The Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane, or LSM, is located directly adjacent to the Italy-France border. Nestled below the Frejus Peak and connected to the Frejus Road Tunnel (a 13km underground highway currently under expansion), the laboratory can be driven into and shields its projects with a maximum of 1700m of […]
physics
This week will be something of an intense travel exercise. I am off to a 2-day workshop at the Modane Underground Laboratory on the border of France and Italy. To get there, I leave on a flight (today) from Toronto to Paris, connecting through New York. This puts me into […]
What is a work vacation? It’s when you keep working but do it from a different location than your work site. My own experience with this is that doing this can vastly improve productivity while serving the interests of your employer and yourself. Last week, I had something of a […]
I have decided to wake up nice and early today to watch the live stream of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement. It will likely begin later than scheduled, but the formal event should begin around 5:45am ET. I’ll post here as the event unfolds. I am very curious […]
I woke up a little late this morning. I wanted to be up at 4:30am. It was 4:40 when I realized the alarm I had set the night before was going off, and I pulled myself out of bed. Jodi was already up, working on her class prep for the […]
There has been too much happening this summer to stop and write about it. Instead, here are scenes and some short verses describing this summer so far. Needless to say, if there wasn’t even time to write… it was one heck of a ride.
I am on an approved leave from teaching and university service this semester so that I can focus on research. While I’ve had a number of things going since before the New Year, the last two weeks have been the start of the “traveling” phase of my semester. For me, […]
100 years ago, Albert Einstein published what is considered the foundational work of his theory of “General Relativity,” a scientific theory of space and time. Tomorrow, two large experiments and collaborations – LIGO and VIRGO – will present the status of their searches for one of the last undiscovered predictions […]
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 […]
For the second time, I will be attending the Rencontres de Blois, a yearly conference that represents a convergence (perhaps even a conversation) between cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics, and particle physics. Held in the Chateau de Blois, a castle perched above the Loire River in Blois, France, this conference will bring […]
I am Stephen Sekula, an Assistant Professor of Physics at SMU conducting research on the ATLAS Experiment. These comments will be my own, and I will try to take a broad view. Let me begin by thanking the members of the Panel for this opportunity to speak, and let me […]