Michael Tripepi
- Strosacker 118
- [email protected]
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“[T]he two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.”— Werner Heisenberg
Faculty Information
Additional Faculty Information for Michael Tripepi
Education
Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2022
M.S., The Ohio State University, 2020
B.S., Hillsdale College, 2017
Memberships
Optica (formerly OSA), SPIE, Sigma Pi Sigma, Society of Catholic Scientists
Biography
My background is in experimental lasers and optics. Specifically, my research focuses on intense laser-matter interactions such as nonlinear optics, supercontinuum generation, harmonic generation, and laser damage of semiconductors.
Having studied at Hillsdale College as an undergraduate, it is a blessing to return as a professor. My goal is to provide students with a physics education that is modern and relevant yet thoroughly rooted in the liberal arts. As a physics professor, I work with students to examine physical theories and integrate how they are manifested in experiments, communicated in language, and formalized in mathematics.
One can easily think that physics is merely a collection of facts about the natural world, that Newton’s Laws of Motion or Einstein’s General Relativity exist only as statements figuratively etched on stone tablets decreeing the “Laws of the Universe.” Yet anyone who has tried to solve a word-problem will know that physics is more than facts. Solving a physics problem is not simply reiterating facts from a book. It requires strategies and skills, an intuition for which equations to use and how to use them. Physics is an inheritance of insight from those who lived and observed the natural world before us. The essence of a physics education is to learn to express concepts found in Nature through both words and mathematical formulas, and to reason about them through discourse, observation, and proof.