This was an incredibly busy month, and I’ve only had time to slow down and breath a little bit this weekend. So let’s review – it helps to put things in perspective. The last 2.5 weeks were mostly filled with preparations for the end of the semester – the third exam in PHYS 1308, the last lectures in the course, the annual Physics Symposium, Honors Ceremonies, and, of course, the 23rd Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subject (DIS2015) at SMU.
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Jodi talks with passion about the quest to unravel the mystery of “Dark Matter.” The Physics Symposium was on Sunday, April 12. Jodi was one of three speakers for the evening. Each speaker gave a short talk on a subject within their area of expertise, and all of these were united under the theme of the evening: “Through a Cosmos Darkly,” a look a the mysteries of the “dark universe” including dark matter and the accelerating expansion of the cosmos. The event brought together the community, friends of the department, and our many students, post-docs, staff, and faculty for dinner and a peek into some of the questions at the forefront of the field of physics.
- The last few weeks were the wrapping weeks for my students in PHYS 1308. We concluded magnetism and moved into light and optics. They had their third exam (covering complex circuits and magnetism) and then had a couple of homework problems sets as well as their continuing work on the “Grand Challenge” problem I assigned at the beginning of the semester. I had a lot of meetings with members of the student teams to discuss their work toward solutions to the challenge scenario. I am excited to see all the write-ups from the students, and I have learned a LOT from them as they researched their questions and tried to perform calculations for their solutions.
- SMU’s many honors ceremonies happen at this time of year. We celebrated both the awards and achievements of our students (see photo above) and received some ourselves. Earlier this year, Jodi and I were nominated for the Rotunda Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, given annually to about 3-4 faculty who are considered by students to be outstanding members of the faculty. Jodi and I both won, and were honored after the student Honors Convocation at the University Awards Extravaganza.
- The big event of the past week has been the XXIII Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects (DIS2015) hosted by SMU and the Physics Department. This annual conference brings together hundreds of physicists from dozens of countries to discuss the state-of-the-proton and other hadrons, and to look forward to new data and new theoretical work. For me, the exciting news from this conference was the incredible state of precision available in predicting the production of Higgs bosons at the LHC. These are essential tools needed to understand the new data that will soon pour from the collider. Of more broad public interest was the hot-off-the-press announcement of CERN’s official timetable for first physics data with the LHC (1st or 2nd week of June) and the news about a curious feature of the accelerator that isn’t causing any actual problems right now: the “unidentified lying object.” For more, check out this article from SMU that made the rounds, including appearing on the Department of Energy Office of Science homepage!
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Jodi snapped a photo of me as I began my talk at the DIS2015 public lecture. We kicked off DIS2015 with a lecture for the public on Sunday, April 26. The event was attending by at least 50 people (we didn’t get an exact head count), including high school kids from Dallas public and private schools and members of the local community. The event was done “TED-style,” with four short, 12-minute talks introduced by a pair of graduating physics majors serving as MCs for the evening. The video from the event is available here: https://youtu.be/1oYuMR8KMR0
