On my seminar tour, I took the opportunity to ask about the status of the LHC. I knew, by the end of my first group of seminars, that the damage to the accelerator was extensive in one section and that a lot of work was needed to repair it. I […]
Physics
257 posts
It seems that I cannot watch the Independent Lens program, “The Atom Smashers” [1], on my local PBS stations. Help! I really want to see this program. If you know of a (legit) way to get it on the internet, let me know. Maybe it’ll appear on the website, maybe […]
This weekend my wife and I drove down to the Monterey area for two reasons. The first was a delayed celebration of our wedding anniversary; I was traveling for my seminar tour during the actual anniversary. The second was so that she could run the Big Sur half-marathon, and I […]
In the last few weeks – and, indeed, years – I am more and more stuck by the fact that physicists are not wide-spread open-source consumers. I’ll give a key example, and then conclude. Microsoft Office. It’s offered for cheap to institutions, especially adademic ones, in order to get people […]
The past five days have been interesting for the CDF experiment. First, their paper appeared on the arXiv [1] – a voluminous tome – which, if one was patient enough to read carefully, suggested that they have some excess of multi-muon events which appear to initiate far from the collision […]
Today was my favorite day of the year – the day we set our clocks back one hour. Sure, the sun now sets one hour earlier; on the other hand, it’s safer to jog on the road in the morning. Most important of all, it was a chance to steal […]
PCSD is the feeling of accomplishment after a collaboration meeting, accompanied by the tremendous stress of knowing you just got 50 new things to do. I can only imagine what this must be like for a larger experiment, and oddly enough my observations of smaller experiments suggests this effect plateaus, […]
Well, it’s that time again: time to collaborate in person. BaBar has its autumn collaboration meeting this week, starting tomorrow morning. I have so much work to do before I present in a few days. God. That one month trip was great, but things have a tendency to pile up […]
For many years, I have felt daunted by the quantum structure of nature. Don’t get me wrong – I studied it in lab class and I read a lot about it in my textbooks. It’s one thing to repeat an old experiment, or read a book; it’s quite another to […]
With all the hooplah about the proposed $700B bail out of bad Wall St. investments, the fact that the United States is now on a continuing budget resolution went completely unnoticed by the press. I’ll bet this escaped everybody’s attention. It didn’t escape physicists’ attention. You can find links to […]
I finally had a chance to watch “The Next Big Bang” tonight. I actually enjoyed it a lot. Apart from the beautiful shots of the LHC experiments and seeing faces I recognize, I thought the sampling of physics topics was great. I especially noticed the focus on dark matter, then […]
Yesterday, I had the great pleasure and privelege of presenting BaBar’s recent work on the bottomonium system to an audience at the MIT Lab for Nuclear Science Colloquium. This was my first colloquium, and I’m told it went quite well. I got some great questions afterward, which I intend to […]