Knowles, Paul

Why this is not a beautiful page:

Like many in academia, I work under the constraints of both continuous partial attention and a multitasking environment, and this is detrimental to the quality of my work.  By formation and training, I learned to work on problems that required `long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration' but am currently working in a continuous state of interruption, i.e., no task is finished before being interrupted by the next visitor, meeting, phone call, staffing chrisis, order, grant request, email, equipment failure, panicked student, etc.  To have a beautiful home page would require my focused attention, but more important tasks await my input.  This also explains why I am a terrible correspondent: email is easy to send, which means it is frequently used for the exchange of trivia.  My first email account dates from 1987, and I learned to use this tool (and have been using it since) as a vehicle for dense information exchange.  However, posing cogent questions and creating answers with meaningful and dense information content requires real work, and I rarely send email with low information content.  Interruptions destroy my ability to read, understand, and answer your email, so emails are frequently ignored, both as source of interruptions, and as victim of other interruptions.  If I don't answer you, blame someone else or perhaps even yourself: I already have a plan for my time, and I refuse to have my schedule dictated by every schmuck with a two dollar email account.

If this page ever becomes beautiful, you will know that I have given up all pretenses of doing research, and am settling down to an intellectually starchy and fattening diet of productivity porn.

Teaching:

APlabs, the laboratory course for first year B.Sc. students.

PH3900, Introduction to Programming: Computer programming in C and Python for science students

Research:

Stark, Atomic clocks and black body radiation...

nEDM, forbidden CP violating electric dipole moment of the neutron.

exotic atoms, (historical) measuring the muonic hydrogen Lamb shift: getting the rms charge radius of the proton.