Cycle Quark

I lived in Madison, Wisconsin for seven years so I know something about cold weather, but the only city with serious cold weather that I visit regularly now is Chicago. When I arrived at O’Hare this afternoon the temperature was 50 degrees. I went to my meeting and when I returned to my car around 6:00 PM, the wind was blowing hard and the temperature was 20 degrees. I went off to dinner and when I left it was snowing and the temperature was 8 degrees. The quick drop  in temperature was what makes it memorable.

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Friday bunny blogging was delayed this week, but I will be making amends for that faux pas. Due to demand from my many readers (You know who you are.), I will be dropping all science blogging, book reviews, technology tidbits, and insightful observations on the world and switching to all bunny blogging all the time. Pictures of bunnies will be featured everyday and not just Friday.

To start of the the new theme of the blog, here is Bquark. He is one fat bunny, although I did see him hop yesterday and successfully get all four paws off the floor at once. Bquark is a mixed breed, half Holland lop and half hippopotamus.

My daughter expressed a strong desire for dopamine earrings. They are silver earrings in the form of the chemical structure of dopamine. Her mother and I gave her a pair as a gift, and she has been wearing them regularly. Today she told me that several people have complemented her on how interesting they look, but no one has recognized that they are dopamine. She is somewhat disappointed.

If she had told me this yesterday, I could have blogged about it on her birthday like she wanted.

I inspired Kristen at radioactive-banana.com to write about the best and worst colloquia she has heard, so I decided to write about the most memorable colloqium I ever heard. It was neither the best or worst, but I will never forget it. It was the first colloqium that I attended as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As brand new graduate students, my officemate and I had not yet learned the traditions of colloqium, so we sat in the second row. As the hall filled we soon saw that we were surrounded by the faculty. We soon learned that graduate students sat in the back of the hall, so they could relax and fall asleep if necessary.

The speaker was the Nobel Prize winner, Carlo Rubbia. He had not yet won his Nobel Prize, but he was speaking on stochastic cooling of antiprotons. It was being developed at CERN by Simon van der Meer, his co-Nobelist. That work that would lead to the discovery of the W and the Z bosons for which Rubbia won the Prize.

In 1979 there was no Powerpoint. Most physics talks were given using transparencies and an overhead projector. Rubbia had a massive stack of transparencies. I did not think there was any way that he could go through them all. I had never experienced such an information overload before, and I have not experienced one as great since. To this day, I tell people that Rubbia took a deep breath and spoke for an hour straight without inhaling again.

Within about 10 minutes, I knew that this was not going to be a leaisurely lecture where I might have time to think about what I was hearing and perhaps learn something. Rubbia would put a transparency up and before I had an idea of what it was suppose to illustrate it was gone and new one appeared. Unfortunately, we were surrounded by the faculty and we did not want make a bad first impression, so we sat up straight and tried to survive the hurricane of physics that was pounding us.

In 1983 I was at CERN working on my thesis experiment when UA1 announced the discovery of the Z boson. A talk by Rubbia on the discovery was scheduled for the auditorium and it was packed. I went to a second auditorium where the talk was shown by video. It was a much more pleasent experience. I could relax, and I now knew enough to follow the talk even at the supersonic speed that it was given.

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Patience is the white and black one. Bquark is the darker one. Bquark was named after the bottom quark which I have done most of my research on. He was the last one that my family acquired, and the name was meant to appease me so that I would let them keep him.

I wanted to figure out how to post photos in wordpress. WordPress seems to default to a thumbnail, but I finally found the option to use the original size. Since I do not have a cat, I could not go for Friday cat blogging. Ginger is my daughter's pet bunny, so she gets the honor of the first photo post.