The Top 50 Science Questions with Surprising Answers

Dr. Christopher S. Baird received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2007. Since that time, he has worked as a physics professor and research scientist specializing in electromagnetism, lasers, and quantum devices. As senior scientist and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell from 2007-2016, he taught graduate electromagnetics courses and pursued research on lasers, quantum well devices, radar imaging, and electromagnetic scattering. From 2016 to the present, Dr. Baird has worked at West Texas A&M University as tenure-track assistant professor of physics, and then as tenured associate professor of physics. In these roles he has taught various undergraduate classes and continued his research on quantum devices. Dr. Baird has authored several dozen research publications, including various classified research reports for the military. Additionally, Dr. Baird has authored sixteen manuals for university physics laboratory classes, over a dozen articles for McGraw Hill's AccessScience, and 340+ articles for his Science Questions with Surprising Answers website. He has written articles and consulting notes for general-audience publications such as Reuters, Popular Mechanics, Newsweek, National Geographic, All About Space magazine, and LiveScience. Dr. Baird has served as a peer reviewer for academic journals such as Applied Optics, The Journal of Optics, The Journal of Applied Physics, AIP Advances, Optics Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Optics Express, and IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. He has also served as a reviewer of applications for NASA fellowships, a reviewer of several grant proposals for Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and a reviewer of textbook proposals and revisions for CRC Publishing, SPIE, and McGraw-Hill. He has helped win a million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as several multimillion dollar grants from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Furthermore, Dr. Baird has served as a science judge at numerous local, regional, and national science competitions and research conferences.