NASA Space Apps Challenge 2013
As in 2012, I participated in the NASA Space Apps Challenge Hackathon, this time as a participant rather than an organizer. Read More …
Category: physics
Road To Reality–Part I
This past year I read Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
The tome is definitely the read for anyone interested in our current understanding of reality from the ground up. It doesn’t shy away from mathematics like most popular science accounts. Rather, as mathematics is the gasoline to travel the Road, it fuels the reader up along the journey. Yet the mathematics quickly progresses from exploring what a number exactly is to a graduate level textbook equivalent and this whirlwind journey is not to be taken lightly. Rather than a Road, I actually consider The Road to Reality to be more of a Roadmap indicating a path to reality without fully providing the reader with the tools to travel it. It worked for me–a Physics PhD student–as most of the book was putting familiar things in a grander context. However, for those not on the Road as a career, supplemental work is probably needed to get the most out of the book. In the that spirit I am presenting a condensed Roadmap in chunks of 6 chapters (there are a whopping 34 chapters covering 1123 pages) with additional links to online courses (primarily sourced from the wonderful Khan academy, Coursera, and MIT OCW).
Without further ado, I present the Roadmap I of VI of Chapters 1-6 of The Road to Reality: Read More …
Higgs Boson
Yesterday was a big day for physics. A new particle was discovered, a boson, at the energy 126GeV, with every indication it is probably the much sought after Higgs. Read More …
Scientific Paper Reading, Voxcharta, Excellent Notation
I use the Stay Focused Chrome extension to block Wordpress, Google Reader, Hacker News, Twitter and Facebook at work, beyond 2 minutes of aggregate usage. Read More …
The Elusive Higgs
The two CERN collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, are trying to independently find the Higgs and confirm each other’s results. Each excludes a standard-model Higgs above 135GeV at above 95% confidence (to about 450 GeV if I recall) and ATLAS finds an excess around 126 GeV consistent with a Higgs at this mass. CMS finds a very slight excess, slightly displaced from (around 124 GeV) though roughly consistent with the ATLAS result. It’s not a detection yet (ATLAS would need more statistical significance on their excess), but it’s tantalizing. They’ll continue running and analyzing data next year, and hopefully we’ll know for sure! Read More …
NASA now accepting applications to the Astronaut candidate class of 2013
NASA is now accepting applications to the Astronaut candidate class of 2013.
I’m absolutely applying. Although hoping to venture to space in any case via the private sphere, I still think NASA will best SpaceX to the first mission to Mars and as far as riding the wave into the future goes, that is the place to be. Read More …
TEDxZurich 2011: Ideas worth spreading from Zurich
I am proud to have been on the organizing team of TEDxZurich 2011. With the help of great sponsors, including the Swiss National Television Network, at which the event was held, amazing speakers and performers, and a full house of 450 attendees, we celebrated and shared “ideas worth spreading”. I was on the speakers committee, moonlighted with a bit of tech help, and the day of was rushing around making sure all the speakers were happy and prepared for their big moment on stage. Here are the videos; it’s extremely hard to pick a favorite, but the speaker I am most proud of and moved by is Dr. Eleanor Dobson who gives us a peek into the belly of CERN and how modern big science is done. Dr. Dobson’s talk was one of the talks I helped curate, in conjunction with the TEDxZurich team, and came about after I heard her passion on the subject and suggested she speak. Don’t stop there though, there are 20 videos from the day and hundreds of ideas ready to run loose. Read More …
So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar….
So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar…. HHere’s a collection of interesting twitter snippets from physicists I follow on twitter about today’s neutrino webcast announcing the surprising, and frankly unbelievable, results that the OPERA collaboration observed superluminal neutrinos. I haven’t watched the webcast myself, nor read the paper beyond the abstract yet so can only comment that I believe it must be systematics. That said it would be insanely interesting to be proven otherwise. Finally, the following highlighted tweets are in reverse chronology, because, well… I’ve been here since the day after tomorrow, said the tachyon. What took you so long? Read More …
Assisting Astrophysical Dynamics this fall
This fall I’m going to be assisting Astrophysical Dynamics. I’m especially excited to assist my first course at the graduate level. Read More …
Fault tolerant computing-II
So the basics are there, with full recovery from 23 failures over 1000 timesteps on 32 processes: context: https://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/fault-tolerant-computing/