At The Lab

A Shutdown Poem
 
Unfortunately, I can see
On each hallway display
The bar across the top remains
Unbroken shutdown gray
 
Some magnets now are warming
Though they're usually frigid
No beams means there's no need to make
The beamline tuning rigid
 
We cannot get new data,
Only process what we have
It's hard to soothe our troubled minds
With scientific salve
 
Not just the researchers bemoan
Our lack of running time
Devices in the vaults are sad
They miss the beams sublime
 
The S800 beckons
I can see it in my dreams

Science can be beautiful in many ways.  I'm a big fan of patterns and symmetry, even if not completely symmetric.  

Below is a plot, says captain obvious. The first person to tell me what's on each axis wins... something.

Sadly, this blog has suffered serious radio silence due to other priorities, but I couldn't result pointing out that NSCL has been Slashdotted, a first that I'm aware of. It's interesting to see the article sliced and diced by a smart crowd, though the conversation does veer all over the place, from science fiction to discussions of quarks and gluons. Some researchers would be taken aback by such unfiltered bantering about their work.

The nuclear physics trivia contests are back by popular demand!

I'm really excited about the nuclear seminar tomorrow. The speaker is talking about GRETINA, which is like SeGA, only more so. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this really cool germanium detector array-to-be. In addition to being SeGA-like, GRETINA is going to form the basis of a bigger array, called GRETA. (Does this make anyone else want to see a companion array called HANSA?)

(Yeah, I know it's cliche, but somebody had to say it this semester.)
 
I'm coming to appreciate the topic of electromagnetism much more than I did before. The impression I got when I first encountered the topic was that it amounted to calculating the potential and field of a spherical conductor, capacitor, solenoid, and other such objects, given a smattering of equations to use. How enthralling.
 

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

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.