Tag Archives: physics

Without honor in his own country

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Higgs boson physicist shunned in Pakistan

Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.

Officials at Quaid-i-Azam University had to cancel plans for Salam to lecture about his Nobel-winning theory when Islamist student activists threatened to break the physicist’s legs, said his colleague Hoodbhoy.

People of the Higgs

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Science Friday

One thing I don’t want to get lost in all the hubbub. Amidst all the many impressive aspects of the work the physicists and machine-builders did to make the LHC happen and achieve this fantastic discovery, I was very struck by how eager people were to give credit to other people. In their main talks, both Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela went out of their way to give credit to the machine builders, the technicians who worked on their experiments, and the thousands of colleagues within each collaboration who contributed to the result. But that eagerness to share credit went well beyond the official announcements — everyone we talked to was quick to point out how far-reaching and international the project really was. The very quintessence of a group effort.

Higgs articles

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Higgs 101. This is a few years old, but still good.

Final Word from the Tevatron on the Higgs Hunt

Live-Blogging the Higgs Seminar

The official Press Release: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs!

New baby boson is born, weighing in at about 126 GeV

Higgsdependence Day!

Does 5-sigma = discovery? [Yes]. What all those sigmas mean, and the difference between random and systematic error. Also see The Higgs Boson – Certainly, certainly (?) there! (at least, I am pretty certain it is).

There should be a Nobel Prize out of this, but who should get it? This is a non-trivial problem. On the Higgs row and Nobel reform

Imaginary numbers and reality

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Imaginary Numbers are Real.

I first visited the complex plane 45 years ago, in High School. It was love at first sight, and I have been smitten ever since. Thank you, Margaret Matchett, my math teacher that year.

EDIT: I just looked her up on the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Go back three “generations” and you get to Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work has fascinated me since I first heard about it, not long after Mrs. Matchett’s math class.