So, there’s a new issue of Physics World magazine out, with a bunch of feature stories on the Large Hadron Collider. Three of these are available free online: Life at the high-energy frontier, a sort of overview of the accelerator and the people involved. Expedition to inner space, a discussion of what they hope to… Continue reading Physics World on the LHC
Category: Physics
Wrong Answers are Infinite in Number
Last week, Mike Dunford was struggling with some teaching issues, relating to what level of effort he should expect from his students. His original decision drew some harsh criticism, both in his comments and from Sandra Porter, leading Mike to reconsider matters. I meant to comment at the time, but I gave an exam last… Continue reading Wrong Answers are Infinite in Number
COBE Nobel Follow-Up
The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday’s Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize– I’ll put some amusing anecdotes into another post. All the usual… Continue reading COBE Nobel Follow-Up
Congratulations to Tom Renbarger
A little while back, I offered a Nobel betting pool, and promised to allow anyone who successfully predicted the name of at least one of the winners of the Physics prize to pick a post topic here: If you correctly predict the name of at least one of the winning physicists, I’ll post an article… Continue reading Congratulations to Tom Renbarger
Dynamite Money for COBE
Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a… Continue reading Dynamite Money for COBE
Classic Edition: Needles in Haystacks Are Easy
The fourth and final post in my 2003 series attempting to explain experimental particle physics to the lay reader. This one talks about the specifics of the “pentaquark” experiment that was announced that year, and provided the inspiration for the whole thing. It should be noted that that discovery is by no means certain, but… Continue reading Classic Edition: Needles in Haystacks Are Easy
Classic Edition: Look Closer and It’s Easy to Trace…
This is the third in a series of posts covering the basics of particle physics, originally posted back in 2003. In this installment, I talk about some of the hardware involved, specifically the CLAS detector at Jefferson Lab, because I’ve heard a good number of talks about that. It should be noted that the inspiration… Continue reading Classic Edition: Look Closer and It’s Easy to Trace…
More Nobel Speculation
Blogging will be light today, as I’m giving an exam and making another magnet coil. I’ve also been working on getting the Blogger SAT Challenge results ready to go– big roll-out coming soon!– so I haven’t been able to pre-schedule posts. All I have time for this morning is a quick follow-up to yesterday’s betting… Continue reading More Nobel Speculation
Nobel Prize Betting Pool
Well, not really. That wouldn’t be legal. But the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 is scheduled to be announced next Tuesday, and this clearly calls for some irresponsible speculation. Who do you think will win? How about a guess as to what field of physics will be honored this year? If you think it’ll… Continue reading Nobel Prize Betting Pool
Classic Edition: Making Quarks Out of Nothing at All
This is the second of a set of old posts, dating back to 2003, discussing the business of experimental particle physics. In this installment, I talk about how you get exotic particles by slamming ordinary ones together at high speed.