My subtitle for this blog is “Musings of a physicist, a witch, and a gamer.” I’ve posted on wicca and gaming, but I’ve never said much about physics until now.
I have been reticent to talk about physics because what I physically do is sit in front of a computer terminal and type (and occasionally think) all day. But evidently someone thinks that the work I do is interesting:
There's a database of high-energy physics papers called SPIRES. If you click on the HEPNAMES section and type "find seligman, william" you'll see my entry; it can lead you to the physics papers with my name on it (only one of which I wrote).What's interesting is that you'll also see my thesis advisor. Click on his name,…
I was asked to repost this Facebook status as a blog post, so that others could share it. When someone asks what good the space program ever did, I have to point out: The sky is blue and the sun is shining, yet we know that a potentially devastating hurricane is coming due to weather satellites. Thousands…
Occasionally I'm asked how I reconcile being both a physicist and a Wiccan. My answer is long and I think most people find it tedious. But in today's Writer's Almanac, I learned that William Blake expressed it much more succinctly: You don’t believe by William Blake You don't believe — I won't attempt to make ye. You…
In my last two posts, I talked about significant events in my life, and about cleaning out my closets. There's something I found while cleaning out my closets of old clothing. I should get rid of it. I know that will never fit into it again for the rest of my life. But I find it hard to…
Today I had the chance to go over some slides from a presentation that a colleague was going to make the Physics Advisory Committee at Fermilab. It was an important presentation, and it was vital to make a good impression. (I should mention that I was not the only one to look over these slides; everyone from…
The following observation was brought to my attention:www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.htmlI want to assure everyone that the experiment shown, CMS ("Compact Muon Solenoid") is not the experiment on which I worked. I worked for a while on ATLAS ("A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS"). I can assure you that the experiment on which I worked would be first to make any such…