Physics

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…

APS begins! We start with the first results from GPB. This probe orbits earth and makes a critical test of general relativity.

After a delay in Denver, a race to catch my Charlotte flight, and then a half-our delay before we were first to take off, I finally arrive in Jacksonville. It’s quite nice here. As with most American cities, there seems to be this strange intermingling of poverty and development. A […]

The American Physical Society meeting begins on Saturday morning, and I’m getting ready to hop a super-early flight tomorrow to get to Jacksonville at a reasonable hour. It’s a trade-off, one with which any cross-country business traveler is well acquainted. I intend to keep a record of my adventures at […]

Today, I decided to work from the third floor of the Varian physics building. None of my MIT colleagues are around SLAC, and the office building where I work gets a little lonely between collaboration meetings. Nonetheless, I have no lack of work to do and I find getting away […]

NPR is featuring several stories about the LHC on their programming today. For starters, check out this report from “Morning Edition”, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9433495 Tonight, on “All Things Considered”, they will continue their coverage. Exciting! I like that the report covers all the possibilities, including the possibility that nothing will be found […]

There are rumors in the particle physics community: MiniBooNE is releasing its results this week. A lot of people are muttering about it, with both hope and concern. MiniBooNE, the “miniature” version of the Booster Neutrino Experiment (BOONE), is a neutrino experiment based at Fermilab. It takes the low-energy protons […]

The future of U.S. high-energy physics is uncertain, and as a consequence I have had a lot on my mind of late. This entry will be the first in a series of essays on messages: messages to the American people, to the Congress, and to the physics community. This time, […]

It’s conference season again for particle physics. We’ve just passed through the period known as the “Winter Conferences” — Lake Louise, La Thuile, and Moriond are notable highlights from that period. BaBar unveiled the discovery of D-meson matter/antimatter mixing at Moriond, and one can expect many experiments to similarly unveil […]

Yesterday, Barry Barish (the head of the International Linear Collider Global Design Effort) came to SLAC to deliver the weekly Monday colloquium. I was very excited about this particular colloquium. It’s the first that Mr. Barish has given at SLAC since the GDE cost estimate was completed and made public […]

Dirac matrices. Spinors. Matrix elements. Trace rules. These are just a few phrases describing how I spent my Sunday. You see, on Friday when I gave an overview of my recent work to one of the SLAC research groups, I got a question early on that I could not answer. […]