One of the necessary conditions for the universe to have achieved a state in which it is completely dominated by matter is that it had to pass through a period of non-equilibirum. A moment of rapid expansion, or *inflation*, near the beginning of time would have been just such a […]
Today is an exciting day: the WMAP collaboration (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) has “released its three year data and data analysis”:http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/map_bibliography.cfm. I’ve just started looking through their results, but there is no doubt the precision cosmology they were able to do three years ago is even more exciting now! Recall […]
Jodi is currently in La Thuile, a mountain skiing town in northern Italy. She’s not there to ski, though – she’s presenting a comprehensive overview of direct-detection dark matter searches at the “20th Rencontres De Physique De La Vallee D’Aoste: Results And Perspective In Particle Physics”:http://www.pi.infn.it/lathuile/lathuile_2006.html. She’s one of many […]
This weekend, as in last weekend, the San Francisco bay area is under a severe wind advisory. Last weekend, this meant nearly 100 mph winds in the bay around San Francisco, and 50 mph winds where I live. A series of rather unpleasant winter storms, gliding down the coast from […]
Every year, once a year, scientists who conduct research at the “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu and the “Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL)”:http://www.fnal.gov travel to Washington DC to lobby on behalf of particle physics and the physical sciences. This is a banner year for this visit, because the “President has […]
Sometimes I get so close to an objective in my research, I become utterly obsessed with it. I spent most of my life in graduate school in that state, chasing the results that eventually became the work of my thesis. This past week, I’ve been pushing hard to try to […]
These entries are going to be more sporadic than they used to, not because my life is super-boring right now, but because my life is super-hectic right now. When I’m not working on my primary or secondary research projects, or my muon veto system simulation, I am working with the […]
The winter conferences are nearly upon the BaBar collaboration, and many deadlines are fast approaching. While my own work is far from ready for presentation at a conference, a lot of the physicists who work in my physics working group are getting fired up for them. As a result, I’m […]
I am a post-doctoral researcher, employed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research is funded by a grant from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Most of my colleagues who are also university scientists are similarly funded either by the DOE or the National Science Foundation (NSF). I […]
The President’s State of the Union address [StateOfTheUnionEarly] was pretty boilerplate, at least for this President. He emphasized all the things we expect him to these days: war on terrror, exporting democracy, domestic security, etc. There were a few notable things that jumped out at me as a scientist, and […]
Toward the late afternoon, I left my office and went down to Stanford’s main campus from SLAC. I had been at SLAC since 7:30 that morning, with a morning spent in meetings and my afternoon spent doing actual, honest-to-God research. Jodi’s book club met tonight, so I decided to just […]
This was a tiring weekend. Saturday was the day of the planning meeting for the annual SLAC and Fermilab Users’ trip to Washington D.C. I have a leadership role in the trip this year, and I got only about 10 hours of sleep between Thursday and Saturday. This trip is […]