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 […]
It’s the end of day two of the “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics” conference here at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. The days are divided into two large subsections: plenary talks, from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30-4:30 in the afternoon, followed by 1-1.5 hours of parallel sessions on a variety […]
I am in Nashville, TN for the third in the conference series “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics”:http://www.fcp05.vanderbilt.edu/. This conference is held at Vanderbilt University, a lovely Methodist university nestled just beside the heart of Nashville. I arrived late last night and spent today finishing my talks, then taking a walk around […]
It’s great to be back in the Midwest. It’s almost a rare pleasure to be here anymore, now that I’m not a student in Wisconsin. I’m back at Fermilab once more for a meeting of the Braidwood neutrino experiment collaboration. We’ve got two days of packed sessions, discussing everything from […]