Tonight, the Deep Impact NASA mission appears to have made history: the first probe, sent by our species, into the surface of a comet. This mission will shed new light on the early solar system as we break into this frozen snapshot. The first pictures are amazing – a white […]
Inspired by this insane buzz in my head (which, in turn, was inspired by “the lawsuit a Russian astrologer is bringing against NASA over it’s mission to comet Tempel-1”:http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hs4321766jun27,0,6528169.story?coll=ny-health-headlines), I think it’s time we take this whole issue of “probing the universe with bombs” more seriously. No, seriously. I’ve previously […]
It’s a little uncouth to post twice in a few minutes, but this “second article on the lawsuit by the Russian mother in the Seattle Times”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002347919_comet25.html escaped my attention when last I scanned news.google.com. Wowsers. You gotta love this quote: “If the Americans can study comets with the help of […]
This past week was immensely fruitful for my research. It was also the week where I was really able to concretely identify the road toward solving the problem of the worst background in my research. Let’s refresh a bit. I’m looking for invisible decays of the “Upsilon meson”:http://pdg.lbl.gov/2004/listings/mxxxcomb.html#mesonsbbbarres. Suppress your […]
It’s summer for physics. That means a “large number of physics conferences”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/conf/wwwbrief?rawcmd=FIND+DATE+%3E+MAY+2005+AND+DATE+%3C+OCTOBER+2005+AND+%28TITLE+PARTICLE+or+TITLE+LEPTON%29 and lots of results to get out the door. It also means all my MIT colleagues are right here at SLAC, instead of spread all over the place with teaching responsibilities,classes, exams, or travel. It also means that […]
Saturday morning is typically when Jodi and I make our weekly pilgrimage to “Stacks”, a local small restaurant chain that specializes in large “American” breakfasts – pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc. We particularly like the one in Menlo Park (corner of El Camino Real and Santa Cruz Ave.), not just because […]
As reported by the Associated Press, “the Kansas State Board of Education has started internal personal attacks over the issue of science education standards”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050615/ap_on_sc/evolution_debate;_ylt=Aq5Y1YhEiEiFnO2zSr2eYQUPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl. Some personal venom is being exchanged between the subcommittee members, who held their sham hearings on the Theory of Evolution, and those who would maintain the […]
If you haven’t already heard the program, “give a listen to the last episode of This American Life, where the program engaged the separation of church and state in public life”:http://www.thislife.org/ra/290.ram.
Well, “it looks like the Kansas State Board of Education is gearing up to revise state science education standards to try to make the theory of evolution look weak”:http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/061205/sta_20050612013.shtml. The subcommittee that held the hearings has made this recommendation, and the board is set to vote on the proposal to […]
Well, it’s vacation time for the Cooleys-Sekulas… er… Whatever that family name would be in the era of hyphenated names. Anyway, we’re on a Frontier Airlines flight over Iowa, on our way to Milwaukee. My brother-in-law’s wedding is on Saturday, and then we’re taking a few days to just travel […]
My friend Jonathan and I walked from the Scarrit-Bennet Center to the park on the other side of the Vanderbilt campus. In that park is a recreation (full-scale) of the Athenian Parthenon. I “snapped a whole bunch of photos”:http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/nashville2005 of the place, which was really phenomenal. It included a 2-3 […]
This is the last day of physics content meetings at the Frontiers in Contemporary Physics III meeting at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Today we closed with an overview of the theory of the strong interaction, referred to as “Quantum Chromodynamics”, or QCD. What amazed me was that this theory, whose […]