Peter Steinberg is lecturing at a summer school in Florida, and has posted the slides for the three lectures he gave about recent work at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. The first lecture is linked from that post, and the other two are available (at the moment) from links on the sidebar.… Continue reading What’s Up With RHIC
Category: Experiment
Irrational Exuberance at the LHC
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has suffered some setbacks in recent months, but they aren’t letting that hold them back: CERN has announced that the Large Hadron Collider will switch on in May 2008, with collisions at full energy starting in summer 2008. “We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always… Continue reading Irrational Exuberance at the LHC
“Supersolids:” Make Up Your Mind, Already
The mysterious saga of “supersolid” helium continues this week. If you recall, there were some new results a little while back showing that the effect depends on disorder in the samples, followed by neutron scattering studies that didn’t show the expected distribution of states in the sample. These results suggest that something else is going… Continue reading “Supersolids:” Make Up Your Mind, Already
Frequency Combs and Astrophysics
Clifford Johnson is pointing to a pair of stories about extrasolar planets. One is a news piece about the “flood” of new discoveries, and the other is a Top 10 list from space.com (warning: irritating web design). This provides a good excuse to roll out a blog suggestion from Ron Walsworth, who pointed out a… Continue reading Frequency Combs and Astrophysics
To Automate or Not To Automate?
The Female Science Professor has a nice post about high and low tech data acquisition: An MS student has repeatedly questioned why he/she has to use a low-tech method to acquire, somewhat tediously, some data that could be acquired more rapidly with a higher-tech method. I say ‘more rapidly’ because the actual acquisition time once… Continue reading To Automate or Not To Automate?
Classic Edition: Master of None
A discussion in the back-channel forums reminded me about all the many things I’ve learned how to do badly in the course of my scientific training. My junior high shop teacher probably sprained something laughing the first time he heard that I was doing machine shop work as part of a research project, but it’s… Continue reading Classic Edition: Master of None
Tired of the LHC
There’s a big long Dennis Overbye article about the Large Hadron Collider in the Times today. The paginated version runs to seven or eight pages on the web, and Overbye is a good writer, so you can be fairly sure it’s exhaustive and detailed and interesting. I can’t say that authoritatively, though, because I got… Continue reading Tired of the LHC
Bubble Fusion Gets Weirder
The bizarre saga of Rusi Taleyarkhan (which I’ve mentioned before) keeps getting stranger. Previously, Purdue University had announced that it conducted an investigation of Taleyarkhan’s work and cleared him of any misconduct, without saying, well, anything much about the investigation. Now, after pressure from Congress on the question, the New York Times reports that they’re… Continue reading Bubble Fusion Gets Weirder
The Mystery of “Supersolid” Helium
One of the other ScienceBloggers is prone to complaining in the back-channel forums that we don’t have enough bloggers who work in some subfield of biology or another– we need more left-handed shrew ecologists, or some such. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. What we need is a physics blogger from the condensed matter world,… Continue reading The Mystery of “Supersolid” Helium
Coming Soon: Laser-Cooled Beer?
One of the things that I always have to explain toward the end of my laser cooling spiel is that the technique only works well for particular atoms. Somewhere on the high side of twenty different elements have been laser cooled and trapped, but the standard techniques don’t generalize well to even simple diatomic molecules,… Continue reading Coming Soon: Laser-Cooled Beer?