March 31, 2008 | 10:02 pm
We have turned comments on for stories posted on symmetry breaking. At this time they’ll all be moderated until we know how we are dealing with spam issues, but we invite you to weigh in on anything we post here.
David Harris
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March 31, 2008 | 4:38 am
It’s been a long winter at Fermilab. At times, it’s called for a brief escape to…. Barsetshire. In a January editorial New York Times editor Verlyn Klinkenborg told Times readers of his pleasure in the novels of Angela Thirkell, chronicler of the fictional English county of Barsetshire originally created by Anthony Trollope. Between 1933 and her death in 1961, Thirkell wrote a series of 29 Barsetshire novels depicting the minutiae of English county life-a way of life that was vanishing even as she wrote about it. Nowhere, on the face of it, could be farther from the chill landscape of an Illinois physics laboratory than the charmingly circumscribed world of the lovely Mrs. Brandon, the gallant but impoverished Lord Pomfret, the headstrong Clarissa and their lives and loves and Coronation fêtes. As the winter dragged on, a restorative sojourn in Barsetshire seemed just the ticket. And yet, as Klinkenborg says, “As you read her, you can feel the world around you poking and prodding at her text.”
Indeed you can. As when you come upon this passage from Thirkell’s 1951 novel, “The Duke’s Daughter,” in which Lord Cecil Waring, is showing the daughter of the Duke of Omnium, Lady Glencora Palliser, around his ancestral home, Belier’s Priory.
Outside the long drawing-room was a terrace overlooking the gardens, the field beyond, and the woods across the valley.
“That’s Golden Valley,” said Cecil, “and the woods on the far side are Copshot Bank….When Leslie and I were little, we used to love to watch the men playing cricket down the field there, because one saw them hit the ball and then a few seconds later we heard the smack of the bat on leather. It proved something or other, and we were frightfully conceited about it.”
“I know,” said Lady Cora sympathetically. “Physics-whatever they are. No pursuit for a gentleman.”
Even in Barsetshire, physics are there.
Judy Jackson
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March 28, 2008 | 2:57 pm
Chad Orzel writing over at ScienceBlogs has a really interesting, although slightly snarky, answer to this question.
In the process, he points out why, despite the fact that particle accelerators are useful for one thing–slamming particles into other particles–there are a lot of different detectors. Each is tailored to look for different kinds of debris from the particle collisions.
Chad’s preference for what he’d do? Search for microscopic black holes, as Peter Steinberg talked about on his US LHC blog the other day.
David Harris
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March 28, 2008 | 8:02 am
For most folks, the Large Hadron Collider is the scene of the next great foray into the nature of the universe. For Hoist magazine, it’s the land of a thousand cranes.
Hoist calls itself “the only global magazine for the industrial crane market. From hoists to winches, crane scales to end of line attachments, Hoist features all types of factory cranes and ancillary lifting equipment.”
In a commentary, editor Richard Howes recalls touring the LHC with Ingo Ruehl, head of material handling operations at CERN, the European particle physics lab on the French-Swiss border. Installing 100,000 tons of material in the collider’s tunnels and caverns—about 10 times the heft of the Eiffel Tower—required about 1000 hoists and cranes. It’s stats like that, Howes says, that put the whole operation in perspective, adding:
I think it’s fascinating how the equipment you and I deal with every day has played such a crucial part in lifting the lid on the secrets of the universe.
For any crane aficionados out there, read more details about the work at CERN in Hoist’s feature.
Glennda Chui
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March 27, 2008 | 4:08 pm
The migratory patterns of Canadian geese used to signify a change in season. But now, instead of faint calls from the “V” shaped pattern overhead, spring is ushered in by the hiss of a territorial Canadian Goose nesting comfortably on a lush manicured suburban landscape.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, has recently taken action to address the safety concerns posed by geese nesting near high-traffic Fermilab buildings. Each day, handlers in fluorescent vests from Geese Police, a local goose-control company, employ specially-trained border collies to scare geese away from building entrances and lawns.
Rhianna Wisniewski
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March 27, 2008 | 6:05 am
Some of the people from SPIRES (Travis Brooks and Heath O’Connell) will be contributing here somewhat regularly. In honor of the debut of this resource, we’ve decided to make the first release of the 2007 Topcites here on symmetry breaking. We’ll be posting some followups with other topcites lists and other interesting stuff culled from the database in the following weeks.
In this year’s list there have not been many changes from last year in the top few. WMAP is still a very prominent force in the list, with other astrophysical and cosmological papers, such as the Supernova survey papers, also showing up near the top of the list. String theory and extra dimensions work also show in the top 10 with papers by Maldacena, Randall and Sundrum, Witten, and Gubser et al. The top position, as always, is reserved for the immensely useful “Review of Particle Physics” compiled by the Particle Data Group. Keep in mind that citation counts can never be exact, there is something like a 5% error in most of these numbers. Please do not fret about number 32 versus 33, as this is often not a statistically significant difference. Remember the detailed warning about the accuracy of these counts. See also the older topcite editions.
Travis Brooks
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March 26, 2008 | 9:26 am
Today we launch a new phase in symmetry magazine’s development with a redesign and expansion of our Web site. Details of other changes are in this month’s print issue of the magazine.
We’ll be posting a lot of new content here, from full-length articles to news briefs, analysis, fact sheets, contests and a variety of projects you can get involved in. This will allow us to respond more quickly to events and keep you better informed. While article commenting is not enabled yet—we want to get the site running smoothly first—we will be open for commenting in a short while. In the meantime, please send us feedback at letters@symmetrymagazine.org, and add us to your RSS feed reader so we can let you know when new items come in.
David Harris
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March 26, 2008 | 8:51 am
Todd Johnson likes to build things. From automated scarecrows to acoustic sundials, Johnson has created numerous gadgets and devices.
His job as an accelerator specialist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, involves working with the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Tevatron. To explain to people how the Tevatron accelerates protons and antiprotons, Johnson built his own accelerator using a ping-pong ball, a bowl, strips of copper, and a DC power source.
Kurt Riesselmann
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March 26, 2008 | 7:24 am
Updated March 29, 2008 (see below for first offer of help)
When many teenagers come home from astronomy camp, they want to become astronauts, with dreams of being the first to visit something beyond the Moon. Heidi Baumgartner, Peter Heuer, and German Diagama came home from camp two years ago with a different dream: to be the first teenagers to create antimatter.
Heidi had drawings of particle accelerators in her journal, which inspired Peter to ask, “Why don’t we build one?” In the years since, their plans have developed and they spent their free time at camp last summer in the library digging for information to help in their quest to build a cyclotron. (The first cyclotron ever built was featured on the cover of symmetry in August 2007 and in the Life List story in that issue.)
The rough schematic drawing Heidi sketched, shown here, includes some of the main parts of the cyclotron. She also has a bunch of more technical drawings and details.
David Harris
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March 26, 2008 | 6:58 am
When was the last time you spotted a cartoon that sincerely explained a scientific concept? Earlier this month, cartoon character “Brewster Rockit: Space Guy” received a science lecture on “Our Missing Universe.” Rockit is the dim captain of space station R.U. Sirius. A crew member tells him about dark matter and dark energy, the “ninety-six percent of the universe that’s missing.” As always, Rockit comes back with a lame response. (Well, the cartoon “pushes the limits of space, time and humor,” according to its Web site.) The “Missing Universe” cartoon ran on Sunday, M
arch 16, in newspapers across the country, syndicated by Tribune Media Services.
Last year, Roz Chast, best known for her cartoons in The New Yorker, created a cartoon about dark energy for our magazine symmetry. She titled it “Over the Edge”.
Do you know of any other cartoons about dark matter, dark energy, or related topics? Send us a link to your favorites and we’ll post the best submissions.
Kurt Riesselmann
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