ESP Biography

MATTHEW WARE, Stanford physics graduate student

Major: Physics

College/Employer: Stanford

Year of Graduation: ???

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I do research in atomic, molecular and optical physics, which pretty much means I get to shoot lasers at the world’s tiniest objects for a living. My primary interest is the dynamics of molecules and fundamental particles at the shortest time scales. How short? One millionth of one billionth of a second. Can you count that fast? I surely can’t! And physics gets pretty weird on these time scales.
I also love to teach. During my undergraduate, I helped run the physics outreach program, and our number one goal was to get students motivated to learn science. I had a lot of fun with the program, and it makes my day to see a student a few years on, who is still excited about doing science.
If you’re in my Splash class, you can expect to have a lot of fun and learn what it means to be a scientist!

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

P3556: The Physics of Waves in Splash! Spring 2014 (Apr. 12 - 13, 2014)

Have you ever wondered how a wave moves through the ocean? Is the water itself moving with the wave? It’s a hard question to answer, but in this class, we will explore ocean waves and other wave phenomena through experiment. Together we’ll build up our intuition about waves using a simple string then explore interference (when two waves meet at a point) and diffraction (when a wave goes through a small hole) using water and lasers. The results will be quite unexpected.