ACU Engineering and Physics

The Higgs particle is barely three weeks old (the baby photos are already up), and one of the hazards of being a particle physicist is that people will ask you to explain what the Higgs particle is.  So I issued a challenge on our Facebook page for the best Higgs explanations.  Here are my personal favorites:

1.  The gentle start – an Official FermiLab video provides a very nice explanation.  (I’m actually at FermiLab for the next few weeks, so I may be a little biased.)  This is called “What is a Higgs Boson?” by Don Lincoln

2.  The lunchtime chat – a video from PhD Comics (required reading for anyone thinking about grad school) with terrible sound quality, since it was literally recorded in the crowded CERN cafeteria at lunch, but cool animations called “The Higgs Boson Explained”.

3.  Fun, Short AND Technical – If you’ve made it this far, head over to Minute Physics and check out part 1 of a fantastic but slightly technical video series on “The Higgs Boson“.  I really like the motivation here for introducing spontaneous symmetry breaking, so this is the explanation I usually give to physics majors.  Incidentally, part 2 brings in some more interesting issues, so it’s nice but not required.

4.  How to Ruin Your Afternoon – If you’re yearning for theoretical minutiae, you can’t do better that Matt Strassler’s blog.  What I admire/fear about his Higgs explanations for the general public is that he refuses to gloss over any aspect, no matter how technical it may be.  Read through the “Higgs FAQ 1.0” and keep going with his other posts for an informative way to annihilate your afternoon.

Finally, I love the “Craziest Higgs Stories” by Hank Campbell for the failed attempts at reporting on the Higgs.  Time travel, teleportation, disproving religion, you betcha!  Behold what passes for journalism these days.

Got something better (or worse)? Pass it along.

-Dr. D

ACU’s Engineering Program officially launches this fall with a new class of entering freshpeople.   We are pleased to announce that Dr. Ken Olree will be the first director of the engineering program.  The ACU press release says:

“I am extremely excited to be directing the new engineering program at ACU,” says Olree, the new director of engineering. “This is a unique time in history. Never before have the needs been as great, and the technology as available, to solve the problems that exist in the world today.”

Our new engineering program will greatly strengthen the offerings and options in the department.   So far, many of our physics majors have gone on to engineering fields after graduation.  In fact, the national averages show that 1 in 3 physics undergraduates are employed in engineering and 1 in 5 who attend grad school will do so in engineering.  The new engineering program will give students more options and the ability to focus on their discipline of choice.  This program also seeks to offer ACU’s first ABET accredited engineering degree.

UPDATE: The Abilene Reporter News has also covered the story.

In all of my classes I take special effort to have a Fun Friday every week.  These classes are exactly like Mondays and Wednesdays except, you know… fun.  Here are some Fun Friday links from the Interwebs:

1.  Stephen Hawking loses $100 bet on the Higgs – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmzwuYj5w1U&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmzwuYj5w1U&feature=player_embedded

2.  My favorite Higgs predictions: http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2012/06/higgs-boson-soon-place-your-bets.html

Fermilab scientists interrupt the announcement, saying, “Yo CERN, I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you finish. But the top quark was one of the best particle physics discoveries of all time. One of the best of ALL TIME!”

Odds: 49 in 100

3. This cartoon by Walt Handelsman:

Quark's view of a RHIC collision

4. Published math paper retracted because it contains no scientific content: http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/math-paper-retracted-because-it-contains-no-scientific-content/

The official notice says:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Publisher, as the article contains no scientific content and was accepted because of an administrative error. Apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

The abstract reads: “In this study, a computer application was used to solve a mathematical problem.”  The authors give emails addresses at yahoo.com and budweiser.com.   The conclusion ends with:

In brief an impossible proposition was proved as possible. This is a problematic problem. Further studies will give birth to a new branch of mathematical science.

Happy Fun Friday!

-Dr. D

This week is a two-for-one double DANGO update as we clear our plates in preparation of this week’s big physics news:

• DANGO 2012, Issue #2
• DANGO 2012, Issue #3

Make your plans to celebrate Higgsdependence Day this Wednesday.

-Dr D.

This week we enjoy our very small piece of the ultimate prize one could ever hope to achieve.  Not the Nobel Prize, or a Fields Medal, or knighthood, or the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.  Oh no.  This prize is better.  We at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider officially now hold the Guinness World Record for highest man-made temperature:

In February 2010, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island, New York, USA, announced that they had smashed together gold ions at nearly the speed of light, briefly forming an exotic state of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma. This substance is believed to have filled the universe just a few microseconds after the Big Bang. During the experiment the plasma reached temperatures of around 4 trillionºC, some 250,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

Fair enough, but what about the Large Hadron Collider?  Every expectation is that their lead-lead collisions will reach higher energies.  I like the explanation from the BNL Science Blog (the emphasis is mine):

But despite ALICE’s prowess, the collaboration has not published an official temperature measurement of its quark-gluon plasma, and the Guinness team is nothing if not official. For the time being, RHIC reigns, having driven physics forward by creating that revelatory multi-trillion degree matter many billions of times. But as with all records, RHIC’s Guinness is destined to be broken.

Enjoying it while it lasts,

-Dr. D

UPDATE:  The ACU press release is up at http://www.acu.edu/news/2012/120711-physics-guiness-world-record.html

Greetings!

It was almost hard to believe that another school year had come and gone already.  Before we knew it, we were triaging our schedules to figure out what had to be done before we left town and what would get put off a few more weeks months, packing up the car, and driving off to the lab.

This summer we’ve got two students at ACU doing phonon imaging with Dr. Head, four students smashing atoms at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island in New York with Dr. Daugherity and Dr. Towell, four more students doing nuclear physics research at FermiLab near Chicago with Dr. Isenhower, two students working on a fission detector for NIFFTE at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico and at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, and one student with Dr. Willis looking for gravity waves at the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany.   It is safe to say that this is one of our busiest summers ever!  (Hence the length of time it took me to get this post up…)  During this summer the sun never sets on ACU’s research.

There are lots of ways to talk about cutting-edge physics research.  There is the big picture overview of how we’re slowly unraveling the mysteries of the universe (and why that is worth our time and money).  There is the discussion on societal impact of how basic science research fuels technology growth, the economy, and (our primary focus) educating the next generation of people who will work in fields which haven’t even been invented yet.  Ultimately, this blog is about what ACU is doing in scientific research, so I’ll let most of our story this summer be told through the eyes of our students.

The day-to-day work of research is not likely what you would expect.  We rarely wear lab coats or safety goggles.  One day we’re writing code, the next day we’re soldering wires, the next day we’re going to a conference, or operating a $500 million detector, or (like today) building dams out of duct tape and styrofoam to keep the water away from our equipment during this torrential downpour.  We have high tech and low tech, exciting days and mundane days, and lots of setbacks for every breakthrough.

Here’s the first chapter of our story.  This is our first edition of our newsletter called the Doings ANd Goings On (DANGO) of ACU Physics Research:

DANGO 2012, Issue #1

-Dr. D

We’ve been working hard at Fermilab this year, and have been making several trips up as our SeaQuest experiment collects data.  We recently spotted a sign on the Fermilab campus:

For the record, the OPERA result suggesting that neutrinos go faster than the speed of light is thoroughly dead, and all of the nails are quite securely in the coffin.  The experiment was refuted twice by ICARUS, and then OPERA eventually traced the problem down to a connection between a fiber optic cable and a hardware board.  Apparently, the spokesperson for OPERA is stepping down, but don’t try to read any scandal here.  Science is hard, which is why unexplainable results are both exciting and terrifying, but in the end we will learn what holds up in the lab.

Happy Fun Friday.

I ran across a great article on space.com about our new season at http://www.space.com/14951-spring-equinox-early-arrival-2012.html.  From the article:

Across much of the United States, this has been an unusually mild winter, especially for those living east of the Mississippi. Not a few people have noted that spring seems to have come early this year.  Of course, in a meteorological sense that could be true, but in 2012 it will also be true in an astronomical sense as well, because this year spring will make its earliest arrival since the late 19th century: 1896, to be exact.

Remember, the equinox is defined as the time when the sun’s path in the sky intersects the Earth’s equator, so this is a well-defined time.  The equilux is defined as the day when you get exactly 12 hours each of day and night, and this date changes depends on where you are in the world. As for the weather deciding to go ahead and actually act like Spring, that is something else entirely…

-Dr. D

This is too good to pass up:

Colbert Report, March 7 2012 on Hulu

Of course, nearly every single detail he gives is wrong, but in the end, he does a remarkable job in proving that physics jokes are harder to make.

For the latest on actual Higgs news, check out the recent Physics Viewpoint by Howard Haber.  Overall, while we don’t have enough statistical evidence to officially claim discovery of the Higgs, there can be no doubt by now that we have found it.

Freakonomics, among other places, has picked up on a recent story from the Guardian that the uber-geeky sitcom Big Bang Theory is causing more students to become physics majors.

The show debuted in the U.S. in September 2007, and the American Institute of Physics does a fantastic job of publishing statistics, so we can give the data a preliminary check.  First we have high school enrollment:

showing a steady increase since 1985.  The results for undergraduate enrollment are quire similar and show a roughly linear increasesince 1999.  Academic year 2009-2010 produced more physics bachelors and PhD’s than any other year in history.

The data definitely show that physics enrollment has been increasing since Big Bang Theory first aired, but by eye it is hard to spot a change in the trends from 2007 onward.  There are many, many, many factors that effect college major choice.  While I’m glad to have shows about science (though personally, the Big Bang Theory does have its moments, but the laugh track just drives me crazy; look for clips on YouTube that show the pre-canned-laughs footage for a chilling and eerie experience), and I’m thrilled for the increases in physics, I doubt that the two are related.  I’ll leave the final conclusion to xkcd: