Just about one year ago, the Large Hadron Collider had a very well-intentioned opening ceremony. It was globally advertised, and along with the opening came a number of strange controversies over how the LHC would destroy the earth. It all soon passed when the reality of a complex frontier physics […]
Physics
257 posts
After some false starts trying to write this post yesterday, here we go. SLAC was treated to a visit by Secretary Chu, the U.S. Energy Secretary. Unlike previous people in his position, who showered the crowd with dumbed-down bureacro-babble and errant platitudes cobbled together from a patchwork misunderstanding of SLAC’s […]
I’ve spent the last three days of this week in an “undisclosed location”, and now that I’m returning home in preparation for my trip to Spain I’m happy to disclose my little vacation spot. I’ve been at Caltech with Jodi, who has been commuting here for a month now for […]
This summer was always going to be busy. Between executing my normal post-doctoral responsibilities, starting the ramp up on the ATLAS experiment, and getting ready to move to Dallas, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of down time. This only reminds me that I should have taken a vacation when […]
Between the heroin addict and the beat cop with the concussion, pale and leaning over a bucket, Professor Erwin Biggle was immensely uncomfortable. The Discovery Channel was droning in the corner, airing some reality TV show about a bunch of surly fisherman gutting tuna or some other horrible thing. The […]
Jodi and I were catching up on TV shows tonight; she’s recovering from yet another cold, plus some inexplicable abdominal pain that put her in the ER earlier this week, and I’m catching up on all the rest I lost worrying about her. We were really pleased to see that […]
As I announced in my professional blog the other day [1], Jodi and I will be joining the faculty at Southern Methodist University [2] in August. We are VERY excited about this – the move to Dallas, teaching, mentoring students, hiring post-docs, establishing our future research careers. We rarely have […]
This coming week is a BaBar Collaboration meeting, the first one since last fall when we celebrated the life of the B-factory with a one-day symposium. This is a chance to think ahead in the short-term about the winter conferences – just around the corner! – and to look to […]
I’ve been neglecting the science and journal aspects of this blog for some time. The reasons are good – I have been focusing on the things that have been demanding my time since the Christmas break. Mainly, faculty job search-related activities, ramping up for this year’s lobbying trip to Washington […]
I became enamored with physics in high school. I remember exactly the moment it happened. The moment it happened was after watching the documentary, “The Origin of the Universe”, hosted by science writer Tim Ferris. Four forces, binding the universe together, uniting at a colossal energy scale the first glimpses […]
It became official today (at least, all the news agencies seem to be treating it this way): Dr. Stephen Chu, director or Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), is President-elect Obama’s pick for the Secretary of Energy [1]. Chu shared the 1997 Nobel prize in physics for experiments in cooling and […]
With the help of a friend of mine, I was finally able to watch the Independent Lens program “The Atom Smashers”. The thoughts of this friend, Joe, are available on his blog [1]. Jodi and I watched the program together. We both felt the same thing – that the amazing […]