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 […]
Physics
260 posts
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 […]
It’s the end of day two of the “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics” conference here at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. The days are divided into two large subsections: plenary talks, from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30-4:30 in the afternoon, followed by 1-1.5 hours of parallel sessions on a variety […]
It’s great to be back in the Midwest. It’s almost a rare pleasure to be here anymore, now that I’m not a student in Wisconsin. I’m back at Fermilab once more for a meeting of the Braidwood neutrino experiment collaboration. We’ve got two days of packed sessions, discussing everything from […]
Crazy. And there’s not enough time in the day to suffer crazy. Why are things crazy? Well, I’m in the honorable position of giving three presentations in the next three weeks (not one a week, or I’d be less stressed). This Thursday night I head to Fermilab to attend a […]
**YAWN**. This was a loooooooooong week. When I was a graduate student it was “no big deal” [1] to have four 8-hour shifts, plus normal meetings and work. Although I was expecting to sleep-in today, I was a little amazed that I slept until 1 pm. I can’t say I’ve […]
Ah, shifts. I love them. It’s the stuff that brings you as close to the experiment as a casual particle experimentalist gets these days. If I were a systems expert, I have my hands deep in the warm guts of the detector every day. But I am not, and so […]
It’s gearing up to be a rich spring, and a richer summer. Winter and Summer are the times of year most densely populated by high-energy physics conferences. The biggies for my field are the winter-time Moriond QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics) and EW (ElectroWeak) conferences, followed usually in the late spring/early summer […]
In this, the second in a series of short essays on the known fundamental building blocks of our universe, I will introduce you to a colorful character that has played an ever-evolving role in physics: the *muon*. In units of the electron mass (which I shall here denote me), the […]
In this first of a series of informational briefs about the fundamental nature of our universe, I want to discuss the electron. This is the first of the current set of building blocks which was discovered, and is a key player in the field of high-energy physics to this day. […]
This year is the “World Year of Physics”:http://www.physics2005.org/, as declared by the United Nations to honor the memory of Einstein’s “annus mirabilis” of 1905. That was the year that Einstein published his three ground-breaking papers on; (1) the photoelectric effect, establishing the particle or “quantum” nature of light; (2) the […]