At The Lab

The web is being spun. 

The meeting on Friday with "the higher-ups" went well. They're going to let us make changes to the graduate portion of the department's website and update information throughout.  I soent all day Saturday sitting at my favorite dive diner, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and fighting with Dreamweaver.  

It's been a few weeks since the 2007 DNP meeting - the annual get together of the American nuclear physicists (DNP=Division of Nuclear Physics) - took place, but I think I'm still on time for this not-so-short review. Here it is, dedicated to all of you who had to stay at the lab babysitting 84Mo and such exotic isotopes.

So there has been some concern recently about the onset of the blog system here at the NSCL. Currently there are two competing theories on why this system is not such a good idea. The first thought is that the students blogging are going to be inclined to mention things involving their research projects. If they reveal too much, someone reading their blog could eventually scoop them.

  Graduate quantum mechanics is amazing. I guess we're familiar enough with the simplest stuff that the powers-that-be decide we can handle a little philosophy--or maybe it's just this particular professor (who has the currently societally ironic name of Michael Moore). The night before homework assignments are due, he's started having discussion sections/communal office hours where much of the class comes, and we can ask questions on the homework or on anything about quantum mechanics, really. Sometimes he prepares material that no conventional quantum mechanics class would ever have time to cover and still teach all the problem-solving skills the students need to be quantum mechanically competent. For example, this Thursday, he prepared a few pages on local hidden variables and why they lose at life.

Many grad students sometimes suffer from PECD: Post Experiment Confusion Disorder.  It's most commonly known as: "What the hell do I do now" disorder.

This week's quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "blazar" (rhymes with quasar).

Why it's interesting:

It's fun to say! Physicists invent great names for things.

What it is:

A quasar is a galaxy with a big black hole in the center where one of the jets (of particles

It's time to stop procrastinating, because July is just around the corner!

While I'm carefully watching the number of days until Christmas, I have to look a lot farther ahead for our marquis outreach program: Physics of Atomic Nuclei. PAN is a 2-week residential nuclear science "boot camp" for science teachers and high school students. We've picked July 14-25 for the dates. We run it here in the lab, and while the program content is arranged by a committee, most of the logistics falls to me:

The entry below was written almost two months ago, in the middle of a very busy time preparing for an experiment. The experiment ran over the last two weeks of October and was a success.

If there's anything better than doing work that you love, it's when people actually notice that you're doing a good job AND say so. Nice. Of course, I doubt anyone here at NSCL is in it for the fortune and glory ("fortune and glory, Dr. Jones!"), but it's still thrilling to have your work show up in Nature...
NSCL discovers neutron-rich isotopes
...and suddenly you're a celebrity. Kudos to our world-class researchers!

Here's another commentary on physics instruction, this time regarding the introductory lecture of quantum mechanics classes. With few exceptions, quantum mechanics is introduced by first giving reasons why classical physics was insufficient. This is extraordinarily akin to beginning meetings with "why we're here." Eventually, after enough meetings, everyone knows why he or she is at the meeting and needn't be so frequently reminded.