Cosmology with Prof Susskind from Standford

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

I found this great video on a cosmology lecture given by Prof Leonard Susskind that is one in a 4 part series of Cosmology lectures. 

I think the video is very good and the Q&A session at the very beginning is a great chance to hear some of the most common questions when it comes to Cosmology explained clearly and with a lay-man in mind!

Enjoy

Fermilab Budget Woes Continue

While most labs managed to dodge a bullet (what really looked like a giant bomb) in the 2011 budget. There is still many problems coming. Announced Thursday and reported on the Courier News and this blog that Fermilab will seek to reduce its staff by 5% through a voluntary program.

With the ending of the Tevatron program in September this doesn't come as too much of a surprise, however it doesn't do much to boost moral around the lab. In fact, even though much of the talk is on the future experiments like Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), Mu2e (website), and the future of Project X (website) there can't help but be a sense of loss for many scientist working there.

For me, trying desperately to finish my thesis on work at CDF and looking for post-docs that might keep me in the Chicago land area, pieces of news about the shrinking of the lab only causes me to take pause and check to see if going down this path is the best for me.

The little support and almost no excitement coming from a budget strapped government towards science makes it hard for a young researcher to keep a stiff upper lip and look to the future with too much optimism .

Oh well, more focus on thesis and hopefully when I lift my head there will be a good position on an interesting and well funded experiment to work on.

DZero Doesn't see the same excess as CDF!

So the physics world is all a buzz with the reported excess in the W+2 Jet channel reported by CDF.

The graph here shows the most recent result released by CDF in the W+ 2 Jet channel for 7.3 fb-1 and shows a clear (and growing) excess in the invariant mass range around 150 GeV. The community has been buzzing with speculation and ideas as to what this phenomenon could be. From mis-modeling to Technicolor (a new model of physics) the result isn't really clear. But something seems to be really there.

The really exciting thing is that CDF's sister experiment at the Tevatron, DZero, has publicly released their findings in the same channel today and they don't seem to see anything. (See the public release by Fermilab here).

So what does it all mean? Well clearly something is happening here. The CDF result has been checked and double checked from within the collaboration (that is really the only way such a result could ever see the light of day) and now you have an independent check by another experiment on the same data and they don't see anything! The fury of discussion as to whether DZero and CDF are doing identical things will launch as well as much debate as to what it means and how to proceed.

To me this is where physics is really interesting! Methods of analysis and meaning and understanding will be hotly debated. DZero will be giving a seminar talk today at 4pm and is webcasted here.

For sure what is to come will be what makes science great. Checks, cross-checks, argument, and ultimately (and probably after many sleepless nights and hurt ego's) agreement to what causes such deviations.

Get Excited!

Fermilab Users Meeting

Today and tomorrow are the 44th annual Fermilab Users Meeting.
This meeting will highlight the many exciting activities that are coming from Fermilab including Collider Physics (like the stuff I work on) as well as Astro-Particle, Neutrino, and future plans for the lab.

The big draw this year seems to be the already "sold out" (I put this in quotes because the tickets were free, but had to be requested) public talk that will be given on Thursday by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. There is some overflow seating that will be made available so even if you don't have tickets it may still be worth the while to come.

So far today there has been many good talks, one I especially liked was given by Brendan Casey of Fermilab on the new g-2 experiment that is slated to begin after the much morned shutdown of the Tevatron. His talk can be found here (https://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=4156). Something that won't come across in the slides (which are very well done!) is the fact that he gave the talk in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt and said that the exciting part of his experiment is "we get to use helicopters, and everyone knows helicopters are awesome". This eludes to how they will transport part of their experimental set-up from where it is now to Fermilab.

See an overview of the meeting here: http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/fermilab_users_org/users_mtg/2011/