Archive by category | American Physical Society

APS March: The curious case of Jan Hendik Schön

APS March: The curious case of Jan Hendik Schön

This afternoon I sat in on a well-attended session about the greatest fraud in physics history by investigative journalist Eugenie Reich. Reich has literally written the book on Jan Hendrik Schön, a Bell Labs physicist who is believed to have fabricated data in dozens of research papers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her message in a sentence? “Don’t hate da playa, hate da game.”

APS March: Has graphene passed its peak?

APS March: Has graphene passed its peak?

Over on his personal blog, Nature Physics editor Ed Gerstner has a very nice blog post on graphene at the March meeting. Graphene, you may remember, are atomically thin sheets of carbon that display all sorts of cool properties. At last year’s meeting Graphene took the headlines: There was lots of talk about using sheets for displays and ribbons of the stuff for transistors.

APS March: Welcome to Portland!

Good morning and welcome to the American Physical Society’s March 2010 meeting in beautiful Portland, OR. I walked into the convention centre this morning and was astonished to see a huge Foucault pendulum in the foyer. I wonder if they set it up all for us…  … Read more

APS 2010: The missing BEHHGK boson

APS 2010: The missing BEHHGK boson

Maybe Peter Higgs shouldn’t have stayed home. The 80 year old Scottish physicist, famous for the elusive mass-conferring particle named after him, didn’t make it to APS on Monday, when he was supposed to receive the Sakurai Prize along with five other theorists who played important roles in developing the theories that predict the particle. His absence — or perhaps the elevation of the five others involved in the prize — seems to be affecting the way that physicists talk about the particle. Rob Roser of Fermilab gave a talk this morning about how the Tevatron still has time to  … Read more