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 […]
Physics
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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 […]
My wife and I cozied up on the futon tonight to watch the 10 o’clock airing of “Faith Under Fire” on PAX, a cable TV network with ostensibly religious overtones to its programming. I was interested in seeing how the religious side, represented by its own media, framed this debate. […]
I was a graduate student at the Universe of Wisconsin-Madison from 1998-2004. When I first moved there, I lived in a studio apartment on Spring St., two blocks from the physics department. I also happened to live right behind the geology department. While thumbing through “Yahoo! News”:http://news.yahoo.com tonight when I […]
I am on shift today, here in building 5 (the SLAC accelerator main control center, or MCC). I am filling the shift position referred to as “liaison”, and my job is to make sure that the experiment (Babar) know’s what the accelerator (LINAC and PEP) is doing, and vice versa. […]