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 […]
Physics
260 posts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]