ACP

Summer continues, and the public lecture series on physics continues a pace at the Aspen Center for Physics with Dr. Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh talking today on the "Dark Side of the Universe". The talk is part of one of the three workshops currently taking place: "Testing the Laws of Gravity with Cosmological Surveys" "Emergence, Evolution and Effects of Black Holes in the Universe: The Next 50 Years of Black Hole Physics" "Entanglement Matters" the public talks are recorded and will, eventually, be available online courtesy of Aspen Grassroots TV, in the meanwhile,…
The Aspen Center for Physics does a number of public outreach and engagement activities. A new and quite interesting effort underway is Radio Physics, in collaboration with KDNK community radio. The project links (visiting) physicists with local AP physics classes, who do a 30 minute group interview, live, on the topic du jour. When available in person, the interview is preceded by a mini-physics cafe, where the whole class meets with the victim at a local coffee shop and gets to quiz them on pretty much anything. And, of course, the whole thing is not just broadcast live, but archived for…
The "Physical Applications of Millisecond Pulsars" conference is under way at the Aspen Center for Physics, going through thursday when the X-Games take over. The meeting started with surveys of current observational and instrumentation projects, in particular the amazing serendipitous discoveries being made by NASA's Fermi γ-ray observatory, in conjunction with ground based radio telescopes, and the new observatories being built. This was followed by a session on pulsar magnetospheric physics, optical companions to pulsars and other goodies. Today we get tests of theories of gravity, and…
"New Particle Physics at the LHC and Its Connection to Dark Matter" is the name of the current workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics running through Sep 9th. I'm hanging out for the first few days and the first presentation is on "what has the LHC Higgs done to supersymmetry"? So, basic point is that supersymmetry sort of predicts that the Higgs mass (125 GeV) should be close to the Z mass (91 GeV), up to some corrections. So the mass corrections can be parametrised in perturbative theory, and how do you nail a ~ 30% correction and keep everything natural? We talk about our feelings. We…