Lecture One in the Sunshine State

This week I'm hanging out in Tallahassee, FL (staying only a few blocks from the governor's mansion, it seems -- too bad Jeb is gone now...) at the National Nuclear Physics Summer School, presenting a set of 3 lectures on RHIC physics. I'm also learning quite a bit about the state of modern nuclear physics, which actually becomes more interesting as I dig deeper into RHIC physics. People generally think that RHIC physics is somehow growing away from "normal" nuclear physics, e.g. nuclear structure, but the more we look, the more we realize that our results really "see" the nuclear wave function in some form or another -- although we see "snapshots" rather than steady state configurations. So why am I sitting in Ian Thompson's nice leactures, blogging about them rather than listening? Go figure.

Anyway, here's the first lecture given yesterday -- an extended version of my RHIC colloquium, with a few more details on centrality determination than i usually allow. More to come.