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, […]
Physics
263 posts
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 […]
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 […]