Will Lockhart
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute on the Environment (IonE) @ University of Minnesota. Research scientist in sustainability, astrophysicist, and director of the first feature documentary on the game of Go.
You can reach me at wlock@umn.edu.
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Physics
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” - Richard Feynman
What is reality, and how can we understand it? More precisely, how can we construct mathematical models to describe the patterns we observe in Nature? This is the starting point for the most fundamental of all the branches of science. On this page you’ll find a few of my favorite resources, past projects, and other miscellanea related to the study of physics.
My Research:
My research focuses on pulsars - rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit a characteristic pattern of electromagnetic radiation in radio and x-rays. I am working with professors Sam Gralla, Dimitrios Psaltis, and Feryal Ozel to model the radiation emitted by these stars using computer simulations. The detailed structure of these light curves contain clues to the properties of neutron stars and the mechanism that produces their exotic x-ray emission. If we can understand the subtle relationship between the properties of these pulsars and the shape of their light curves, we can actually learn something about the exotic ultra-dense nuclear matter of which they are composed. Our first paper describing our apporach to light curve modeling can be found on the arxiv.
My current project is to compare the results of our model with the most recent data from NASA’s Neutron-star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER). In order to do this analysis, I am using a Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to find the set of model parameters which best fit the observed data. We expect to report on this next year!
Other Projects / Code:
- Asteroids: a Newtonian gravity simulator. Download the python code
- Particle Mesh Code: Last spring I co-wrote a particle mesh code for a course in cosmology. The code loosely simulates large-scale structure formation in the universe. Check out one of the final videos here
- On the Shoulders of Giants: A project to compile the all-time great pedagogical physics problems. I hope that someday this can be a lovely resource for students and teachers alike. Problem suggestions are welcome! You can see a sample page here
“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” - Isaac Newton
Resources:
- arXiv.org
- HyperPhysics
- The Physics Stack Exchange
- The Feynman Lectures books & corresponding video lecture series
- Richard Feynman’s Fun to Imagine videos (must-watch!)
- David Tong’s graduate-level Lecture Notes on theoretical physics
- TASI video lectures
- Physics Formulary - a huge pdf of useful formulas, organized by subject
- Astrobites - a blog on recent news and academic papers in astronomy
- Sean Carroll’s blog, “presposterous universe”
- PBS Spacetime Youtube channel
- John Baez
“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” - Hermann Minkowski
Videos:
- Scale of the universe
- Magnet and copper pipe
- 3Blue1Brown - a Youtube channel of wonderful animated math videos
- James O’Donohhue - Animations of the Solar System
