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 […]
Physics
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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 […]
Physics is a good story. The muon collider is one amazing chapter in that story, one which has yet to be written but which has been colorfully outlined. Jodi’s experiences at the WIN07 conference in India reminded me tonight of this incredible instrument, and I want to here share my […]
Jodi’s ability to connect to the internet from Calcutta has been intermittent, but I’ve managed to get a few things out of her in the last 24 hours. After the initial culture shock (don’t drink the water . . . in fact, don’t even let it touch your teeth), she […]
The international linear collider will be the most powerful, most precise probe of the universe ever constructed on the Earth. The Large Hadron Collider, currently in the final stages of construction, will crack open the Terascale. Most physicists believe, based on knowing where our current theory of nature fails to […]
I’ve been picked on for watching Gilmore Girls. I’ve also been picked on for watching “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. In fact, I once mocked a good friend of mine for doing just that. But seemingly stupid TV can actually hide many nuggets of great writing and acting. “Buffy” […]
What seems like a very long time ago, my family took a vacation. Vacations were a near rarity in my family – by which I mean the kind of textbook, campy Americana vacation depicted in movies. We spent lots of time at the beach, and plenty of time just hanging […]