My next stop in the seminar tour is my previous workplace, MIT. I left yesterday evening for Boston, arriving around sunset. Traffic getting into the city was basically what I remembered, at least between I-84 and I-90 up by Worchester. I’ll be giving the Lab for Nuclear Science Colloquium today, […]
Physics
257 posts
My father asked me today, right before I took a jog, “Did you see that program called ‘The Next Big Bang’? Was it any good? I didn’t see it.” What program? I did some digging on the net, and found out that on Sept. 9 The History Channel aired (just […]
Every experiment has setbacks. The BaBar/PEP-II B-factory, in its quest to collect the largest sample of B mesons on the planet, was stymied along the way by pernicious vacuum leaks which limited the amount of current we could put into the collider. This, in turn, limited the rate at which […]
One of the side effects of going to an historic university like Cornell is to learn a little of the local history. My host for the day, who also arranged dinner at a local, popular restaurant called Moosewood, educated me a little on the local history of Ithaca and Cornell. […]
Today begins a nearly one-month odyssey. I leave my home in California, laptop in hand, and head east to start a seminar tour. I’m currently on an AirTran flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, where I’ll transfer to a flight to Rochester, NY. I’ll be grabbing a rental car in […]
ICHEP has ended, and while there were no truly stunning revelations at this conference it’s clear that a lot of great research is going on right now. The turn on of LHC is a nail-biter for everybody, inside and outside the experimental physics community. The launch of GLAST is seen […]
The first three days of the ICHEP conference have consisted entirely of parallel sessions on a variety of topics. Heavy quark physics, supersymmetry, CP violation and rare decays, exotic physics, computing and data analysis, particle astrophysics – too much for any one person to see! I did my fair share […]
No sooner did my plane land than I had a voicemail from a long-time friend and colleague. I made it from the terminal to the SEPTA rail system, where I had a very pleasant ride to the University City station. From there, it was just a short walk to Houston […]
When I traveled to ICHEP in Moscow in 2006, I kept a small leather-bound journal in my pocket to keep a record of my travels and my thoughts. I scribbled hot results from the conference in the book, which kept on going even when I couldn’t plug in my laptop. […]
This week begins the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). The conference is being held in Philadelphia. While this presents much less of an interesting travel story [1], this conference may prove to be quite interesting. The LHC has not yet started operations, so this will be the […]
The press release about the ηb discovery went out earlier this week, accompanied in SLAC Today with a very nice photo of the primary physics researchers working on the search. Looking back to the “winter of insanity” that started in December, I find it incredible that in such a short […]
This has been an exciting week. My own work may be soon coming to fruition, and I’m starting to the “pre-unblinding jitters”. I even took a walk from my office to the BaBar detector today, even in the oppressive heat, to relax. But what are “pre-unblnding jitters”? This is a […]