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blogs.discovermagazine.com - 2 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
The LHC circulated two counter-rotating beams today, and
a few hours ago the CMS experiment recorded its...
first collision event, shown in the display above. This is a fantastic milestone for the LHC And the experiments! (Sorry the event display is ...
(more)
First Collisions in the LHC!
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astropixie
found this 2 days agofound this
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 2 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
We’ve been waiting decades for this and here
it is - first collisions at the LHC !...
WooHoo! The ATLAS detector saw the first collision this afternoon, followed soon by CMS. The machine was then tuned to give the LHCb and ALICE detectors ...
(more)
Collisions!!!
My last 10 days (posted after a recovery weekend), by the numbers :
Shuttle launches witnessed: 1
Shuttle launches since 1981: 129
Shuttle launches remaining: 5
“Shuttle Experience” rides experienced: 1
Cost of Space Shuttle Atlantis [dollars]: 1.7 billion
Total cost of the ...
Physical Science
Japan has had a long and distinguished tradition in modern physics. Just to pick one example, the amazing efforts of Shin’ichirō Tomonaga to understand quantum electrodynamics, anticipating the work of Schwinger and Feynman while remaining essentially isolated from the rest of the world ...
Physical Science
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 3 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
9:37 PST: Like many of my colleagues, I’ve
been eagerly awaiting word that the LHC has successfully...
threaded the proton beam around the whole ring. In recent days they have gotten it half way around the 27 km circumference, and within hours, ...
(more)
Circulating Beam in LHC Imminent!
You know, other people talk a lot about time, too — it’s not just me. Here’s a great video from Nature , featuring a conversation between David Gross and Itzhak Fouxon about the existence of time. (Via Sarah Kavassalis .) Itzhak plays the role of the starry-eyed young ...
Physical Science
Greetings from Down Under! Current at the CosPA conference in Melbourne, after spending a couple of days in Sydney — a brief fling through Adelaide up next.
It’s been a mixed bag so far; while I’ve had great fun interacting with people here in Australia, I’ve also been ...
Physical Science
blogs.discovermagazine.com - 7 days ago
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blogs.discovermagazine.com —
This is rather “inside baseball”, but back when
Cycle 17 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) proposals were being...
written, I plotted up the number of proposals as a function of time until deadline. Right now, a signficant fraction of the ...
(more)
Predicting the Number of Hubble Proposals
Wow.
At 2:28 pm Eastern Standard Time, the space shuttle Atlantis left Earth. It was a flawless launch.
It is, of course, hard to describe the experience of watching it go up. I was surprised by just how bright it was. It’s like a mini-Sun, which is roughly right since it burns its ...
Physical Science
Atlantis
Earth
Spending twenty four hours at Kennedy Space Center , one absorbs all sorts of trivia. Here are some tidbits:
- 5 astronauts have masters degrees. 3 were successful football players. 1 has a PhD ( and an MD as well , just for good measure). I’m not sure what that says about the ...
Physical Science
Earth
Hatch is closed. We are currently at T-45 minutes, but I just learned that there are “holds” in the middle, so we are actually closer to an hour and 36 minutes from launch — launch is at 2:28 pm eastern.
Here’s the full schedule of events:
Monday November 16 ...
Physical Science
Risa and I are sitting right next to the countdown clock. The shuttle is waiting patiently about three miles away. It is fueled up, and ready to go. In the last 15 minutes the sky went from completely overcast to patchy sun to brilliant blue sky with a few patchy clouds. We are now 2:58:22 from ...
Physical Science
So, a few weeks ago we all got an email here at cosmic variance inviting us to the first ever “NASA tweetup” for the next Shuttle Launch. Sean and Mark are in Australia and JoAnne is in Egypt, and Julianne is a launch veteran… but Daniel and I decided that it was too good of ...
Physical Science
NASA
I had that somewhat rare experience two days ago, getting the message from Physical Review Letters that are paper had finally been published online . In our field it can take quite a long time to get a paper all the way to publication; this one took longer than usual…
The paper ...
Physical Science
Later today I hop in an airplane to fly to the antipodes, or at least to Australia. (The actual antipodes would be in the middle of an ocean.) Looking forward to it, as this will mean I’ve visited every non-Antarctic continent at least once.
But the reason I’m blogging about it ...
Physical Science
I don’t think you can define a consistent arrow of time here, but clearly more investigation is warranted.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal .
Physical Science
Uncertain Chad is, well, uncertain , about how best to deal with two competing ideals when using Powerpoint (or Keynote) for lecture classes.
On the one hand, nobody likes a cluttered slide. In science lectures it’s much better to show a single plot augmented with a verrrry limited ...
Physical Science
Lev Kofman passed away this morning. He was a great physicist, animated by passion and joy. I was last in his office, at CITA, two years ago. As usual, the conversation stretched across wide swaths of physics, governed only by Lev’s irrepressible enthusiasm and interest. He will be ...
Physical Science
I’ve been meaning to write about this for, well, some time: how do we visualize time? What is the mental picture we have in our heads of this basic dimension of our existence? This is bound to be one the the stranger posts of mine you’ve read, but, so be it.
Looking online I find ...
Physical Science
Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the heavens, and revolutionized our conception of Earth’s place in the Universe. Now you can do the same thing! In conjunction with the International Year of Astronomy , replicas of Galileo’s telescope are now available . For the low price of ...
