Today I had the *immense* pleasure of a day away from SLAC. Wait a second. That sounded all wrong. You see, the pleasure was not in the separation from my laboratory; the pleasure was the company I kept while away, and the work I got to do. I got into […]
Physics
257 posts
My colleague “Caolionn O’Connell has written a PSA for physics”:http://qd.typepad.com/13/2005/09/public_service_.html. I don’t know why, but I kept thinking about that Prairie Home Companion skit about how being an English major teaches you the life skills you need to succeed. Then again, success in physics really does prepare you to solve […]
This labor day weekend, I am setting aside the sacrifices of my ancestors.These brave men and later, women, struggled to free themselves of the oppressive bonds of the industrial elite. The won their rights, they won their dignity, and for that we should be eternally grateful. But, here I am, […]
Sometimes, University of Maryland physicist Bob Park has an uncanny knack for hitting every week’s science and society issues right on their collective head. This week is an excellent example. “Just go and read all his comments”:http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN05/wn090205.html. From women’s health and the growingly arbitrary definition of “life”, to the irrefutable […]
This month’s issue of Physics Today contains an article entitled “Evolution Wars Show No Sign of Abating”:http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-8/p24.html. It’s free on the web, for all you non-subscribers (and I know there are just a few of you!). It’s a nice, but (as usual) scary, overview of this confusing mess into which […]
In this, the third in a series of short essays about the structure of our universe, I will introduce you to a mysterious and elusive particle, the neutrino. This essay will do the work of three, since there are three different kinds of neutrinos. Their histories are closely linked, so […]
August is a “dead month” for my collaboration, on a variety of levels. This is the standard European vacation season, so ~half of my collaboration is winking in and out of existence. This happens to be a month I **don’t** like to vacate, mostly because it’s quiet and I can […]
I’ve had the pleasure and the pain of being a BaBar reviewer for the past year on an analysis of the rare process b->sγ. This analysis has been in preparation for years, and believe it or not the analysts (and the review committee) worked on this thing pretty much continuously […]
This week was a very exciting week, both for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (“SLAC”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu), where I do my research, and for me personally. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman, a member of the U.S. Cabinet and head of the U.S. Department of Energy, visited SLAC to learn more about the […]
What a week. Busy, busy, busy! Let’s start at the beginning. BaBar is engrossed in its fifth run, which we aptly denote “Run 5”. A lot of things changed in the accelerator and detector when we shutdown for the 2004 upgrade last fall. It’s critical, given such changes, to validate […]
It’s summer for physics. That means a “large number of physics conferences”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/conf/wwwbrief?rawcmd=FIND+DATE+%3E+MAY+2005+AND+DATE+%3C+OCTOBER+2005+AND+%28TITLE+PARTICLE+or+TITLE+LEPTON%29 and lots of results to get out the door. It also means all my MIT colleagues are right here at SLAC, instead of spread all over the place with teaching responsibilities,classes, exams, or travel. It also means that […]
This is the last day of physics content meetings at the Frontiers in Contemporary Physics III meeting at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Today we closed with an overview of the theory of the strong interaction, referred to as “Quantum Chromodynamics”, or QCD. What amazed me was that this theory, whose […]