About a year ago, I discovered the book “It Takes a Family” by Senator Rick Santorum. I commented on this book’s views on the scientific theories of both evolution and the big bang, as well as its attitudes toward a theory of multiple universes [TAOMPH96]. In short, I was unimpressed […]
I am currently in Killingworth, CT, spending a very wonderful day with my mother and father. I arrived last night, after landing in Newark and driving to Connecticut. But,I digress. How did this trip begin? I was originally scheduled to give a seminar at Princeton, but it turns out that […]
What seems like a very long time ago, my family took a vacation. Vacations were a near rarity in my family – by which I mean the kind of textbook, campy Americana vacation depicted in movies. We spent lots of time at the beach, and plenty of time just hanging […]
Jodi and I have been working our asses off to prepare job applications. We’ve just finished the most grueling of them, and while largely this was a painful experience there was good, too. I learned a lot about what Jodi has accomplished since graduate school. This may sounds ridiculous – […]
Tonight’s Nova, which focused on the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, got me thinking back to Jodi’s graduate research. “Monster of the Milky Way”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/ was a fun tour of the physics of black holes, the science behind their detection, and the road of discovery on the […]
I am lame. We established that a while ago [TAOMPH243]. Every now and then, I punch my name, or my domain name, into Google and Yahoo to see what turns up. Most recently, I’ve been curious to see if the changeover from cooleysekula.net to cooleysekula.net had taken in the search […]
I’ve had the privelege of participating in lobbying Congress about science for almost half a decade, and in that time I have seen scientists take more steps to raise their public profile. We have been graced by a number of opportunities to engage the public, and the government, about our […]
My dad is a chemistry teacher, and a chemist by training. Naturally, a son who wound up as a physicist (and a daughter who married a physicist) must be a great disappointment to such a proud man. I’m kidding, of course, except the part about my sister marrying a physicist. […]
I like “Numb3rs”. Not just the kind that let you do math, but also the TV show that attempts to popularize the life and minds of scientists. Centering on the stories of Charlie, a math prodigy and the youngest full faculty member at “CalPoly” (clearly modeled on CalTech), and his […]
The International Linear Collider, a cornerstone of future progress in physics, is many years away. But as I am constantly reminded, the seeds of groundbreaking experiments are planted in one decade, to be harvested in another. BaBar, the experiment I work on here at SLAC, is an example. Conceived of […]
This has been quite a set of seasons for me and Jodi. The whole thing started for us just before the summer, as we were getting ready for our variety of shifts and analyses. I popped off to Moscow, then we headed to Minnesota for my vacation and her shifts, […]
When I was a senior at Yale, I decided to see how much I had really learned in junior year quantum mechanics by taking solid state physics. Solid state physics is the study of crystalline structures. It is an exercise in applying quantum mechanics – you have to have a […]