Category Archive for 'Physics News'

Uhhgg!
The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.
But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists’ wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth?
Or spit out particles that could turn [...]

Our PR people here at Longwood are pretty good. A few days ago, I mentioned the short blurb about our NSF grant in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. On Monday, the Lynchburg News & Advance listed me among the “Movers and Shakers” in the central Virginia area.
 
 
My colleagues will probably not be too happy about their names [...]

Making the News

It appears that the press release issued by Longwood concerning the grant I was recently awarded was picked up by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Farmville A Longwood University physics professor and two colleagues from Virginia Commonwealth University recently received a National Science Foundation grant for a research project that could help improve technology for high-density optical discs [...]

John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics for depicting the universe as it was 380,000 years after its birth in the Big Bang.
Mather and Smoot were the architects of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) [...]

Superatom Chemistry

A research team based out of the physics department here at Virginia Commonwealth University (where I call home) has discovered clusters of Aluminum atoms that have chemical properties similar to single atoms of metallic and nonmetallic elements when they react with iodine. This is the first indication of what is being called “Superatom Chemistry.” Rather [...]

This week I’m attending the American Vacuum Society’s (AVS) annual conference. More about what that is tommorrow. I just got off the plane. Normally, I would write an interesting article about flight and the Bernoulli Principle, but I’m too tired. Maybe another day. The high point of the flight: on the plane, I sat next [...]

The recipients of the 2004 Nobel prize in physics have been announced. Read the AP report here.
Americans David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczeck won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their exploration of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus.
So what did these guys do? Well they [...]