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The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. -
Author Archives: skullsinthestars
Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones
I’ve been working on getting myself back into a regular reading habit, and to warm up I’ve been looking for some punchy short horror novels. When I was recently at my local Barnes & Noble, this book practically jumped off … Continue reading
Posted in Horror
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“Deterministic vortices evolving from partially coherent fields” in Optica!
Some exciting personal and optics news: I just had a paper published in the prestigious journal Optica with my student Wenrui Miao and my colleague Yongtao Zhang on “Deterministic vortices evolving from partially coherent fields.” The paper is open access, … Continue reading
Posted in Optics, Personal
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Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
One thing I’ve long believed is that truly powerful stories, the ones that stay with you, are the ones that are truly about something meaningful to the author. As a general rule, no great stories are purely “entertainment,” even though … Continue reading
16 years of Skulls in the Stars!
Just a quick note that I’ve been blogging now for 16 years, as of today, as WordPress reminded me! It’s wild that 16 years is almost 1/3 of my life that I’ve been writing this blog, and no plans to … Continue reading
Posted in Personal
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Invisibility talk at Natural Sciences at Raleigh!
Wanted to announce that I’ll be doing a Science Cafe at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences this coming Thursday, August 17th, at 7:00 pm! It will be both an in-person event as well as a livestream on YouTube, … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Personal
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A “remarkable lightning stroke,” 1879
One of the fun things about reading early science journals and magazines is finding anecdotes about unusual phenomena that are sent in by readers and published. While I was writing my previous blog post about Tyndall and Mayer, I came … Continue reading
Posted in ... the Hell?, History of science
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Me on science writing in Optics & Photonics News!
A couple of months ago, the folks who run Optics & Photonics News at Optica, the optical society, asked if I could write a post for their “careers” blog about my path to writing popular science books. Well, the post … Continue reading
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John Tyndall rescues Julius Mayer, 1862
I’ve been thinking again recently of the remarkable story of Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878), the German physician and scientist who was the first person to truly discover the principle of conservation of energy. Most physicists associate James Prescott Joule with … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Two new reviews of Invisibility!
Yesterday was quite the day for book reviews for my book on the history and science of invisibility! First, James Gleick wrote a very nice and thoughtful review of the book for the New York Review of Books; a screenshot … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Personal
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Skulls in the Stars 