November 7 and 14 Colloquiums
On November 7th we had a speaker from MIT come by, Dr. Daniel Kleppner, and talk about Boost-Phase Intercept Missile Defense and the Safety of the Nation. The first part of the talk was neat stuff, basically a presentation of a report on the feasibility of such a system. Basically we could shut North Korea's launch capability down if we parked a ship equipped with their more advanced proposed interceptors off the coast. Well, they could still blow up China, but that's really not something we care about. Iran is more problematic, but hey, I'm all in favor of orbital interceptor platforms waiting to swat down anything that looks like a missile launch in Iran (this is legal, FYI, under the last space armaments treaty we signed). Of course he wasn't in favor of orbital launch platforms. No sir. He was all "WTF BUSH IS EVIL AND SINCE HE LIKES MISSILE DEFENSE I'M GOING TO OPPOSE IT ON PRINCIPLE. AN INSTEAD PROPOSE BRIBING PEOPLE NOT TO SHOOT US." Good one there. Like I said, the first part where he talked about the study, it's results, how that process worked was all great stuff. The political tirade at the end was wholly out of place - and technically he violated the terms that he was a party of when the American Physical Society commissioned the report (i.e. Don't talk about what you feel on this topic for fear of appearing biased in its results).
Moving on to November 14, Thomas Weiler from Vanderbilt talked about Cosmic Rays and Neutrino Astrophysics. It was pretty neat stuff. I learned a bit about how the various kinds of 'radiation' couple to the CMB and why you can't find photons past a certain energy threshold running around in space, and why we're at the upper limit of exploration of high energy physics with Cosmic Rays (i.e. particulate 'radiation'). Which is why we need to move on to Neutrinos, which never couple to the CMB (or so they think) and thus have no cut-off in their maximum energy. There was some history, some neat results (like the discovery of the positron and the muon), and so forth, and it was a pretty interesting colloquium to hear, even if there's not much to talk about in report.
And finally, I didn't go to the November 21st colloquium given by Dr. Reinhard Kremer, because at the November 14th one they said it was the last colloquium and ergo I was not inclined to go to another this semester.
Moving on to November 14, Thomas Weiler from Vanderbilt talked about Cosmic Rays and Neutrino Astrophysics. It was pretty neat stuff. I learned a bit about how the various kinds of 'radiation' couple to the CMB and why you can't find photons past a certain energy threshold running around in space, and why we're at the upper limit of exploration of high energy physics with Cosmic Rays (i.e. particulate 'radiation'). Which is why we need to move on to Neutrinos, which never couple to the CMB (or so they think) and thus have no cut-off in their maximum energy. There was some history, some neat results (like the discovery of the positron and the muon), and so forth, and it was a pretty interesting colloquium to hear, even if there's not much to talk about in report.
And finally, I didn't go to the November 21st colloquium given by Dr. Reinhard Kremer, because at the November 14th one they said it was the last colloquium and ergo I was not inclined to go to another this semester.