APS March: So long from Portland!
Well it’s been another stimulating meeting full of lasers, quantum, and topological insulators. My brain has turned to mush.
Well it’s been another stimulating meeting full of lasers, quantum, and topological insulators. My brain has turned to mush.
I took a random walk through the convention centre this morning and stumbled into a talk by Margaret Murnane, a researcher at JILA and one half of laser-jocky-power-couple Murnane-Kapteyn.
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.”
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.
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
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
Like many other outlets, I covered the announcements from Brookhaven’s RHIC collider yesterday. Read about the 4 trillion degree measurement on the main Nature News site. Read more
Have you ever seen the videos of stars whirling around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way? They’re wild. But wouldn’t you want to see pictures of the black hole itself? Read more