Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of visiting CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) with a group of STEM-curious high school kids. Our guide on the visit was Shirajum Monira, a tiny, dark-haired woman, who spoke gently as she walked us through numerous exhibits, experimental facilities and scientific devices. She spoke patiently and […]
CERN
I slept through the Higgs boson announcement on July 4. Whatever the news that the Large Hadron Collider physicists would be trumpeting in the middle of the New York night, it wasn’t going to change by 9 a.m. No, what I would be monitoring throughout the day were the press releases and media coverage. Would […]
The news of a detection of faster-than-light speed neutrinos by the OPERA experiment stunned the physics and astronomy community last week. I read the paper, and I listened to the talk from Geneva over the Web. This is seriously weird stuff! Faster-than-light speed neutrinos!? The talk was filled with wonderfully arcane geodetic methods for measuring […]