This was my first week as a faculty member at Southern Methodist University. It was pretty low-key, full of paperwork and unpacking. I was excited to choose anoffice and start moving in – that makes a place feel more like a home than a job. Let me step back and […]
Science
449 posts
Global climate change, war, the economy – progress in all three of these things depend on innovating America’s energy demand to sustainable and acceptable levels, then exporting that innovation to the world before somebody else beats us to it. Tied to this is water conservation, and the need integrate stellar […]
When Galileo Galilei composed his treatise on cosmology, collecting his own many observations of the natural world into a coherent argument, he chose to present the work as a dialogue among three men. One of them, Salviati, spoke for Galileo, and the other two (Sagredo and Simplicio) represented the voices […]
Michael Pollan’s name keeps popping up. This past week, I listened to his excellent discussion on one of the local radio forum programs. As the author of several popular books on our relationship with food, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] and “In Defense of Food”, he has become the de […]
After some false starts trying to write this post yesterday, here we go. SLAC was treated to a visit by Secretary Chu, the U.S. Energy Secretary. Unlike previous people in his position, who showered the crowd with dumbed-down bureacro-babble and errant platitudes cobbled together from a patchwork misunderstanding of SLAC’s […]
I took a break this afternoon, met up with Jodi and her colleagues, and went out for coffee. While sitting outside, sipping our drinks, one of the students pulled out his mobile phone and showed a picture to Jodi. He said that he was reminded to show the photo since […]
In all my years as a post-doc, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with a number of students. There have been a few to whom I have been more of a mentor than to others, and in the last year both of them have successfully defended their theses. They […]
Well, I decided to go through with it. I kept an audio diary of my trip to Washington. I think it conveys better than writing some of the emotions of the trip. I didn’t get to do interviews, like I wanted – there was just no good time to actually […]
Each year, about 50 physicists from all across the United States and, in a few cases, the globe, converge on Washington D.C. to bring messages to our lawmakers. These messages include thanks, first and foremost, for the support we receive for science. High-energy physics is a difficult enterprise to sell […]
Next week, I will be co-leading a team of physicists from the SLAC community to Washington D.C. As I remarked in my professional blog, the number of research physicists in Washington D.C. may spike next week in a historically unique way [1]. I haven’t done any audio projects in a […]
This last week’s episode of the TV show “Bones”, named “The Science in the Physicist”, featured the Large Hadron Collider. Specifically, a suspect in the murder of a theoretical physicist sent over a hundred death threats to the victim because he feared the end of the world when the LHC […]
The weekly critical look at the media, NPR’s “On the Media”, did a piece on the changes to Texas science standards. It’s a good piece, and has the great quote from TEA Chairman McLeroy about “standing up to experts”. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/03/01