Chalkboard discussions usually arise spontaneously, with one person explaining something to a small group standing nearby. Scratchings on the board tend to represent fragments of a conversation rather than a complete train of thought.
It began with a guest speaker in her small upstate New York town. Roshan Houshmand’s uncles were visiting, and because of their engineering background, she thought a talk on physics would be ideal for a night of entertainment.
With a blue marker poised at a large white flip chart, Maury Tigner, a physicist at Cornell University, turned to a group of about 10 representatives from industry and asked, “What kind of applications interest your company?” The room was cramped and beige, a generic hotel meeting spa
Theorists cant help it: When asked to explain something, they reach for a piece of chalk. The language of math and physics seems to require a writing implement and a large vertical surface.
A dozen years after it first appeared on the world stage, the top quark is still one of the hottest topics in particle physics. Why is it so much heavier than any other particle? And what can it tell us about the origin of mass and other quantum mysteries?
Affectionately known at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as simply “The Blue Book,” The Stanford Two-Mile Accelerator has been a classic on site since the day it was published in 1968.
I've observed an important relationship between David Harris' intro "Appreciating Successes" and Ray Orbach's "Focus on the Future" in the March issue of symmetry.
The article (Apr 07) on improvisation in experimental physics was a fascinating one. Along the same lines, I heard that at Cornell (I think), and probably at least one other accelerator, Revereware—copper-bottomed steel cookware—was used to avoid having to make copper to steel welds.
The numbers on citations and all listed by Heath O'Connell (Mar 07) are exceedingly interesting! The general phenomenon has been known to people working in scientometrics for many decades, and is called "incorporation."
I know of the use of aspirins as water detectors (Apr 07) from my year and a half (June 70 to Jan 72) in the US Army in the Republic of South Vietnam on the receiving end. I heard from people who had been there in the late 1960s that it had been used then as well.
A recent article by scientists in Leeds and Oslo featured in CERN's "Picked Up for You" might have an answer to Terry Anderson's ice-related question in March's symmetry.
Cartoonist Roz Chast has busted the field of particle physics wide open with her pioneering cover for this issue of symmetry. We say it's about time: Why limit ourselves to the same old list of particles that have actually been discovered, or at least properly theorized?
In the 1990s, astronomical observations revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Not knowing what causes this acceleration, scientists began to attribute the phenomenon to some unknown source of energy, coined "dark energy" by astrophysicist Michael Turner.
