By Hamish Johnston
Over on the Quantum Diaries blog, Aidan Randle-Conde has put together a lovely photo-essay called “30 reasons why you shouldn’t be a particle physicist”. It is reverse psychology, of course, and the 30 images highlight the benefits of devoting your life to studying sub-atomic particles. As someone who chose to do condensed-matter physics, do I now think that I made a huge mistake? No, but I have shared the thrill and excitement of being at CERN when the Higg’s was discovered and seen the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors up close, so I know where he is coming from.
Sometimes too much excitement can be a bad thing in physics. A case in point was the premature announcement in March last year by the BICEP2 collaboration that it had discovered the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation. It turns out that the researchers had not and what they were really seeing is the effect of dust in the Milky Way. In an interview on Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe blog, Caltech’s Jamie Bock explains why he and his BICEP2 colleagues made the fateful decision to release their results last year. Does Bock regret the decision? You’ll have to read the interview to find out.
We all know about the physicists Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer but what about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and Sophie Germain? They are just four of the “Pioneering women of physics” that are being featured in an infographic from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Released just in time for International Women’s Day on Sunday, the infographic also tells the story of how Hedy Lamarr (whose day job was being a Hollywood star) invented a frequency-hopping radio technique that is the precursor of the technology that underpins modern mobile-phone networks.
