“Are you here for business or personal?” “Business,” I replied. “Sekula . . . is that Finnish?” “Lithuanian,” I said, “Sekulavich”. “Oh ya, that makes sense.” And with that, the passport control officer at Swedish customs waved me through. I found it interesting that my time in Sweden began with […]
Physics
257 posts
I’ve been taking a vacation from vacation. After returning from the Minnesota-Wisconsin-Illinois extravaganza, which was itself a recovery from Moscow, I spend the past few weeks recovering from vacation. At first, I was absolutely unmotivated to do anything. Writing the two talks, one for ICHEP and a much longer one […]
Yesterday, Jodi and I spent the day in Madison, WI. This is where, about three years ago, we graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with our degrees in physics. We took this opportunity not only to seek out our old haunts, but also to catch up with the groups that […]
A few days ago, a critical piece of evidence was gathered [ARXIVDM]. This evidence was needed to discern between two possibilities: either 84% of the matter in our universe is “dark” – non-luminous, invisible to most means of detecting it – or is due to a modification of gravity at […]
I’ll comment on this more later. For now, here is the reference: “http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608407”:http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608407.
One of the many reasons I am a physicist is the influence of my father. I had previously commented on the role my mother’s father, “pop-pop”, played on my choice to pursue science as part of my life. However, the role my father played in engaging me in challenging questions, […]
An article appeared recently [CNNPhysics], written by Gregory Mone, a member of the writing staff at Popular Science. In the title of the article, he posed the question “Can this machine rescue physics?”. This article came to my attention when members of the BaBar collaboration began to comment on it. […]
I think that much of the public forgets that scientists, including physicists, are people, too. Partly, this is because of the myth of the scientist – the recluse, the weirdo, the hubris. Partly, this is because often the most outspoken scientists are, indeed, the reclusive, weirdo, snobs. It’s the greater […]
My “day off” in the mine has been anything but. Well, to be fair, I volunteered. I had planned to spend the day catching up on news, listening to some statistics lectures from SLAC [SLUOStats], and generally take photos of all the cool stuff down here in the Soudan Mine […]
I’m scheduled to give the “wine and cheese” seminar at “Fermilab”:http://www.fnal.gov on August 25, so part of my vacation has to be spent writing slides for the talk. I’m planning to give the audience a promenade through recent results using searches for leptonic decays of heavy mesons. BaBar is what […]
The plenary sessions at ICHEP were what I was most looking forward to, but they didn’t really deliver. I expected to catch some results that I missed during the parallels in the summary talks, but there wasn’t too much “hot stuff” that I hadn’t already seen. What was very clear […]
Time for another installment of my ICHEP Journal. I kept notes on all the parallel sessions I attended. I tried to mix it up: astrophysics, heavy quark physics, spectroscopy and new states, computing. I tried to avoid topics that are typical to BaBar, things I ought to know, unless there […]