This APS brought a few interesting lessons. When you commit to an experiment, follow it through and ignore outside pressure to release results before you’re ready. Mingle with your superiors, and mingle with your peers. Spending $130 per night on a hotel room for a physics conference is not justified, […]
Physics
260 posts
Excellent science is going on to understand the dark ages of the universe. Using things like arrays of cheap TV antennae in China, or dipoles in western Australia, astronomers are trying to image the time when the universe was dominated by neutral hydrogen. 21 cm waves – the TV band […]
Earlier today, I had the pleasure of watching two presentations from the MiniBooNE collaboration on their recently released results. The first was by Eric Zimmerman, with whom I’ve worked on Washington lobbying efforts, and the other was by Heather Ray. Heather’s talk was of most interest to me, as it […]
APS meetings are great for showcasing science – the MiniBooNE result, top charge, gravity probe B – and for relating science and society. I’m at a discussion of Sputnik’s influence on US science education. It is astounding how a single trigger event can spur a President and a nation to […]
This morning’s plenaries have been great. We got a look at just how concordant the concordance model of cosmology. The amount of different information – supernovae, relic elemental abundances, CMB, and galactic clusters – that can be explained by dark matter, dark energy, and inflation is remarkable. Steven Chu’s talk […]
Yesterday at the talk on going from postdoc to your first tenure track job, the panel warned us not to go do the same thing we did in grad school. This shows your flexibility as a scientist, allegedly making you a abetter candidate. Today, as I watch how the long […]
After David Kestenbaum’s talk on the levee failure, I couldn’t help but to go chat with him. He’s a fascinating guy, and it’s a real privelege for the science community to have such an experienced scientist working in science journalism. He was a very relaxed guy, and still in awe […]
CDF and D0 were well represented by two students today, Per and Zeynep, who presented their measurements of the top quark charge. The standard model top must have charge 2/3, but a simple extension (adding a fourth quark generation) would give an exotic quark with mass 175 GeV, pushing the […]
I had the pleasure of chairing a session at APS , where students from Babar gave excellent talks about their frontier research. Now. David Kastenbaum from NPR, a PHD physicist from Harvard and the CDF experiment, is talking about canal failure in New Orleans.
There is a famous saying in my field: yesterday’s mystery is today’s discovery is tomorrows calibration. Although we havent finished all measurements of the top quark, we know a lot about it. At LHC, the top quark will be prduced in such great numbers over background, it will serve as […]
There are lots of families here at APS. Breakfast for “companions”, kids along for talks. Pretty cool to see the physics community act like a community.
Well, the opening talk is done. GPB has seen what they call “glimpses” of frame dragging, a critical prediction of GR. However, clearly not all experimental effects are understood. Looks like they are planning for a December final analysis…