunes App Store in late November 2010. That was followed by Please Take My Picture, which lets you ask someone to take your picture in any of more than 15 languages. I have several more apps in preparation, and ideas for more to follow.
In 2004/2005, as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, I was part of the team which set up a distributed computing system called Einstein@Home which uses spare computing cycles on your home or office computer to search through LIGO data for evidence of gravitational waves from periodic sources, all while displaying a nifty screensaver. I hope you will consider installing the BOINC software that makes this work and contributing your own spare computer time to the project. It's very easy.
(While LIGO has not yet detected gravitational waves, Einstein@Home has also been searching through radio data from the Arecibo observatory, which has resulted in the "re-discovery " of over 100 known radio pulsars, and the discovery of 10 new radio pulsars never before detected. I was not involved with this part of the project, but I'm proud of the progress it's made since I helped get it started.)
From 2005 to 2009 I worked on a science education project called Interactions in Understanding the Universe, which will allow high school teachers and their students to access LIGO environmental data (from seismometers, magnetometers and weather stations) and to use these data for inquiry-based investigations called "e-Labs". This is part of a larger collaboration between physics labs and experimental collbarorations which use Grid computing, with the overall goal of making Grid tools and resources available for education and outreach in addition to their use for research.
From 2000 to 2002 I worked as a research physicist at the University of Michigan on a variety of projects. I contributed to the development of a calibration database for the pre-shower detectors for the DØ experiment at Fermilab. I worked on networking projects for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. And I worked on the Web Lecture Archive Project, which recorded physics lectures and technical training courses for distribution via the web.
Over the years I've created a number of web pages for computer help which you might find helpful.
I am co-author of TeXsis - a collection of TeX macros for physicists.
Talks
Notes
I do not have a blog, but sometimes I post notes for my friends to
Facebook, and these are generally readable by anybody (who has a
Facebook account, not just my "friends").
I also have a
few old notes pages that you may (or may not) find interesting:
At some point I'll have to figure out how to get stuff like this out
for easier access. Some day...
| Explaining something about waves on an Oregon beach. |
Teaching and Physics Education
I have taught physics -- and sometimes math and computing -- at Yale, St. Louis University, Vassar College, the University of Michigan, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and Marist College.Some of the teaching materials I've prepared over the years which others might find useful include:
- Notes on
- Metric System Prefixes (and some jokes to go with them)
- Sig Figs - the rules for computing with 'Significant Figures', and where they come from.
- an interesting flying illusion
- and additional hints and notes on learning physics
- Graduate School and the Physics GRE
- Physics koans and the Origami answer cards
- Fortran and Unix for Physics and Astronomy
BOINC
As a part of my work on creating Einstein@Home I set up a test project using the same BOINC software, called Pirates@Home After serving admirably as a test platform, the project was shut down at the end of June 2005. It was later brought back when it was deemed useful for further testing and software development for I2U2. Right now the project is running silent again, but I'm hoping to put it to good use for a new mission in the near future.PGP Keys
Here is my PGP key. You can use this to send me private, encryted e-mail which only I can read, or you can use it to verify that a digitally signed document is signed by me rather than someone else. You can verify that the keys on that page are the correct keys by comparing to this fingerprint:PGP Key #6E2D2259/RSA: BA39 1D46 5EC3 0D59 C2AC 6FCB F920 4DC8 PGP Key #E519EAC3/DSS: D15B 9A50 B1ED 2947 EC29 B0F6 EA61 FB6E E519 EAC3
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