Done

Two days ago, after one last flurry of final exams and get-togethers, my brother and I packed up my stuff and I left Case for the last time as an undergraduate. The degree is promised to arrive at some point next month in the mail, though I was unsuccessful in my petition of having it converted into radians.

I confess leaving my university and home for the past 4.5 years has been difficult- even now it feels like I'll just be heading back soon after winter break, and my sister assures me I'll feel the same right up to next fall when I realize I'm heading somewhere else. We'll see what that new place will be like, once I learn just where it is, but all I know is it will be very difficult to find another place where it's natural to be on first-name terms with all your professors, where even the dean and department chair show up for your parties, and the university president knows who you are. Being personable never hurt but still, I worked my way quite nicely into that community and feel a bit left out already for leaving it.

But there we are. As a final note, I am happy to say that I got all As for the first time ever (as in, I think a B always slipped in even in elementary school) except this time there were things like upper-level English classes and graduate-level physics ones, so we can argue just how much sense this makes. But to quote my research adviser, "Congratulations. You've achieved perfection just in time to move on."

I was always impressed by how that guy can see through everything I've been working on to say what I should do next, all in an instant. Time to move on. I'll let you guys know where I end up.

E&M Haiku

Written on my final today-

Maxwell's Equations
Brighten the universe, but
Are there monopoles?

(Don't worry, I wrote other things too, they're just not as exciting to share!)

Three Thoughts

One month from now will be Christmas, and I will have a physics degree.

Two months from now will be my 23rd birthday, and I will be in Kyoto, Japan.

Three months from now I can't tell you where I'll be, short of somewhere in South East Asia.

What an extraordinary thing, this life I get to lead.

Quarked: Campus Mysteries

Here is the most recent installment of Quarked, which covers a variety of things I have noticed around campus that I never quite figured out and figure I probably won't by this point. I'm not sure how entertaining some of the things are to those who don't know my university, but I write for a campus newspaper and figured I should cover a few more 'local' things as well.

Entertainingly enough, this column is not without controversey, due to the following passage-

Inscription plaque in Rockefeller - Our physics building was built in 1906,
but if you actually look at the dedication plaque, (between the two sets of
doors as you're coming in from the Quad) the dedication date for the building is
written as "MDCCCCVI." This is, of course, not the way you write Roman numerals
- you use subtraction notation, meaning you can only have three of anything in a
row and 1906 should actually be written "MCMVI."

I don't know what is more disturbing, the fact that the physics department doesn't know how to count, or the fact that I am the first person in over 100 years who has noticed this.

As it turns out, there is some controversey as to when exactly Roman numerals were "standardized" as we use them today- the Romans liked to use "IIII" for 4 instead of "IV" like we do due to superstition, but were fine with "IX" for example. Long story short, I now know more about this than I cared to know.

I mention this because it turns out some people writing to point out errors are not as nice as others, and one went as far as saying "the physics department is owed an apology by the snarky columnist." I always thought I was more curmudgeonly myself... Anyway, this led me to wonder who exactly I'd apologize to should anyone care. Myself? My friends, my professors, or my friends who are professors? The department chair who has shown up to my parties?

This is why letters to the editor are funny, by the way. They can take one person's opinion and totally blow it out of proportion so you'll remember it a long time even when everyone else has long forgotten the incident at hand.

Across the Universe

Sitting here doing physics homework, watching the snow fall and listening to The Beatles. Which leads to an interesting question in my mind- how many people have ever fallen under this description of activity? Many of the material physics classes you take haven't changed much in recent years- or at least since the 1960s- and the decades in between cover millions of physics students, Beatles listeners, and snow watchers respectively. Surely these categories of people overlap to at least a decent several thousand.

It's funny how united in experience we can be, even if we never stop to think about it.

Tape, X-Rays, and Why Physics Is Awesome

Check this out-

We saw this in one of my classes earlier today and I haven't gotten over it. What you're basically seeing is doing something very simple in unrolling tape and releasing ~50keV of energy in x-rays. That is a lot of energy in there, and no one knows how or why it would be so concentrated.

And this is why I love physics. Because there is always something new and fascinating that shows up no matter how much you think you have things figured out.

On the Physics GRE

Most of my spare time lately is being spent studying for the Physics GRE- that insidious test required for admission to most American astronomy/physics graduate schools. The reason it's insidious (beyond the silliness of reducing physics to multiple choice) is the grading curve is so heavily skewed towards international students, mainly coming from countries like China where they spend several years essentially studying for the Physics GRE. Us domestics make up for this with things like good lab experience, but you still have to try your best of course even if the percentile you're hoping for is probably 50% lower.

There are two GRE Physics exams in the fall (and the general GRE, of course, but no one cares excessively about that) and the first one is two weekends from now- conveniently right at the end of my midterms and the first day of Fall Break. Beyond the obviousness of doing practice questions and tests, I also have about 200 flashcards with various physics equations on them, because when you only have a minute or so a question you need to know the stuff like the charecteristic frequency of an LHC circuit or the van der Waal equation of states like that. I find this silly because I guarantee none of my professors could tell you most of these without looking them up, but no matter.

On the bright side, I realized I got a lot better at all this when I started treating my stack of flashcards like a violin concerto, and progress has gotten better. Each concept is like a measure, ten are a phrase so you have to go back and review, twice that you need to go back again to reinforce it... and then once your "problem spots" are out of the way (everyone's got them, in my case it's stat mech and some of the quantum) and you can waltz through the cards however they're sorted you find a few questions and see if you can do that. A musician's dicipline comes into life in odd ways...

So that's what I've been doing. (Yay?) I could rant about this topic a little more but think I'll abstain for now on the grounds that topic irritates me, except for one last observation- if I end up not getting into graduate school, remind me to go work for the GRE people. It's costing me $140 a pop to take this test, and they must make a killing.

Baby Black Holes

Shamelessly copied from my friend and suitemate Megan's blog where she was (of course) expounding about the LHC-

This historic event reminds me of the two concepts that first really got me interested in physics - gravitons and black holes. Seriously, how awesome would it be to have a pet baby black hole? Never need another trash can, if you’re ever attacked nothing to worry about just sic Wilbur the Baby Black Hole on the guy...

I, for one, have absolutely no idea how I went through life never thinking of this. Only problem I can see is you couldn't pet it, unless you were ok with never using your hand again.

Griffiths Was Here!

We had a huge bit of excitement yesterday as our weekly colloquium speaker was someone we were all very eager to meet- Dr. David Griffiths. Every physics student the world over knows Griffiths because he has written the standard textbook used in upper-level electromagnetism courses, as well as dominantly used quantum mechanics and nuclear particle texts. Clearly we had to invite him, and clearly by "we" I mean "I" in this setting because this was a student-inspired idea and I always get tapped to do these things.

As a secondary note, because I did the inviting this meant I also got to do the hosting, so I hosted my first colloquium speaker. Probably a first time a student ever did such a thing at our institution (I don't know why, it's really fun and you get a nice dinner!), but I like to see how far I can get away with things...

Anyway, comments about Griffiths' visit-

1) David is, it turns out, really really awesome. As in we had a pizza lunch in the undergrad lounge with him for the students, and most of the 1+ hour was spent with ~30 physics students staring at him in rapt attention while he talked about various topics.

2) If you think it's awesome to be on a first-name basis with David Griffiths, and moreover hang out with people who are jealous of you for the fact, you might be a nerd. Just maybe.

3) He was nice enough to sign our books. Was not even perturbed when asked to sign international editions of books that some students had, on the grounds that the publishing industry is such a racket in the US.

4) Because everyone wants to know I'm sure, the quantum book cover with the live cat on the front, dead cat on the back was his publisher's idea and not his. The funny thing about the cat, apparently, is David noticed it was visibly plagiarized off a Scientific American cover a few months prior. Upon writing his publisher urgently saying something needed to be done, he received the cryptic response of "don't worry about it" so the cover has stayed the same since.

5) About once every three or four months, someone emails Griffiths outraged over the mere image of the dead cat. He thus far just responds by saying the cat might just be sleeping, but I suggested he write back saying the cat was killed by the act of looking at it just to see what happens.

6) One last note about the quantum book: the fact that the last word in the whole thing is "gullible" is deliberate.

7) The E&M book and quantum book in particular were written from class notes from classes David taught where the students hated the book (the nuclear particle one was written mainly while at SLAC on sabbatical). There are notes for perhaps one more book, on general relativity, but he says he likes the book he uses for GR so the motivation really isn't there.

8) I asked him if he'd ever considered wirting a thermodynamics book because I hate Kittel & Kromer so much. He said no, because he didn't think he understood thermo or that most anyone really does. Fair enough...

9) The colloquium itself- ie the technical excuse we used to drag him all the way to Cleveland to speak- was really neat. It has the distinct honor of being a theory talk I actually followed most of since you could if you had a general quantum background, about what happens to an electron orbiting a +q charge when a -q charge approaches it (originally worked by Fermi, but not to much precision). It involved a few really nifty and elegant explanations involving a 1/x-squared potential and left both theorists and experimentalists in the audience alike in good spirits, so I'm glad that worked out!

10) I think my favorite thing about the talk though was how, for lack of better explanation, it was exactly the sort of thing I imagined David Griffiths would give. He lectures very well and speaks in a manner very similar to how he writes, so combined with using the exact same font used in the books for the equations I was captivated. The man must give wicked lectures!

The LHC Poetry Slam

Sorry everyone, been busy with the start of the semester... lots of random things popping up, such as the LHC party I was invited to last night (aka Large Hadron Collider, aka the big particle smasher that was tested today in Europe). Also known as "Geekfest 2008," I was invited by a bunch of physics grad students to stay up until 4am to celebrate the turning-on of the largest experiment ever conducted by humankind. As the next generation particle accelerator won't be seen for several decades, of course I had to accept.

Anyway, somewhere during the course of the night the LHC Rap was shown to those who had not seen it for some reason yet, and I expressed my sentiment that I really don't like it. A guy challenged me on my reasons, and beyond explaining the cheesy nature I broke down and said "not trying to sound pretentious, but I think I could write something better." Clearly I wasn't going to be allowed to get away with such a statement and was handed a pencil and paper and told to get to work.

So what follows was my result after a half hour or so of work- what does everyone think? Considering it was 2am and I was nursing a beer while writing, I hope I will be forgiven for the lack of proper pantameter-

The LHC Ode
by Yvette Cendes

It was mid-September and the leaves were flying
The grass turning brown and the wind a-crying
The physicists were gathering late at night
To witness what could only be an incredible sight-
It was the LHC! In the entire world
It would throw particles faster than they'd ever been hurled
The truth behind theories earlier fabled
Would finally be pinned down and properly nailed,
It would find the Higgs, and possibly see
An answer to baryonic asymmetry!
Oh how marvelous! Oh how grand!
All the things we would finally understand!

So the physicists chatted while they lay in wait
Not knowing they'd taken the universe's bait,
For when the switch went "on," that exciting goal,
They accidentally created... a black hole.
Yes, that's right, the nuts had held the truth
(Even if they'd seemed silly and rather uncouth)
And the black hole was there, it grew and grew
As black holes accreting mass are known to do,
It ate all in its path, and before the dawn
The planet called Earth was forever gone.

Now people will say it's an unlikely case-
On par with creating an elephant in space-
But if there are infinite universes, as some like to say,
Eventually it would happen and we'd all die away
So it's unlikely, it's true, but just for some fun,
Ask yourself this- what if THIS is the one?

Testing Physics

Um, yeah. There's really no way to display this picture without giving away that I went skydiving this past weekend, is there?

Basically, this is something that I've wanted to do even back in New Zealand, but we just never got around to it. A few other students here in the program were keen on going, though, so we joined up and finally did it halfway towards Sacramento from the Bay Area. Mind it was $100 for a tandem jump from 13,000 feet, which is a relative steal as far as these things go...
Our motley crew, waiting for the plane to take us up. Mind I didn't notice at the time that I was the only one of us with a purple harness; this was only pointed out to me later...

It should also be noted that it turns out that the sort of people who decide to be professional skydivers are really the sort to get excited upon the word that they're ferrying a bunch of students working at the SETI Institute. As in they get very much into the joke of which one of them we've come to take away, and appreciate responses like "sorry, we're only looking for intelligent life..." and "I could tell you the truth [about aliens], but then I'd have to kill you."

Which raised the obvious question in my mind of why exactly people who professionally do SETI and people who professionally skydive are probably considered mildly crazy (probably in slightly different ways, but not much), and why at the same time you would trust someone society at large considers a bit crazy to jump out of an airplane with you and make sure you land safely. But I digress...
On the ride up- the guy sitting in front of me was the guy who took all the pictures you see here (I ordered them, seems kind of silly to go skydiving and not have pictures!) and the guy behind is the guy who operated the parachute and all that... This plane btw was a little one, just big enough to hold 15-20 people, and we were sitting crammed in on two benches by the window like they do in WWII movies.

And because it's inevitable to be asked, no, I really wasn't scared at all- there might have been a bit of a "huh, I'm actually going to do this" thought when the plane was taking off but I never gave it another thought since.

To be honest, I am almost worried sometimes about my inability to get scared about things a lot of people get really freaked out about. This started when I was in New Zealand last year, where I never thought I could do bungy jumping but ended up realizing that rationally there's nothing to be scared of. You know the physics and how it works, you know the statistics of something happening, so why be afraid?

Skydiving is, to me, the same idea- you are about twenty times more likely to die in a car accident than jumping out of a plane and you know the physics works, so what is there to be afraid of? Just a simple kinematic equation is all.

(Yes, I realize I'm essentially saying something along the lines of learning physics helped me master my fears. I don't think that was the intended consequence, but it's definitely a nice one.)
So for anyone who is curious, in my experience it is a lot easier to skydive versus bungy jump. This is because first of all you don't have much time to think in skydiving- they open the door and everyone hops out in pretty quick succession- and because unlike bungy jumping the ground is really, really far away so that instinct of "maybe this isn't the best idea" doesn't cut in as much. Even better, in skydiving once you hit ~50 mph (terminal velocity is 120 mph when you're on your tummy) the wind resistance makes you feel like you have some weight, meaning after about a second you don't even feel like you're falling. You're just... floating, I guess, which was so great that I spent the entire time alternating between laughing and grinning like an idiot.

One cool thing I really liked about all this by the way is how we did some sort of backflip on the way out, meaning I spent the first few seconds watching the plane go away. Per my frame of reference, however, it felt like I wasn't moving, so I watched the plane go up and away at an odd angle all the while thinking "huh, that's mighty interesting!" And then I got even more excited, as it was by far the best demonstration of relative reference frames I have ever experienced and physics has destroyed any chance I have of thinking normal things even when falling out of an airplane at a hundred twenty miles an hour.
Falling. It was the most absolutely lovely sensation. In fact, he photographer spent some time towards the end trying to get me to do a thumbs up or some other gesture for photographic purposes, but honestly I was only vaguely wondering who the hell this guy was and what he wanted because I wasn't even bothering to pay attention to anything more than the moment. There's just too much to process... Now I'm told if you go skydiving again it's a lot easier to figure out what's going on the second time, but we're going to ignore that line of thought because my mom still has yet to progress beyond saying "I'm glad you survived."
Parachute deployed! This is a rather abrupt stop- taking you from 120 mph to a less splattering descent is guaranteed to be- and I was frankly amazed that it was over that quickly. I was told that free fall lasts about a minute, but it definitely seemed much shorter.

And here's something that I only remembered later, on the ground, while rethinking everything. Somewhere along the way, probably right before the instructor deployed the parachute, he shouted in my ear, "do aliens exist, yes or no? I'm not pulling until you answer!!!" Such wonderful senses of humor, those skydivers... And fyi no, I didn't answer, as a. I wasn't processing what he was saying, b. it's not like he would've heard an answer due to the wind, and c. I was too busy smiling and laughing at the awesomeness known as skydiving.
Gliding through the sky, ho-hum. Still very awesome though, it lasts maybe three or four minutes and I got to steer the parachute. Pretty simple, you have two ropes, and you pull the one on the right to go right and the one on the left to go left. If you pull one of them really, really hard you go into this nice looping spiral, which is similar to the scale of a looping decent on a tall roller coaster. The only problem I had with the parachute part is your weight is essentially held entirely in check by the straps on your legs, which isn't the most comfortable thing in the world but is obviously necessary and doesn't last long so we'll let it slide.
Coming in for landing on the landing field. Landing is so gentle that we ended up standing (slight winds and you might end up sitting instead) and you're unsteady for a second or two on your feet until you remember how to deal with real ground again.

So that is skydiving, or at least the best description I can possibly give of it. I must say explicitly though, in case it wasn't clear, that skydiving is wonderful and you all should most definitely go do it when you have the chance. Trust me on this. After all, you'd trust the astrophysics student who searches for aliens and goes skydiving on the weekends, wouldn't you?

Physics Explained

I'm at the Array right now, waiting for the last of the data to finish up so we can drive back tonight. Until then, I just wanted to share an entertaining list explaining physical theories as women. You know, like how Newtonian mechanics is like a high school girlfriend as she's your first encounter with physics and hence amazing...

For whatever reason, it reminds me of the time I went through and decided to write accurate descriptions of the physics undergraduate course catalog. Don't think I ever shared it here, so I'm hoping everyone will enjoy it as getting a post ready gives me something to do while waiting for the all-clear to head out.

Undergraduate Course Listing- Physics

Physics 101- Introductory Physics I

Required by all majors where people are required to think, such as engineering, math, astronomy, and of course physics. You will spend a lot of time learning elementary kinematics, a version of physics that has been disproved from being completely true but is nonetheless confusing enough on its own.
Prerequisites: Grade 12 mathematics

Physics 110- Physics for Pre-Meds
This is the course taken by all the people who are required to take a physics class for their major (biology, chemistry, etc.) but have nightmares over words like 'calculus' or 'integral.' This course also fills the 'charitable benefit to humankind' requirement for the department, as its curve ensures that no one completely stupid will ever get into medical school.
Prerequisites: Grade 8 mathematics

Physics 120- Physics for Poets
(cross-registered with 'Rocks for Jocks' and 'Computers for the Clueless')
This is a blatant attempt on behalf of the department to increase the number of enrolled students in physics. If all the other departments get to do it, why not us?
The professor currently listed is either someone looking for paid early retirement or someone not to be trusted with the actual physics majors. Topics include discerning between 'up' and 'down,' listing the colors in a rainbow in proper order, and a bunch of historical anecdotes that have nothing do with actual physics.
Corequisites: Firing neurons, a pulse

Physics 150: Introductory Physics II
This course is designed as the place where your dreams go to die: that's right, the weed-out course for everyone who survived the first semester of Introductory Physics! We will be covering the topic of electromagnetism, which requires intimate knowledge of the vector calculus you're not learning until next semester.
Prerequisites: Physics 101

Physics 200: Modern Physics
We will introduce and explore the revolutionary ideas and experiments during the last hundred years without explaining any of the maths which would allow you to do something with this knowledge. This is kind of nice for the professor who has a smoke-screen to hide behind whenever he's not entirely certain of what's going on but doesn't want to admit to it.
Prerequisites: Acceptance that everything you learned in Physics 101 is not really true

Physics 300: Mechanics
On the first day of class, the professor will ask anyone expecting to learn about car maintenance to leave, which will thin the crowd down to approximately ten people. Those ten students will then proceed to learn enough about missile trajectory to take over the universe.
Prerequisites: Physics 101

Physics 310: Thermodynamics and Sadistical Mechanics
Have you ever looked at the nothingness in the room and found yourself thinking 'gee, I wonder what quantum and statistical mechanics have to say about the movements of 1,000,000,000,000 gas molecules in a confined space? And have a really crappy textbook which references future material during explanations of key issues?' Well look no further, because this is the course for you!
Prerequisites: Physics 101, Math 666

Physics 320: Quantum Mechanics
This is the class where we finally teach you everything we couldn't teach you properly in Physics 200 because you had no knowledge of linear algebra or partial differential equations. You still don't, but we think anyone who's made it this far should be able to absorb all that during the first week of the semester.
Prerequisites: Physics 200, any math class you can get

Physics 350: Senior Thesis
Despite your paid laboratory assistantship during summer months and the previous school year(s), we are going to start making you pay us for the privilege of doing so by making this a required class. In this way, we hope to sufficiently strap you for cash so as to simulate the graduate student lifestyle for those of you still idealistic enough to consider further education in physics.
Prerequisites: three years of undergraduate laboratory experience
Course fee: your soul

I Found the Higgs!

Ok, it was actually my friend Alison who directed me towards The Particle Zoo, but I've decided to be nice and share it with you guys too-

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or buy a cuddly dark matter particle for my friends who search for them.

One point I'm confused on though- how do they know what these particles look like anyway? Unlike plush microbes it's not like you have a clue, though props to the entrepreneurs for details like taking mass into account and giving the antiparticles faces on the opposite sides.

A Few Links

Got the wisdom teeth out today- was knocked out at 8am, have vauge recollections of going out to the car/into bed at some point after, and slept until 1pm. Spent the rest of the day taking it easy and with pain that was manegable with only two Advils, though to be honest the back of my jaw had ached for awhile now so perhaps being used to it helps. But hey, not complaining...

Until the cross-country stuff starts coming in in a few short days, here are a few links for the procrastinators out there. First, here is one to The Fratellis' newest single, Mistress Mabel. I've loved them ever since New Zealand where I first heard them, and their new CD is coming out next week so you should look into it.

And, because it is late, I just finished watching The Colbert Report and Brian Greene was just on to promote the World Science Festival in New York City next week (and have Colbert make fun of string theory and discuss the Large Hadron Collider), which is the sort of event that makes you wish your road trip went in the opposite direction. I'd link to the specific video but it's not up on the official site just yet, but heartily encourage you to wander over and check it out.

Dear Professor

Yesterday was the awards ceremony and dinner for the senior undergraduate physics majors, and while I'm not graduating until December I went as this is my class and all that. As part of the ceremonies all us students had to read a cute poem from the compilation Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? by Nin Andrews, which are assembled from emails students wrote to a physics professor. They were all great, but I saw one I immediately knew I needed to read-

Dear Professor,
I heard the Brian Greene talk
on string theory. He even showed pictures
of these stringy things.
Like vibes. That explains everything.
And I had really good vibes about Brian Greene.
Do you know if he's single?

Another one I quite related with in the book, while we're at it:

When I was in your office
and you showed me the problem
about the weight lifter and the dumbbells,
I kept smiling and saying yes,
but I didn't really understand a word you were saying.
I tried, but it's like you were speaking
a different language.
I think new professors do that.
They get lost in translation.
So I thought maybe I should tell you
that when a student smiles and nods and says yes
a lot,
what she really means is she has no idea
what you're talking about.

It should also be noted, here at the bottom so I can be discreet, that there were politics afoot recently in that it turned out several professors wanted to nominate me for one of the departmental awards, but the university refused on the grounds that I'm not yet graduating. They decided this would be "no fun," so the powers that be created a one-time-only award for me, for my "exemplary services to the department of physics."

I was so overwhelmed by this gesture of kindness that I nearly cried. This department will be hard to leave.

Thought for the Day

"You know, there's probably a better plan for getting into graduate school than deciding while in Middle Earth that you need to get your academic act together, come back and start getting more or less straight As, thus landing you on the dean's list repeatedly. But honestly now, doesn't this make a better story?"

(My experiment to turn things around is working. Take that, bitches.)

My Talk

Me giving my first "real" physics talk to a room of about 20 physicists (aka my senior project presentation). It was well-recieved, which is always good, and I've discovered that I have a tendancy to crack jokes when nervous. I'm certain this surprises absolutely no one...

Be back in this space when exams are done. Cheers!

My First PR Shot

Remember how I went to Boston several weeks ago to the AAAS conference because I won that snazzy science journalism award? Well when that happened the chair of my physics department decided to tip off the university public relations people in charge of writing press releases and what not for around here, and they came and interviewed me and took a few shots of me standing by the setup of the Michelson-Morley Experiment in the basement of the physics department (my favorite of which is on the left, though they chose another for the article itself). Then for about two months nothing happened as the university has a several month backlog on press releases, so I'd forgotten about the whole thing.

Then last Thursday while I was taking a break from my GRE Physics exam studying (I took it on Saturday) someone in the hall told me "hey, saw you in the Case Daily!" The Case Daily is the university's email newsletter where they print various articles regarding what's going on on campus, the university in the news, and, of course, the latest batch of press releases. I go to check it out, and promptly laughed upon reading the first line. The main headline for the day was "Now reporting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Boston... senior Yvette Cendes," and the article begins as follows:

Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss—a writer of popular science books—may have some future competition for the bestsellers' list. Recently the National Science Writers Association (NASW) chose senior physics major Yvette Cendes as one of 10 undergraduates to participate in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston...

Full text of the article can be found here. Or you can go to the main website of CWRU, aka www.case.edu, and click on the link there as my name's on the main page, which is neat.

So now I have PR shots, which will surely come in handy when I need something for the dust jacket of all those bestsellers I'm apparently going to write soon.

Oh, and because I forgot to mention it then, this is actually my second PR thing as of late. The first was me being one of the March staff members of the month for the Journal of Young Investigators- quite nice of them seeing as I hardly ever find time to write for them anymore- and you can see that press release here. And before I forget something else, my picture is also in the March issue of QST, the largest Ham radio magazine in circulation, because a picture of me doing ham radio is in their files and they like to pull it up periodically for random articles...

Alright, this will end now because while it's always nice to have your accomplishments noted the limelight gets embarrassing. That and your thesaurus starts running out of different things to say when every conversation with passing acquaintances you have is on the lines of "hey, I saw you in the Case Daily..."

Fermilab!

There's a famous story amongst physicists about Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab who played a huge role in the development and construction of the facility. Once, when pressed by a US Senator on whether Fermilab would do for national security, Wilson retorted by saying "it has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, except to make it worth defending."

I was thinking a lot about this this weekend because our Physics and Astronomy Club got the wonderful opportunity to visit Fermilab, and let the record show that Wilson is absolutely right. It really is a great place, filled with world-class research that is downright exciting to see for yourself!
This is the main building at Fermilab, which was our first stop of the day after waking up really early in the morning to drive the ~6 hours from Cleveland to Batavia, Illinois. We were supposed to meet at 6 but I didn't wake up until my friend called me at 6:25 asking where I was, which prompted a loud "why the [censored] did my alarm not go off?!?" followed by frantic scurrying out the door. Our car was actually on the road by 6:35 though, so no problem getting there (and I confess I don't remember much of the drive, as I spent most of it napping in the back seat there and back).

But anyway, if you ever go and tour Fermilab you'll probably be taken to the top story of the building above, which is a museum of sorts for the facility and has a great view-

This picture is looking out from the main enterance. Don't be fooled by the decorative-looking ponds, they're actually there to drain in case the giant Tevatron accelerator's superconducting magnets stop doing their job correctly.... Fermilab for the most part doesn't look that impressive from above for the simple reason that most particle experiments are done underground, but they've creatively made up for this by making the place the biggest restorative prairie in the state of Illinois. There's even a herd of buffalo wandering around the place.
This is another view from the 15th story, this one looking towards part of the Tevatron (the entire ring is four miles in circumference or so, so I couldn't even begin to see all of it, let alone get a decent picture). Essentially the point of the Tevatron is to speed up ionized hydrogen gas so it travels just a tiny fraction under the speed of light, then smash together the particles and see what we see. It's sort of like if you had a clock and smashed it to have all the parts fly apart and tried to reassemble the clock based on what you find. Doesn't sound very effective in a sense, but this is really what particle physicists do except for atoms and for Fermilab this proved to be quite effective- the top quark and bottom quark were discovered here.
We couldn't go into the Tevatron itself but there was a mockup with mirrors so you could step in and sort of get a feel for what it's like. Currently the Tevatron is the most powerful operational particle accelerator in the world until the Large Hadron Collider turns on later this year, after which the Tevatron will be shut down (as the LHC will be several times more powerful). We also learned that the Tevatron gets an electric bill of approximately a million dollars a month, making me conclude that the local electric company really hit the jackpot when Batavia won the rights to build it.
We did get to take a look at the control room for the Tevatron, which is pictured above. I must say the operators had a great sense of humor about it- there's a large glass panel all the tours stop at, so they put up a "do not feed the operators" sign on the door for good measure. Further, at one point one of the operators abruptly turned us and snapped a picture of us with his own camera as retaliation for all the ones we were taking, and I thought that was hilarious.

We also checked out one of the smaller experiments on site, known as MiniBooNE. This one tests for neutrino mass via neutrino oscillations, and they specially built a tunnel 300 feet below ground to do it (so ~30 stories). It's a pretty long elevator ride!
Here's what the tunnel looked like underground. I think I prefer looking at the sky.
This large box is part of an experiment in the tunnel trying to find dark matter. Basically there's a bit of water inside and a particle passing through leaves a bubble trail, so you're looking for a bubble trail that would be left over from a dark matter candidate... Of course, you get noise from things like cosmic rays that find their way in even down here and radioactive decay from the glass holding the water and all sorts of things most people would never think of, so no dark matter yet. You can hear the machine go "ping" once a minute or so thanks to all the false positives.

And this is in no way a critical judgment against my friends who are dedicating their lives to the dark matter search, but I decided within five minutes this is not exactly my sort of project. This is, of course, the amount of time the novelty of being 30 stories underground wears off on you, and don't know if I could spend years obsessing over if my glass is radioactive and what not. Different strokes for different folks...
This is the origin of the neutrinos in miniBooNE, which are generated here on the order of a billion neutrinos pulsed every 2.5 seconds (so standing in front of it means you're in the most concentrated beam of neutrinos on the planet- luckily they pass right through you harmlessly!). The neutrinos then tunnel underground to another detector in a mine in Soudan, Minnesota several hundred miles away- leading physicists to joke that they're using Wisconsin as a drift space- and they vary the type of neutrinos produced so they can see if there are any differences between the pulses upon detection.

Explaining how exactly you make a neutrino beam takes a fair amount of time and I don't want to make this much longer than it already is/ will be, so if you're interested take a gander over here.
Finally, our group underground (there were actually 20 or so students on this trip, but only so many of us could be underground at a given time). Now that I look at this picture, all I can say is I'm the one who really stands out compared to all the dark colors everyone else was apparently wearing!

As one last entertaining postscript, we went to the visitor center while waiting for the last group to finish touring, which is filled with cute little science displays you usually find at science centers to entertain little kids. Needless to say we had a blast, but I was particularly enamored with this one-
I really can't pretend to know why it was there, but in short it's a scintillator panel cosmic ray detector, which is something I'm using in my own senior project setup! So if I don't get mine to work, think they'll let me hang out in the Fermilab visitor center and collect data?

But anyway, that was the end of our time at Fermilab as we were off to a swanky restaurant to hang out with some members of the Case Alumni Association who were kind enough to foot our trip bill. I spent a lot of time talking to Cyrus Taylor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and speaker for the night, and we spent a great deal of time discussing things like women in science, string theory, and Dean Taylor's crazy backpacking trip through Tanzania after he got his PhD which involved an economic meltdown and him getting sick with malaria for three weeks. You know, normal physicist talk!

And last but not least we were all exhausted having gotten up so early, so we went back to the hotel to crash. Because after all there was a big day ahead of us, with the city of Chicago looming nearby...

Playing with Physics

Who is this crab, and why is he hanging out on the roof of a building on campus? The answer can be found in this week's "Quarked," where I discuss the interesting phenomenon whereby physics is one grand excuse to play with toys.

By the way, there are four crabs and we named them officially today. Their names are Sebastian, Pinchy, Cake, and Turtle... That's the second thing physicists do a lot of, of course- naming things that wouldn't be named normally in an attempt to be clever.