Jodi is currently in La Thuile, a mountain skiing town in northern Italy. She’s not there to ski, though – she’s presenting a comprehensive overview of direct-detection dark matter searches at the “20th Rencontres De Physique De La Vallee D’Aoste: Results And Perspective In Particle Physics”:http://www.pi.infn.it/lathuile/lathuile_2006.html. She’s one of many […]
Physics
257 posts
Sometimes I get so close to an objective in my research, I become utterly obsessed with it. I spent most of my life in graduate school in that state, chasing the results that eventually became the work of my thesis. This past week, I’ve been pushing hard to try to […]
The BaBar Collaboration meeting is over, and it was as exhausting and fulfilling as I had hoped. Despite the necessary shutdown to address the safety culture at SLAC (which occurred just over a year ago), we have bounced back with enthusiasm and science. The upcoming winter conferences will be a […]
Well, it is that time of year again. Actually, it’s that time of year again, again, again. This is the fourth BaBar collaboration meeting of the year, the one that most directly influences our work going into the particle physics winter conference schedule. We start on a Sunday so that […]
The universe is expanding. We sit on our tiny blue world in, as Douglas Adams put it, an unfashionable Western Spiral arm of a galaxy. This galaxy drifts lonely and unregarded, pulled along by the expansion of spacetime. As we sit here and wonder, the universe in contemplation of itself, […]
I love physics. I’ve spent my past few weekends reviewing all those chapters on relativity in introductory physics textbooks that I had to rush through as a student, just to prep for the exam. I’ve mixed into that whitewashed view of special relativity Einstein’s original papers (translated) on the subject, […]
The continuum. It’s not an “organization of intergalactic intelligent designers whose purpose seems to be constant irritation of Jean-Luc Picard”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28Star_Trek%29. The continuum is the ultimate expression of quantum mechanics. It is what nature does with energy when it converts to mass: generate a continuous distribution of random particles whose production […]
One of the deep truths of nature is that the universe, as it exists to our senses at human scales, does not behave the same at all other scales. For instance, when you and I describe the motion of a baseball through the air, we only have to enumerate the […]
“Symmetry Magazine”:http://www.symmetrymagazine.org, a publication spearheaded by Fermilab and SLAC, appears monthly and has articles that touch on particle physics at a level appropriate for all people. “Slashdot is carrying a link to this month’s article on an art exhibit by Jan-Henrik Anderson”:http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/10/12/1913203.shtml?tid=126&tid=14. It’s nice to see Symmetry Magazine getting some […]
WOW! I’m speechless. NOVA has outdone itself. My father e-mailed me excitedly earlier tonight to heap praise on “Einstein’s Big Idea”. It was really a remarkable combination of drama, history, and science. I’ve always liked “Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens” for that reason, but this takes the damn cake. What […]
In 1905, 100 years ago, Einstein experienced what we now call his “miracle year”, during which he published three seminal works in physics that opened the door to quantum mechanics and relativity. NOVA, the excellent PBS science program, celebrates this achievement with their program “Einstein’s Big Idea”:http://www.pbs.org/hplink/redir/wgbh/nova/einstein/, airing tonight on […]
Last week was a real killer. After I spent a tough but rewarding Monday at UCSF, it seemed I didn’t get a single minute to myself. Now that the professors in my group are back at MIT, I’m trying to make sure that the students are making progress and that […]