Yesterday, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to two physicists – Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald – who made leading contributions to the discovery that neutrinos, very difficult-to-detect subatomic particles, can actually change from one kind to another kind spontaneously. This is called “neutrino oscillation” or […]
[I am posting this now after a bit of a hiatus. It’s been a busy and somewhat unpredictable summer. See below.] I’ve gone silent for may weeks primarily out of a re-prioritization of my time since returning from CERN. It was a very busy finish to the work period at […]
This was a very good week at CERN. We made some progress on identifying clear physics topics of exploration in the context of Run 2 physics involving H → bb decays. It was the week of the US ATLAS Meeting. Oh, and our new summer grad students arrived on Saturday. […]
It has been an exciting couple of weeks since arriving at CERN. I have been bouncing from hotel to hostel, but mostly getting some physics done. I even found time to take a weekend in Barcelona and visit an old friend of mine. But, the work continues. Meantime, here are […]
It’s been a busy month, and the only reason I am pausing to jot all this down is because I have a cold, and I don’t feel like doing much of anything else. So, let’s do it! The month of May brought with it the end of teaching, graduation, family […]
This was an incredibly busy month, and I’ve only had time to slow down and breath a little bit this weekend. So let’s review – it helps to put things in perspective. The last 2.5 weeks were mostly filled with preparations for the end of the semester – the third […]
It’s time for another episode of Steve traveling backward in time! It’s my week in review, another look back at the week that was in my little web log. This week was one of mixed emotions. I’ve begun the last formal topic in my introductory physics course (optics); I received […]
The past couple of weeks have been extremely busy. Jodi and I were traveling last week, finally meeting up in Seattle for a conference; I gave my second exam in my introductory physics class; there were computer woes that greatly slowed down some ATLAS work; we had some car trouble […]
It’s that time again – time to think back long and hard on the week that was. The past 7 days were filled with something called “Spring Break,” though I haven’t worked this hard since the fall semester. While this was far from a vacation, it was productive. That wayward […]
This was a mixed week, filled with ruined plans and bad weather. Considering this week was the run up to Spring Break, it was a downer. There was sleet and snow; a power supply that never showed up; a backup power supply that FedEx couldn’t deliver as promised; more adventures […]
The past week was a busy one: judging at the Dallas Regional Science and Engineering Fair (DRSEF), the Dallas “Icepocalypse” that shut down SMU for 1.5 days and led to a ridiculous amount of work getting done, meetings with my students about their “Grand Challenge Physics Problem,” SMU Research Day, […]
I thought it might be nice to use this blog to . . . you know . . . actually blog. “Blog” is derived from “Web Log,” a journal or log kept by a person but broadcast publicly on the web. So in this week’s inaugural “Anti-Steve” [1], here are […]