Ethics in Research: Share your views April 15, 2009
Posted by sarah in: politics, science . 3commentsIn the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics in physics and astronomy. While in astronomy we don’t have to navigate the perilous minefield of research on people or animals, proper scientific conduct is still considered to be an essential requirement for a career in astronomy. But what defines “proper scientific conduct”, or its counterpart, the dreaded “misconduct”, and who writes those definitions? Plagiarism is the one form of misconduct students are taught from undergraduate level to avoid at all cost. How far does the definition of plagiarism actually stretch, and why? And does that make sense? Moreover, what is the punishment, and who should it be administered by?While these issues are often presented in very black and white terms, once you dig below the surface they are really pretty murky. (more…)
Fundamental Physics work scoops the Nobel Prize October 7, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentThe Royal Swedish Academy of Science has just awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics to three theoretical physicists working in the field of fundamental subatomic particle physics. Read their press release here. Prof. Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago received half the prize “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic particles”; the other half went jointly to Prof. Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK Laboratory and Prof. Toshihide Maskawa of the University of Kyoto, both in Japan, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”. Congratulations to them and all their collaborators!
Nobel Prize in Physics announced tomorrow! October 6, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentThe winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced tomorrow from 11:45 am CET. You can follow the live webcast of the announcement here!
Any thoughts on who it might be?? Wired have some predictions here.
LHC: Going Round in Circles September 10, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentGoing round in circles has never been so exciting as today at CERN, where a beam of protons has made it round the entire accelerator (27 km) for the first time. Yay!
The particles were travelling at a snail’s pace of around 30 kph, which is barely even a fraction of the final energy of 14 TeV they will hopefully achieve in around a year’s time.
The media interest is really great, particularly as particle physics has never been the easiest subject to get people excited about. Many of the media streams are pretty overloaded so it’s been hard to follow what’s happened.
There is a Twitter feed for the First Beam event.
The Guardian are blogging the event here.
The BBC’s updates are appearing here.
The Volkskrant has blog from Geneva in Dutch, by Prof. Bentvelsen from the University of Amsterdam and Nikhef.
LHC First Beam tomorrow! September 9, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentOn Wednesday 10 September the Large Hadron Collider, the long-awaited new particle accelerator at CERN on the French-Swiss border, will see its First Beam. This means that protons will be sent round the 27 km-long ring for the very first time, after more than 20 years of development work since its inception in the 1980s. Scientists around the world, including me, are really excited about this happening, as the LHC will be able to confirm or disprove our current understanding of particle physics, which totally underpins the way we see nature, from the very small to the very large.
The switch-on event will be webcast live here on 10 September @ 9 am CEST
If you want to know how it works, particle physicist-rockstar-all-around-lovely bloke Brian Cox explains it here.
The CERN LHC website lists some very cool facts and figures and all the info about the experiments that will take place around the beam.
The Guardian newspaper have been doing a whole series of pieces on the new accelerator – all collected here.
