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 […]
Physics
260 posts
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 […]
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, […]
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. […]