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This Week Archive
Conference tales
Ursula Bassler goes hiking with colleagues at a workshop. Advertised as an "easy" hike, the trail turns out to be extremely challenging, and several people turn back before reaching the summit. Ever the optimist, Ursula puts a positive spin on the grueling experience: "What improves group coherence and team spirit? To overcome difficulties together, to reach a common goal." Perhaps the payoff will be evident in future physics results.
Gordon Watts reports from a conference in Rome, where there are too many physicists and not enough power outlets. The result? Lots of knots!
Rob Gardner attends a conference in Korea, but not in person. He gives an entire lecture via his laptop, without cameras on him or the audience. "I'm still not sure if anyone witnessed it," he writes.
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Pop physics
David Waller ventures into the world of show biz when he's asked to write a "big equation" to feature in the plot of a sci-fi TV pilot. "I wrote out the differential cross section for e+e- annihilation to fermion pairs; the story had tachyons annihilating with each other, but I figured most Joe and Jane Bloes wouldn't make a fuss," he writes.
Peter Steinberg reads the "hard" sci-fi novel Cosm, about a scientist who creates a miniature universe using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The premise is "a scientific Hail Mary," writes Peter, but "RHIC, its basic physics, its experiments, and even some of its people...are rendered with reasonable (and sometimes excessive) accuracy, almost as if it were out of a missing chapter of Sharon Traweek's anthropological work on High Energy Physics."
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