NASA to Announce Success of Long Galactic Hunt

MEDIA ADVISORY : M08-089


NASA to Announce Success of Long Galactic Hunt


WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with ground-based observations.

News Release

Thu, May 8, 2008  Permanent link

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About to go live. (CERN's Large Hadron Collider)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.

It planned to circulate the first beams in May 2008. First collisions at high energy are expected mid-2008 with the first results from the experiments soon after.

"Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale."
The Guardian

CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Thu, Apr 24, 2008  Permanent link

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Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike

Wed, Jan 2, 2008  Permanent link

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Cosmology meets condensed matter

By Professor Tom Kibble FRS and Professor George Pickett FRS

The meeting aims to bring together physicists from the very different disciplines of condensed matter physics and cosmology/astrophysics to exploit the remarkable correspondences emerging between processes and mechanisms on hugely different scales.

Motion in a condensate mimics motion in a curved space-time metric; quantized vortices mimic cosmic strings; coherent phase boundaries mimic branes; there are partial analogues of black holes and some features of neutron stars. Condensed matter processes in the laboratory can provide insight into inaccessible cosmological processes and the violent transitions in the early Universe have in turn generated interest into rapid transits of analogous phase transitions in condensed matter.

http://royalsociety.org/event.asp?id=6063

Mon, Dec 31, 2007  Permanent link

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