For the past five months, my professional life has been a roller-coaster ride. My research is now a constant source of stress, as deadlines rapidly approach and MANY questions need to be answered. Adding to this is a broader concern about the future of my own field in this country. […]
Physics
263 posts
(Credit CERN) To see the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider installed in the CERN LHC tunnel is quite a sight. These magnets, along with the towering components of the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors, represent the very near future of my field. Each of these is a component in […]
Today, the National Academies concluded their decadal study of particle physics – EPP2010 – with the release of the multidisciplinary committee’s report. The EPP2010 report is several things. It is a strong cautionary bullhorn to the United States, telling us that ceding leadership in fundamental particle physics will pose more […]
The EPP2010 is released at 11:30 today. Here are my notes and thoughts. “EPP2010 Homepage”:http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bpa/EPP2010.html *11:30* Prompt beginning. Appearing: Harold Shapiro (chair), Sally Dawson (vice-chair), John Bagger, Takaaki Kajita. *11:31*: Opening remarks by Shapiro. This report lays otu the future of U.S. particle physics. The committee is 1/3 particle physicists, […]
One of the necessary conditions for the universe to have achieved a state in which it is completely dominated by matter is that it had to pass through a period of non-equilibirum. A moment of rapid expansion, or *inflation*, near the beginning of time would have been just such a […]
Today is an exciting day: the WMAP collaboration (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) has “released its three year data and data analysis”:http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/map_bibliography.cfm. I’ve just started looking through their results, but there is no doubt the precision cosmology they were able to do three years ago is even more exciting now! Recall […]
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 […]
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, […]