constan's blog

Here we are in early December, with six inches of snow on the ground and more every day. Now is the best time for me to start thinking about summer, but not for the reasons you'd think!

Tour activity slows way down in December, since schools are busy wrapping up before break and most people are bogged down with Christmas-related extracurricular activities. This gives me more time to start dealing with the outreach boom that will come in July/August 2009:

Whew... the outreach business can get really busy sometimes. The summer was fairly intense, between the increased tour volume and running the PAN program. September was calm, and then October turned into a circus with the "FRIB Frenzy"... check the links for more details and pics! Especially if you want to see what students who believe in nuclear science at MSU can do.

Editor's Note: Happy April Fool's Day!

The Large Hadron Collider, or "LHC", will come online this year. The largest and most powerful accelerator ever built, it will smash protons together at 99.999999% of the speed of light in an effort to recreate conditions similar to those that existed during the Big Bang. The scientists who will do experiments there intend to study what the Bang was like and how our universe came into existence.

Is it possible to have an irrational attachment to a piece of research equipment? I know I'm rather fond of our cyclotrons...
From the New Yorker: Cyclotron's Last Stand

Another installment of physics-related stories from around the web that will tickle your fancy.

First: I'm glad Intel is thinking about how cosmic rays cause bit errors in RAM, plus this is really cool.

Cosmic ray detector on a chip

I just returned from a two-day conference in Austin, TX. For the record, it was fifty degrees warmer there, and in a good way.

The conference was sponsored by PTEC: the Physics Teacher Education Coalition, a joint effort of the American Physical Society, American Association of Physics Teachers, and National Science Foundation. PTEC has over 100 member institutions around the U.S, and they just recently opened up membership to national laboratories, so Michael and I arranged to have NSCL join. Over 150 science educators were in attendance at the 2008 meeting.

This is a demonstration that has become an integral part of how I explain what we do here, and we used to great effect with last Saturday's visiting sixth graders. I call it the "Fragmentation Box", and most of the credit for it goes to Jon Delauter.

The content of this post is less grand than the title, but do not be disappointed. There is some import contained within.

On Friday, I was privileged to attend the lecture by Dr. Ruth Ann Sime, author of Lise Meitner: a Life in Physics. Aside from being a thoroughly pleasant person, Dr. Sime enlightened us with her research into the life of a woman who was instrumental in the discovery of fission and yet received no credit. Due to her gender and Jewish ancestry, her research in Germany was glossed over and her collaborator, Otto Hahn, received the Nobel.