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” […]
Physics
257 posts
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 […]
When I was a senior at Yale, I decided to see how much I had really learned in junior year quantum mechanics by taking solid state physics. Solid state physics is the study of crystalline structures. It is an exercise in applying quantum mechanics – you have to have a […]
Crazy times, crazy times. I thought the summer would be busy, but it seems that I misjudged the autumn. There is a real press to get a bunch of analyses out the door and into publication, some of which I have my hands in. The batch system at SLAC is […]
It’s Nobel Prize season! I’m not a big fan of doing science for a prize, but I value the public impact that the prize has. For instance, today two American scientists, John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, were recognized with the prize for their tireless effort to realize the […]
Just in case I ever find myself doubting that I gave a seminar at the University of Chicago, here’s some proof!
The internet has only been available to me in starts and fits these past three days. It began with my departure from home via San Jose Airport to Denver, then onto Chicago. For the fourth time in three months, I was on my way to give a talk. This time, […]
It’s been a few days since I returned from Sweden. The flight back was uneventful, and I highly recommend Scandinavian Airlines for traveling to northern Europe. They were very nice, generous with food and alcohol, and nice planes. Not bad for cross-Atlantic coach! Today, I checked the workshop website and […]