APS begins! We start with the first results from GPB. This probe orbits earth and makes a critical test of general relativity.
Physics
260 posts
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. […]
This past Friday, on “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday”, a half-hour of the two-hour program was devoted to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Higgs particle [SciFriLHC]. The guests were luminaries of the hadron and future collider world – the spokesman of the CDF collaboration at Fermilab (Konigsberg), […]
The Higgs – no, we haven’t found it yet. Physicists have long talked about it. We’ve been building and running machines for decades, trying to zero in on it. Back in the eighties, most physicists seemed to think it was a low-mass particle and looked for evidence of it at […]