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. […]
Physics
263 posts
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 […]
Jodi and I have been working our asses off to prepare job applications. We’ve just finished the most grueling of them, and while largely this was a painful experience there was good, too. I learned a lot about what Jodi has accomplished since graduate school. This may sounds ridiculous – […]
Tonight’s Nova, which focused on the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, got me thinking back to Jodi’s graduate research. “Monster of the Milky Way”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/ was a fun tour of the physics of black holes, the science behind their detection, and the road of discovery on the […]
My dad is a chemistry teacher, and a chemist by training. Naturally, a son who wound up as a physicist (and a daughter who married a physicist) must be a great disappointment to such a proud man. I’m kidding, of course, except the part about my sister marrying a physicist. […]
The International Linear Collider, a cornerstone of future progress in physics, is many years away. But as I am constantly reminded, the seeds of groundbreaking experiments are planted in one decade, to be harvested in another. BaBar, the experiment I work on here at SLAC, is an example. Conceived of […]