February 6, 2010My “Modern Physics” class has come to one of the most crucial and important insights that has been made into the natural world: waves of probability seem to lie at the heart of the behavior of matter. “Paradigm shift” is a phrase overly applied in the modern world, but it applies extremely well to the [...]
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January 30, 2010E=mc^2 gets all the fame and press. That’s because this deceptively simple equation hides a rich spectrum of insights which still have ripple effects on the modern world. It tells us that a large input of energy is needed to generate a little mass; the flip-side of that statement is that if you can effect [...]
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November 1, 2009The conductor of an orchestra is not for show. A conductor is not just a part of the social construct of the orchestra. A conductor is not just a means by which one person can be made more important than another. The reality is that the conductor of an orchestra is required, by the speed [...]
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October 26, 2009Sunday night, as we sat on the patio by the grill, we thought about thunder and lightning. The sky was overcast, and in the distance storms were brewing. Lightning reflected off the clouds above us, followed a short time later by thunder. We started to think about the relationship between the light and sound from [...]
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September 28, 2009Dark matter appears to explain the bulk of matter in our cosmos. While it has clearly been observed to exert influence over normal matter – nuclei, electrons, light – through gravitation, it has never been observed through any other interaction. Dark matter does not appear to directly emit light, nor respond to light; it has [...]
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September 18, 2009I was recently a participant in a welcome event for pre-med students at SMU. The event started with a panel discussion, including members of the science faculty at SMU. It ended with a social event outside the auditorium. Jodi and I participated in the social event (the panel discussion was packed and well underway by [...]
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May 29, 2009Next week (June 2-6), I will be at CERN for the first time in many years (and to kickoff my many visits to come!). I am attending the ATLAS Collaboration Physics Week, a four-day event centering on ATLAS physics analysis. I am excited to be heading to the new Mecca of particle physics, the new [...]
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April 20, 2009This past week, while working on systematic uncertainty estimates for one of my research projects, I escaped to the SLAC library for a quiet but inspirational space in which to conduct my efforts. There was a particular moment when I needed to hit ENTER and wait for a program to execute and return some numbers. [...]
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April 12, 2009As I’ve probably hinted with my previous post on baseball physics [1], I love the show “Mythbusters”. This past week, we had a new 2-hour episode focused on car demolition myths. In one segment, Adam and Jamie revisit an old myth that two semis, heading at one another at 50 mph and striking a compact [...]
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April 10, 2009Take the SLAC Library Survey
Not too long ago, the SLAC Library occupied a large space on the second floor of Central Lab [1], the heart of the administrative and research activities here at SLAC. Due to shifting priorities at the lab, and the need to renovate existing space in Central Lab for future experiments, the [...]
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Steve Sekula is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, and currently works on the BaBar Experiment at SLAC and the ATLAS Experiment at CERN.
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