Mar 16 2006
One of the necessary conditions for the universe to have achieved a state in which it is completely dominated by matter is that it had to pass through a period of non-equilibirum. A moment of rapid expansion, or *inflation*, near the beginning of time would have been just such a non-equilibrium state. How do you [...]
Mar 16 2006
Today is an exciting day: the WMAP collaboration (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) has “released its three year data and data analysis”:http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/map_bibliography.cfm. I’ve just started looking through their results, but there is no doubt the precision cosmology they were able to do three years ago is even more exciting now! Recall that last time they released [...]
Mar 05 2006
Jodi is currently in La Thuile, a mountain skiing town in northern Italy. She’s not there to ski, though – she’s presenting a comprehensive overview of direct-detection dark matter searches at the “20th Rencontres De Physique De La Vallee D’Aoste: Results And Perspective In Particle Physics”:http://www.pi.infn.it/lathuile/lathuile_2006.html. She’s one of many particle physicists converging on La [...]
Mar 04 2006
This weekend, as in last weekend, the San Francisco bay area is under a severe wind advisory. Last weekend, this meant nearly 100 mph winds in the bay around San Francisco, and 50 mph winds where I live. A series of rather unpleasant winter storms, gliding down the coast from Alaska, have wrought havoc on [...]
Mar 04 2006
Every year, once a year, scientists who conduct research at the “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu and the “Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL)”:http://www.fnal.gov travel to Washington DC to lobby on behalf of particle physics and the physical sciences. This is a banner year for this visit, because the “President has endorsed a plan, much [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
