DISORDER, INSTABILITY, AND TRAFFIC JAMS: AN INQUIRY WITH DR. SIDNEY NAGEL
JESSICA METZGER
At first, Professor Sidney Nagel didn’t want to be a physicist. His “first love” was literature, which he intended to study when he entered his undergraduate studies at Columbia University. However, Nagel changed his mind after taking a challenging introductory physics sequence, “kind of equivalent to our 140’s sequence here,” in his 2nd year. He specifically remembers being intrigued by Purcell’s Electricity and Magnetism, a textbook still used in UChicago’s introductory physics class. Nagel
caught up on the required classes for the physics major in his 3rd year, and before graduate school, spent time working in a particle physics lab building a particle detector. He also spent time working for a particle physicist studying bioluminescence in Woods Hole, MA. However, he soon decided he wasn’t as interested in particle physics as in condensed matter physics, the study of materials and their properties like crystals, magnets, and (starting from around
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