When I was in grad school: Then, not within a factor of two. Now H0 = 67.80 ± 0.77 Then ηearth > 10-9. Now ηearth = 0.22 ± 0.08 Suspicions about cold dark matter, vague notions about the cosmological constant being so out of sorts between the Stand Model and GR. Now, 96% of the […]
So I work for a rather well-known private university, which runs a rather well-known research center, funded largely by a government organization with a FLA, rather than the usual TLA. As part of the budget disaster known as “sequestration,” but which is really an ongoing decline over the last several years, this FLA organization decided […]
“No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” – Gus Grissom, as quoted in Tom Wolfe's “The Right Stuff But while that maxim is true around here, and at labs and universities in general, the polarity is reversed for staff – no Buck Rogers, no bucks. Staff exists to support scientists who bring in the money from which […]
No one cares if you’re two years late and 2x overbudget if you succeed. Congratulations, Curiosity team. Science. It works, bitches! Two things: Someone was getting text messages during the whole descent, and it must have been someone high up because no one asked them to mute their phone. Bolden and Holdren had to piss […]
There’s a new kid gunning for Nobel in town. Seven of the nine prizes went to string theorists. I kinda thought ST might be a bit in disfavor now that the LHC has pretty much ruled out supersymmetry in any reasonably testable regime. No experimentally verifiable SS means that ST is kinda in there with […]
Tagged Nobel, physicsIf we hadn’t cancelled the SSC, we’d have found it 20 years ago. And many other things besides, given that the SSC had several times the energy and luminosity of the LHC. Congratulations, CERN.
I just discovered Tim Minchin: “Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this? Beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap manmade myths and monsters? If you’re so into your Shakespeare, lend me your ear: to gild […]
The cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider was an idiot thing to do for any number of reasons. First, it still would have been the most powerful accelerator on earth, with the most luminosity. We would have found the Higgs in 1996, instead of not quite yet in 2011. We rarely get measurable quantities like […]
Tagged HEPWhy is NPR interviewing a theoretical string physicist, someone as far removed from experiment as it’s possible to be and still in be in physics, about OPERA’s new experimental FTL neutrino results? Arrgh.
Sidney Coleman, on his time at Caltech: Caltech, at that time was (and still is) a much smaller school than this. There were something like a thousand students, graduate and undergraduate together when I was at Caltech. Also it was out in Pasadena so it was the Caltech students, the Caltech faculty and a bunch […]
Tagged quoteWhen you read an article about your subject in the NYT Tuesday Science section, and realize they got it all wrong. Then you read the next article and think, “Wow, how cool that they figured that out.” Even though you know that those scientists are also tearing their hair out about how the NYT Science […]
Fifth force, wait, what? No, solar neutrinos affect radioactive decay rates
Pardon me if I’m skeptical.