Did German physicists have a plan in the 1930s? And if so, was their physics any help?
Last week, on the plane back from Chicago, I finished Philip Ball’s book about physics in Germany in the nineteen-thirties and -forties. I’m still thinking about it, and I’m trying to work out why it has left such a strong impression. I think it is because the compromises, recriminations and judgements formed have echoes, weak but clear, in so many other arguments going on today.
Read more at the Guardian.
The NOνA far detector, at Ash River Minnesota, measures neutrinos fired from Fermilab in Chicago – 800 km away. This week NOνA reported data showing that they change types during that journey; the beginning of what promises to be an exciting programme of precision neutrino physics. And meanwhile, in Antarctica…
I’m writing this in a coffee bar in Chicago. The ‘windy city’ seems quiet and still this morning and the coffee is surprisingly good. About 80 km to the west, at Fermilab, the highest-powered beam of neutrinos in the world is being produced, and fired through hundreds of kilometres of solid rock to impatiently-waiting detectors, principally the new NOνA far detector.
The reason for my visit is the annual Boost meeting, more related to the Large Hadron Collider than to neutrinos. Fermilab hosted the previous highest-energy particle-collider, the Tevatron, and there is a big community of high-energy physicists in and around Chicago who now work on the LHC. Some of them are hosting us this week. But these days neutrinos are the focus of the accelerator programme down the road¹.
At the Guardian.
Life and Physics 