Still Twittering

Still twittering like crazy - lots of links and short bursts of commentary - but it takes mindshare away from the blog. Not sure how to solve this yet, until I have complete essay-length thoughts to share, which will be difficult while we are dealing with some of the more intense rites of adulthood, all at the same time. More later!

S.O.S. (Save Austrian Science)

Just in case you missed it: Austria is planning on pulling out of CERN after 50 years involvement. The claim is that they can use the money (about $21M) elsewhere in the EU.

Anyway, don't think that the Austrian scientific community is taking the news well. They are getting organized and already have a petition online. Please take a minute and sign it:

http://sos.teilchen.at/petition/

It came as a surprise when Federal Minister Hahn announced that he wanted to discontinue Austria's membership in CERN.

This "wrong historic decision" (quoting Prof. Dr. Herbert Pietschmann) must be stopped before Austria's reputation as a nation of high-tech and modern research suffers irreparable damage and our country excludes itself from future developments.

CERN - this is research in elementary particle physics and comology. CERN is a brilliant example of excellence by European cooperation. CERN is the vision of our young scientists.

By signing this petition I urge the Austrian parliament not to agree to this proposition of minister Hahn.

(And I hope no-one missed that ATLAS slide in the AP article!)

(Thanks, Heinz and Paul!)

Redesign

Not like I have time to fiddle around and redesign things just for the heck of it but, well, I fiddled around and made the design a little cleaner, and even cleaner still with some help from my wife.

So just in case people are reading this via an RSS reader, have a look at the new version and let me know what you think. But if you're from the Kazimir Malevich estate, I'm not home right now -- of course, if you leave your name and number, I'll be sure get back to you right away.

Tesla in Shoreham

Tesla's lab was located in Shoreham, New York (yes, that Shoreham - but a lovely place I used to live in when I first moved to BNL) in Long Island, just north of Brookhaven. The Times reports on the battle brewing over what to do with the site, which locals and Tesla enthusiasts want landmarked, and which Agfa, the current owner, just wants to jettison. Neat article, and a reminder of how big a presence Tesla was in his time, and how hard he fell.

Plot Device of Mass Destruction

Don't be afraid, the likelihood of anyone gathering up even a fraction of a gram of anti-matter (as seen here in this still from the Angels & Demons preview) is pretty unlikely. The ATRAP experiment at CERN managed to trap 170,000 antihydrogen atoms, but that's still 18 orders of magnitude (1 with 18 zeros after it!) away from A&D territory.

Now, why was I thinking about this recently, since I'm not much of a Dan Brown fan (I survived Da Vinci, just to see what the fuss was about, but enough)? Dave Mosher, from Discovery Space, asked me to put together a little guest blog on anti-matter, and when the media asks, I deliver. Anyway, please have a gander at my piece, "Plot Device of Mass Destruction", and let me know what you think.

Two things I didn't manage to squeeze into an already-long article:

1. My introduction to anti-matter was certainly via "The Counter Clock Incident", in the animated Star Trek series from the early 1970's. While the black stars on the white sky, and the total absence of annihilating anything, clearly miss the mark, they did somehow capture Feynman's insight that anti-particles in the matter universe are, in a sense, travelling backwards in time. Who knows if they were reading Bjorken & Drell, and it's sci-fi as all get-out, but it sort of feels like an inside joke for physicists (in a Saturday morning cartoon, no less)
2. My reminder that people other than I watched Star Trek as kids came when I was visiting NYC from CERN in the mid-1990's. I was staying with a college friend who had gone into finance, and we ended up hanging out in Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon, with a guitar or two in tow. I vividly remember him playing for a bit, looking thoughtful for a second and then asking, "Now that you're a physicist, you can tell me: what is antimatter?" I gave a similar spiel as I wrote in this Discovery Space piece, but somehow he wasn't satisfied. The mystery was too great, and my experienced reality of anti-matter was far too mundane. Hope this try was better!

Anyway, enjoy.

Twittering

Yes, I broke down and started twittering. I used to find it quite pointless, compared to "normal" blogging, but then I started getting into updating my facebook status, and realized I actually enjoyed microblogging. Then I discovered how to link twitter and FB, and here I am, updating over and over, over on the right side of this page in the little box.

Starry Eyed

This is really fun (via Gizmodo): a picture how the sky would look if your eyes were as sensitive as a long exposure telescope image.

Explanation: Intricate, glowing nebulae that shine in planet Earth's night sky are beautiful to look at in deep images made with telescopes and sensitive cameras. But they are faint and otherwise invisible to the naked-eye. That makes their relative location and extent on the sky difficult to appreciate. So, consider this impressive composite image of a wide region of the northern winter sky. With a total exposure time of 40 hours, the painstaking mosaic presents a nebula-rich expanse known as the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble above a house in suburban Boston, USA. Within the wide and deep view are nebulae more often seen in narrower views, including the Great Orion Nebula, the Rosette Nebula, the Seagull Nebula, the California Nebula, and Barnard's Loop. The familiar constellation of Orion itself is just above the foreground house. Brightest star Sirius is left of the roof, and the recognizable Pleiades star cluster is above the tree at the right. A version of the big picture that includes simple constellation guidelines is available here.

One can get a sense of this even with the naked eye if you go way out in the desert, e.g. in South Africa. I once saw the large and small Magellanic clouds down there -- with my eyes -- and I was never the same again.

Quark Matter in the News

Holy moly, what have we here? Quark Matter 2009, on the news...and look there I am in the green down vest just as it begins! And there's Giorgio, breaking our hearts. And Kai and Spencer, trying to convince people that physicists know something about sports (well, some do). And that awesome guy at the end (see below...):

I'm sitting here and I got some things on my mind,
and we're sitting here at Quark Matter two-thousand-and-nine.
Now I can't really explain what all of it means,
I just hope they don't blow us all to smith-er-eens

Hear, hear! (Thanks, Mike!)