I spent the last weekend in Berlin, attending a conference for editors organized by Elsevier. And I learnt quite a bit during two very busy days. As a newbie - I am handling editor for the journal "Reviews in Physics" since January this year - I did expect to learn a lot from the event; but I will admit that I decided to accept the invitation to attend the event more out of curiosity for a world that is at least in part new to me, rather than out of professional sense of duty.
Burton Richter, 1975 Nobel prize in Physics for the discovery of the J/ψ meson, speaks about the need of a new linear collider for the measurement of Higgs boson branching fractions in a video on Facebook (as soon as I understand how to paste here I will!)
Richter has been a fervent advocate of electron-positron machines over hadronic accelerators throughout his life. So you really could not expect anything different from him - but he still does it with all his might. At one point he says, talking of the hadron collider scientists who discovered the Higgs boson:
I am very happy today because I have been notified by the European Community that a project I submitted for funding as coordinator last January has been evaluated very positively by the EU reviewers. The project is a training network of universities and research centres in Europe, with participation of two additional academic partners and four industrial partners from the US, Russia, Italy and Belgium. The network name is "AMVA4NewPhysics", and it aims at developing and applying cutting-edge statistical learning tools to new physics and Englert-Higgs boson studies to the LHC data collected by ATLAS and CMS.
“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”
Richard Feynman, who would turn 97 years old today. Happy birthday, mr. Feynman!
Sometimes I write stuff here not because I know things, but rather, because I would like to know more, and I think the audience of this blog may help me find the material I need to become more knowledgeable on some topic. Having a blog is a privilege, in the sense that the one-to-many communication it establishes between the writer and the readers allows the owner to sometimes have access to the (all together vast) knowledge of his or her readers. Thanks to you, dear reader, to your comments, reactions, and suggestions expressed in the comments thread, I learn more on topics I do not have an expertise on. I cherish this one-to-many communcation means and I am grateful to you for it.
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