My Corporate Masters have finally posted the piece that ran in the most recent print edition of the magazine, in which prominent physicists comment on the LHC. They’ve got predictions and explanations of why the LHC is interesting from an impressive array of people. Most of the answers are pretty predictable. Lisa Randall talks about… Continue reading Seed on the Large Hadron Collider
Category: Physics
Classic Edition: Clever Tricks and Cooling
I’m going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don’t want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I’m going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I’m away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts… Continue reading Classic Edition: Clever Tricks and Cooling
Classic Edition: Not Just Air Conditioning the Laser Lab
I’m going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don’t want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I’m going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I’m away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts… Continue reading Classic Edition: Not Just Air Conditioning the Laser Lab
Classic Edition: Shut Up and Calculate, Already
I’m going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don’t want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I’m going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I’m away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts… Continue reading Classic Edition: Shut Up and Calculate, Already
How Do You Judge an Interpretation?
Matt Leifer, whose blog I hadn’t previously encountered, has a long and fascinating post on evaluation criteria for quantum interpretations. “Interpretation” here means the stuff of countless “Isn’t Quantum Mechanics weird?” books– Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian hidden variable theories, all that stuff. These are the “meta-theories” that are used to explain how you get from all… Continue reading How Do You Judge an Interpretation?
Fun With Diode Lasers
I ended the previous laser post by noting that diode lasers need some additional wavelength selection to be done in order to be useful as light sources for spectroscopy experiments. In their natural state, they tend to emit light over a broader range of wavelengths than is really ideal, and we’d like to narrow that… Continue reading Fun With Diode Lasers
So, CERN Has a Particle Accelerator?
A little while back, JoAnne at Cosmic Variance reported on the status of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant next-generation accelerator that is the cover story for the current print issue of Seed. Particle experimentalist Gordon Watts reports in with some more technical details about the delay in the proposed turn-on schedule. He’s also… Continue reading So, CERN Has a Particle Accelerator?
Frickin’ Lasers
I haven’t posted much about life in the lab lately, because even though I’m getting to spend a bit of time in the lab, I’ve been so fried from this past term that I haven’t had much energy for blogging. Things are finally settling into the summer routine, though, and I’ve gotten a little rest… Continue reading Frickin’ Lasers
Shaw Prize in Astronomy
Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006: Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such… Continue reading Shaw Prize in Astronomy
Stringamathing
I’ve got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you’re getting short, link-y physics blogging: – The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this “string theory” thing (maybe you’ve heard of it?) for a little while… Continue reading Stringamathing