I decided that, despite my claims in a recent post, I might have an optical instrument in the house with more power than those binoculars. I charged up the Sony handicam and set it up on its tripod. A quick look at Kstars gave the rough coordinates of Jupiter in […]
It’s a cool, grey, overcast day here in Redwood City. It’s not raining – at least, it’s not supposed to rain. However, the sky is the color of dusty milk and there is a gentle breeze that makes shorts and a tee-shirt a little uncomfortable. That’s why I was so […]
It was in the early 1600s that Galileo gazed at the heavens with his telescope and first saw the mountain and scars on the moon, the moons of jupiter, and many other wonders. Tonight, here on the West Coast, it’s a nearly cloudless night. I decided to step outside into […]
My wife has gone off for two weeks to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Her trip is one of mixed business and personal events. First, she went to her home in the northwoods for a wedding shower. Then she’s off to Minnesota for a stint at the Soudan Mine, where her experiment […]
Peer review is the basis of good science publication standards. Papers are sent to journals and the journal collects a group of experts in the field so that the material can be reviewed. A positive review of the work lends itself toward obtaining publication; a negative review, depeding on the […]
The catholic church has “just selected its new Pope”:http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=1&u=/ap/20050420/ap_on_re_eu/pope&sid=84439559. Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, will soon begin his reign as Pope of the Catholic Church. In that role, he will affect the lives of a billion people on this planet. While not all catholics share the same views […]
Just before heading to bed tonight, I was goofing about on Google (doing that hubris-filled “search for your own name” thing) and found a link that brought me back to my youth. My dad used to run a bulletin board system (BBS) from our home. In their golden era, the […]
It’s gearing up to be a rich spring, and a richer summer. Winter and Summer are the times of year most densely populated by high-energy physics conferences. The biggies for my field are the winter-time Moriond QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics) and EW (ElectroWeak) conferences, followed usually in the late spring/early summer […]
In this, the second in a series of short essays on the known fundamental building blocks of our universe, I will introduce you to a colorful character that has played an ever-evolving role in physics: the *muon*. In units of the electron mass (which I shall here denote me), the […]
There’s a lot going on in our nation right now regarding the pushing of faith into the science classroom. As a scientist, I am watching this issue with great concern. Although the struggle over the content of science class challenges primarily my colleagues in biology and medicine (i.e. those who […]
The Dope on Runners Athletics in the U.S. has recently been put under a microscope, and why not? Olympic runners accused of doping, baseball superstars telling all about their steroid use. Let’s face it, U.S. athletics has become as disgraceful as English football. Now, according to a study published in […]
In this first of a series of informational briefs about the fundamental nature of our universe, I want to discuss the electron. This is the first of the current set of building blocks which was discovered, and is a key player in the field of high-energy physics to this day. […]